On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

Re:On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't by skohan on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @02:52AM (#26312921)

I feel like this concept of turning everything into a market has much more downside than we would like to believe. It's often sold as democratization: i.e. "anyone can just go on youtube and be a content creator now - you don't need a production company as a middleman!"

But the thing about markets is they are great for the winners, and terrible for the losers. And one of the effects of technology is that it allows scaling such that fewer providers can serve the needs of many more consumers. The confluence of these factors is that you can have markets where a handful of winners can essentially serve the entire world. I don't know where that is supposed to leave the rest of the population.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't by bradleyjg on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @12:16PM (#26317635)

The theory of it is good—-the more efficiently the human race can produce goods and services the better. If ten people can provide the entire world’s stand up comedy needs that frees up all those other people to do other valuable things. The issues are: 1) distributional (i.e. wealth gap) and 2) people get value out of the work itself and not just the compensation.

Although we fight a lot about #1, #2 strikes me as a thornier problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]