posted
I want to start by saying that I'm certainly no economic expert. And I have a tenuous grasp of the intersection between economics and politics. Though it seems to me that my issues go beyond the conservative/liberal divide and are rooted more in fundamental problems in the system.
Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well. If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen. How do you battle a company with a budget thousands of times your size? That can make things cheaper by outscourcing the work. I think the internet age helps with this somewhat, and that's heartening, but I think the problems are bigger than what the internet can solve alone. I also think that the very notion that we as consumers make rational decisions based on logic is from a scientific standpoint very disputable.
The scarier part to me is the broader impact on our planet and our future. Companies don't make money by thinking about the future. Or by being ethical...that hurts profits. Between the health insurance lobby and the energy lobby any meaningful change to either of those systems seems doomed from the start. Even if we as individuals see the danger and try to avert it, what can we do? We try to change policy at the government level and these industries use money and misinformation to stop it dead in its tracks, whether by buying off politicians or convincing citizens to act against their best interests.
Since I've gone vegetarian I've also tried to grow more informed about consuming ethically in general. And the more I learn about the food industry the more depressed I get.
I can't blame all these problems on capitalism. Whether it's the producer or the consumer, the have or the have not, they(we) are all products of our society and culture and our education system. If the population demanded reform or products manufactured using ethical practices, etc...then the corporations would most likely have to oblige. But in the end companies are out for their own best interest(for the most part) and because that is the bottom line, I have trouble buying the idea that the consumer or the population as a whole wins out because of this.
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well. If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen. How do you battle a company with a budget thousands of times your size?
What you are concerned about is corporatism. I think that it is unfairly associated with capitalism. You might like this interview of Ron Paul by Jon Stewert.
Starting at mark 5:18 they start to address the same thing as you. At minute 6:30, Jon Stewert asks a great question: "Who protects us from corporatism?"
To summarize Ron Paul's answer: "You do this more by prevention. The corporations have no right to go to government and get special benefits. If they make money because they gave a good product at a good price then it is good. If they are big because they wheel and deal with the government it is bad. The bigger the government gets the more incentive there is for lobbyists to get a piece of the pie."
Republicans, for sure, have encouraged corporatism and fought against a better form of capitalism where government protects you from fraud and abuse and doesn't grant special favors or bailouts to large industry. However, the Democrats (in my opinion) are just as bad because they want to fix corporatism with a bigger form of corporatism.
I say liquidate bad debt, suffer the consequences, stop printing and spending, and stop protecting/encouraging corporations. I think we would see a more healthy economy/society emerge.
Remember, most corporations (especially the favored few) love regulation and lobby for it because it stands as a barrier to the market place---which is anti-capitalism.
Posts: 2445 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well. If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen.
I don't know about you, but large corporations have done a lot to increase the standard of living of this consumer.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
It's also worth noting that a lot of large corporations became large by starting small and providing a cheap, good service. Google and Amazon come to mind. It doesn't seem very reasonable to argue that an economy containing these two giants doesn't give the small startup a fair chance.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Don't lose faith in capitalism. It's exceedingly awesome. Just gain faith in appropriate oversight and regulation. I'm of the mind that neither capitalism nor socialism can stand up on its own and be very successful. Each needs the other to work well for so many people.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Pure capitalism and pure socialism are deadly poisons. You need a mixture of both for success.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
"I'm of the mind that neither capitalism nor socialism can stand up on its own and be very successful. Each needs the other to work well for so many people."
It amazes me a little how difficult people find this to understand. It's so simple, yet the Rush Limbaughs and Hugo Chavez of the world continue to get attention.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: It's also worth noting that a lot of large corporations became large by starting small and providing a cheap, good service. Google and Amazon come to mind. It doesn't seem very reasonable to argue that an economy containing these two giants doesn't give the small startup a fair chance.
I should point out that Amazon had a lot of years in the red when it was starting out, far more than most "small" businesses could survive.
One wonders sometimes how stable a system in which businesses buy their inventories on credit to sell to customers who buy their goods on credit really is, and how much is a house of cards that stands as long as no one thinks about it too much.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
If you just track the movement of goods, labour, and services, and ignore all questions of when payment occurs, it seems to me you'll find a remarkably stable system.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Sterling: small businesses survive several years in the red all the time, especially venture capital funded ones. Of course, a lot don't, but that doesn't mean successful small businesses don't start all the time. That funding is required does not make them any less small businesses competing with larger ones.
As for your question of credit, it seems remarkably stable. Even in our current problems, which have some of the strongest credit contraction we've ever seen, most small businesses are mustering on, and they're also the site of most hiring.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well. If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen.
I don't know about you, but large corporations have done a lot to increase the standard of living of this consumer.
So would bank robbery, if you got away with it.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Would you care to elucidate the difference, with reference to the principals you are basing it on?
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Strider: I want to start by saying that I'm certainly no economic expert. And I have a tenuous grasp of the intersection between economics and politics. Though it seems to me that my issues go beyond the conservative/liberal divide and are rooted more in fundamental problems in the system.
Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well.
Corporations are large. So's the US. So's the world. Being large isn't a bad thing, in and of itself. I like corporations - I like what they offer me in terms of goods and services. So do the vast majority of people, or the corporations wouldn't be that large - they got that way by offering things that people wanted. You're going to have to do better to argue that it's bad for the consumer that large corporations exist. That being said, I also like small companies, and I know plenty that succeed. The odds are far better now ("now" being the present era, not, like, the current recessionary year) for a small company to succeed than ever before, given the abundance of credit, information, and ability to reach long-tail consumers.
quote:If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen. How do you battle a company with a budget thousands of times your size? That can make things cheaper by outscourcing the work. I think the internet age helps with this somewhat, and that's heartening, but I think the problems are bigger than what the internet can solve alone.
First of all, capitalism doesn't imply that the "best product" (however you define that...) always wins. That being said, what wonderful products are losing out because of a larger company with a better marketing team? Sure, we're probably losing some marginal increases in quality, but most of the time, either amazing products/services do well on their own, or they're acquired by larger companies which then market them more effectively. That's what I'm seeing happen.
My brother-in-law, for example, has had two startups. With the first, he saw a need for an online market in a particular industry in India - he developed the idea, hired some brilliant kids straight out college to program it, and then sold it to an industry giant, who is now using it to lower the costs of manufacturing materials in the industry for all players. With the second, he saw another missed opportunity in computing in the US, got the same (now extremely rich) brilliant kids to do the programming, marketed it well to get funding, and then sold it to a Silicon Valley giant, who markets the (very useful) program far better than he ever could (or would want to), meaning that more people get to use it. Now he works for the company that acquired his second startup, looking for other brilliant startups that they should think about acquiring.
Finally, what in the world is wrong with outsourcing work? Frankly, I'm almost always glad when jobs go overseas. I think it's awesome that people are getting jobs in developing nations - they'll certainly see a much larger increase in utility than the US workers' decrease. Why should I care more about US workers than about Chinese or Indian workers? They're all strangers to me, and they're all people.
quote:I also think that the very notion that we as consumers make rational decisions based on logic is from a scientific standpoint very disputable.
Neither capitalism nor economics (today) has this notion. What economics does have is models - which do make simplifying assumptions about humans' decision making process - which generally work very well to predict human behavior at the micro level. (Macro level is different, but that's a completely different set of assumptions than the ones I think you're referring to here.) Whether the simplifying assumptions are true or not doesn't really matter - because the (micro)models work to give us good results.
quote:The scarier part to me is the broader impact on our planet and our future. Companies don't make money by thinking about the future. Or by being ethical...that hurts profits.
Of course companies have to think about the future to make money - every company has a long-term business plan. I know that my company, which is the leading consultant on climate change, has a number of long-term plans in the pipeline on how it can best help itself - by helping out companies that are innovating in that field. Why does my company do that? Because the right incentives are there for the company to make money doing that. If you want to change how corporations act, change the incentives via consumer or governmental actions.
quote:Between the health insurance lobby and the energy lobby any meaningful change to either of those systems seems doomed from the start. Even if we as individuals see the danger and try to avert it, what can we do? We try to change policy at the government level and these industries use money and misinformation to stop it dead in its tracks, whether by buying off politicians or convincing citizens to act against their best interests.
I can't speak to the health insurance industry, but what do you think is so wrong with the energy industry? I mean, I work as a consultant for the EPA helping shape policy regarding the energy industry, so I'm pretty tied into most environmental (and other) concerns you could have. And really, I'm not coming up with much.
quote:Since I've gone vegetarian I've also tried to grow more informed about consuming ethically in general. And the more I learn about the food industry the more depressed I get.
I think there are ethical problems with the food industry, and some statinability ones as well. That said, I also think this article makes some good point.
quote:I can't blame all these problems on capitalism. Whether it's the producer or the consumer, the have or the have not, they(we) are all products of our society and culture and our education system. If the population demanded reform or products manufactured using ethical practices, etc...then the corporations would most likely have to oblige. But in the end companies are out for their own best interest(for the most part) and because that is the bottom line, I have trouble buying the idea that the consumer or the population as a whole wins out because of this.
Everyone is out for their best interest - the question is just how they each define it. Nothing new there.
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:That said, I also think this article makes some good point.
Man, the world is so complicated.... (I am Vegetarian so I'm not sure how much of the problems outlined therein are my fault, but I am wondering how the quality of life of a wild animal really does compare to a factory farm)
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
That's not the right comparison, I think. There are way more cattle in the world than could be supported in the wild - yes, including herds of millions of buffalo on the Plains. So you should compare factory-farm conditions to no conditions at all. Providing you care about cattle in the first place, of course.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Sterling: small businesses survive several years in the red all the time, especially venture capital funded ones. Of course, a lot don't, but that doesn't mean successful small businesses don't start all the time. That funding is required does not make them any less small businesses competing with larger ones.
Amazon was founded in 1994. It first turned a profit in 2004. Some small businesses have bad years, even sets of bad years, but the vast, vast majority of the ones that survive have those bad stretches buffered by profitable ones. I have to say that surviving ten years in the red makes Amazon sufficiently unique that it's difficult to accurately compare it to any other company or class of companies.
Some small businesses survive and even thrive within their niches. Some die out. A lot of the ones that become big enough to become notable do so for just long enough to get bought up and merged with the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, etc.
As far as credit goes... Time will tell. Too much of the U.S. economy is dependent on a constant and unsustainable expansion, even when that expansion borders on illusion. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that the recent downturn is bringing about quite as much soul-searching as it might.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Too much of the U.S. economy is dependent on a constant and unsustainable expansion, even when that expansion borders on illusion.
How do you know? To me it looks like a good 95% of the American economy is steady, unspectacular businesses that turn a small profit in bad years and a moderate one in good years; of the remaining 5%, half flame out in a spectacular fashion - Enron, anyone? Lehman? - and the other half eventually turn into steady-state companies, as Amazon did. Possibly you are being fooled by the media view of the economy, in which this proportion is, unsurprisingly, reversed.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Too much of the U.S. economy is dependent on a constant and unsustainable expansion, even when that expansion borders on illusion.
How do you know? To me it looks like a good 95% of the American economy is steady, unspectacular businesses that turn a small profit in bad years and a moderate one in good years; of the remaining 5%, half flame out in a spectacular fashion - Enron, anyone? Lehman? - and the other half eventually turn into steady-state companies, as Amazon did. Possibly you are being fooled by the media view of the economy, in which this proportion is, unsurprisingly, reversed.
You've conflated enumerating businesses with enumerating their economic impact.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Most of the US economy still exists and is being very productive (especially compared to other places) even though we're undergoing contraction. How does that involve a dependency on expansion?
Not to mention that expansion of human activity, as far as the data suggests, has been the rule for hundreds and hundreds of years, at minimum, with relatively small deviations from that trend. Given that, I find it very hard to fault businesses for trying to follow the trend during times of expansion (which dominate in modern history).
Sterling: And yet, Amazon was still a small business in the very beginning. But I'd be happy to provide lists of other businesses that started out small and became large and had fewer years without profit, if you'd like to have their existence proven, though.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Corporations today are staggeringly large. And while it's not impossible for a smaller start up company to create a better product and become successful, it seems like the odds are all against that smaller company. And thus against the consumer as well. If the free market is supposed to encourage a system where the best product wins out in the end on its merits, I am not seeing that happen.
I don't know about you, but large corporations have done a lot to increase the standard of living of this consumer.
So would bank robbery, if you got away with it.
If you are trying to make a point, I don't know what it is.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Sterling: And yet, Amazon was still a small business in the very beginning. But I'd be happy to provide lists of other businesses that started out small and became large and had fewer years without profit, if you'd like to have their existence proven, though.
I've never said that small businesses don't ever turn into big businesses; obviously, they do. But it's nothing like commonplace for that to happen. One study concluded that nearly two-thirds of small businesses fail in a ten year period ( link) Of those that succeed, the majority remain small; of those that become large, most either receed under the onslaught of other large competitors, are bought up or merged with those competitors, or fall under their own weight. I'm just saying that Amazon is far from typical for a start-up; suggesting it in any way typifies the life story of a small business is a little like saying that because so-and-so grew up in the slums and went on to be an NBA star, anyone can do it.
As far as credit goes, according to 2004 numbers, approximately 43% of American families spend more than they earn each year. (link)Consumer spending accounts for, depending on how the numbers are crunched, between a third and over two thirds of the GDP. The gross national debt is anticipated to exceed the GDP as of 2011, which is likely to preceed a sharp decline in the already waning value of the dollar.
I do not think the current state of affairs is sustainable.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
The guy devotes a paragraph to it, making a point. A completely bogus one. I don't know enough about farming to know how to sort what parts of the article are true and what parts are similar to the "turkeys are so dumb they drown in the rain" thing.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
It isn't commonplace in the sense that most don't, but of course, that's impossible. There are far more big businesses than small businesses (edit: obviously, I meant the reverse). However, there are small businesses that become big businesses all the time (dozens per year, at minimum, for commonly accepted definitions of small business). Of course the very largest are rarely toppled, but they are toppled -- it isn't hard to name some huge companies that existed a few decades ago that no longer exist, while their former smaller competitors dominate.
Of course amazon is far from typical for a startup. Any startup that succeeds really well is. That does not mean, however, that the startup model doesn't generate a lot of successes, and Amazon is one of numerous examples of those.
That a lot of people spend more than they earn is neither particularly unusual nor necessarily concerning, though it was getting somewhat extreme towards the end of the latest bubble. Almost everyone who buys a house or a car or sends a child to college spends more than they earn; add all the households in a year that do those and you'll get a fairly substantial percentage. However, most of the time the people making those decisions are making pretty reasonable ones, that they can reasonably pay off in years they don't spend more than they earn.
Also, those statistics tend to not include government aid in "earnings". So, everyone who receives some kind of government aid goes in that number, too, even though that isn't really a fair way of looking at their behavior -- most people on gov't aid live firmly within their means, but their means include that gov't aid. They're reasonable transfer payments from other people in the economy, not the addition of debt.
Returning to something I touched on tangentially, you're using statistics from the height of a bubble period to try to say a general pattern of behavior isn't sustainable in the long run. But if you look at those statistics, during our normal course of behavior they fluctuate considerably. During the bubble, credit was cheap. It made sense to use a lot of it. Now that credit is dear, people use a lot less. If you want to assess the sustainability of a strategy, you need to look at how it responds to the normal course of events, not an extreme point. Of course certain extreme points aren't sustainable.
quote:Originally posted by sndrake: I don't know enough about farming to know how to sort what parts of the article are true and what parts are similar to the "turkeys are so dumb they drown in the rain" thing.
More than that, the entire article is anecdotes as data gone amuck.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
The 43% statistic, even taking it at face value, is a perfect example of fun, games, and dam' lies with statistics. The intended implication, clearly, is that 43% of households are buying Prada shoes on their credit cards, and going to be bankrupt in another decade. No. Your average college student spends, say, twenty thousand a year on tuition and whatnot, on an income of zero; bang she goes into the 43%. Ten years later she is still paying off that loan on her nice degree-supported income, and an entirely different set of people is taking up college loans. And god forbid that anyone should buy a house; 200k on an income of 50k! Terrible!
Even if true, this is just not a problem. But there are, clearly, people who would like others to think that it is.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Quite a few of the statements are supported by data, and are not just anecdotes. I do wonder about the turkey story due to using the myth, though recently born turkeys do die in the rain (not due to drowning while looking up, however).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Quite a few of the statements are supported by data, and are not just anecdotes.
But liberally mixed in with the unsupported anecdotes. Which make the article as a whole fairly useless, IMO.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Fairly useless if someone were using it to prove something. However, unsupported anecdotes are part and parcel of most news stories and editorials, and often serve to make people think, which I suspect was the point of the article. Note that Jhai just said the article made some good points, not that it showed modern farming was morally upstanding. Many of the points in the article are even abstract, and not really something that can be proven (or disproven) with data; just different ways of thinking about a situation.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: Quite a few of the statements are supported by data, and are not just anecdotes. I do wonder about the turkey story due to using the myth, though recently born turkeys do die in the rain (not due to drowning while looking up, however).
Right, but according to the Straight Dope, those deaths are from exposure, due to the lack of insulating feathers on the chicks. Farmers know enough to get turkey chicks out of the rain for this reason.
It gives another slant on the sad story about the farmer with a dream in the story - who apparently didn't know this about turkey chicks.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
*shrug* You can find other articles - data-driven journal articles - that point out the same sort of flaws with some of the criticism aimed at the agriculture industry. This was just the first I came across.
I think the main point to draw from these sort of pieces is that Michael Pollan is a journalist, not a scientist, agriculturalist, nor even someone who has at least been practicing farming for most of his life. I've read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and, while I think it raises some good points, there are some places that make it very clear that Pollan is laughably unfamiliar with some economic realities at the very least. (I haven't studied agriculture, but I have touched on agriculture economics through development - so I'll only comment on the parts I know are criticizable).
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Jhai: Michael Pollan is a journalist, not a scientist, agriculturalist, nor even someone who has at least been practicing farming for most of his life.
Certainly. And anyone who changes their life based solely on his book (and I know some people who have) without doing any further research on the points he raises . . . well, I don't think it's very smart. Let's leave it at that.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
sndrake: of course, bringing thousands of young birds, or finding thousands of eggs to be born inside before being allowed outside when older, would be very labor intensive, I suspect.
But I share rivka's suspicion that the turkey story is made up, or at least third or fourth hand rather than second-hand as presented. I am tempted to write and inquire about the details.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I've been dying to try and make a joke out of Strider's post title and the tepid critical and financial reception of Michael Moore's new movie, but I just can't make it work.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
The only movie of moore's that I could stand was Sicko, and that's more or less because he stayed off camera for a while and pulled a much lower than average amount of his stupid bullhorn stunts that make me want to throw pens at his head, and because the american healthcare industry is such a fertile feeding ground for outrage anyway.
I think I would walk out of his newest one if the previews are any indication.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
There are quite literally millions of small businesses in the US. There are fewer than 20,000 businesses with at least 500 employees.
Small businesses are born all the time. Some become quite successful and become big businesses, some become quite successful and remain small/medium sized businesses, and some struggle and fail.
Usually success comes from offering a superior product, or superior quality of service - or from filling a niche, or offering a personal touch to their business.
While I'm not a big fan of certain corporations (I'm looking at you, here, Walmart), I choose not to support them. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy from them. There are plenty of smaller storefronts on teh interwebs that can likely get you what you want without having to go through a mega-corporation.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
There are quite literally millions of small businesses in the US. There are fewer than 20,000 businesses with at least 500 employees.
Perhaps what was meant was that there is far more *big business* than there is "small" business. I don't know if that's even true or not, but big businesses of course garner the most public attention, so it's easy to assume they also account for the larger share of all the commercial activity of the nation. What I'm wondering is what the actual figures are, or where you'd look for them.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Whats wrong with Wal-Mart? Penn and Teller I think did a good coverage of the very benefitial effects Walmart has on smaller towns and poor neighbourhoods.
IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: The only movie of moore's that I could stand was Sicko, and that's more or less because he stayed off camera for a while and pulled a much lower than average amount of his stupid bullhorn stunts that make me want to throw pens at his head, and because the american healthcare industry is such a fertile feeding ground for outrage anyway.
One of Moore's oddball strengths as a commentator is his haplessness in the face of complex issues. A lot of the time: "I don't get it," is played half jokingly in his films, but is also at least half serious as well. He has always espoused the average joe perspective on big issues, and actually I tend to think he really isn't a very sophisticated guy in a lot of ways, although he is opinionated and imperturbable.
That works, as I say, with big issues where Moore wants to get down to the brass tacks of right and wrong. It's easy to make a case that someone not getting the right healthcare for a stupid unfathomable reason = wrong. It's easy to argue that kids shooting up a school = wrong, and whatever else is concomitant with that act is also a sign of something going wrong.
But I sense that probably when Moore tries to tackle a less tangible subject like economics and related broad sociological questions, his go-to approach doesn't exactly put him ahead in the game. Unlike with governments and companies involved in wars and health care debacles, the economy doesn't fulfill a stated purpose, and is not itself embodied in any one organization, or even a collective of organizations. So there's nobody for Moore to approach with a microphone and say: "why did you hurt the economy?" I mean, he can do that, but it's going to look silly and weirdly childlike and macabre if he actually does. It just doesn't sound like a fight Moore is suited to.
Personally I really wish the guys at NPR's Planet Money would get together and pen a screenplay about the financial crisis. It's a story best told in small pieces, hinting at the larger framework.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
No, it was just a switched typo. I meant far more small businesses than big businesses. As should be clear if you read the next few sentences Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
This question deserves so much more than I can put together in a single post.
Just googling "walmart" with the words "bad", "unfair", "evil", etc. brings up countless hits.
Here is one list of possible responses to your question from the website of a Walmart documentary.
BUT, Walmart is another perfect example of a small, single-store business becoming hugely successful, and in a short peroid of time (even though I disagree with their methods).
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
The thing that bothers about Walmart facts like that, though, is I don't know how they compare to every other superstore out there (both those successfully competing and those that are getting crushed under Walmart's boot). Because while a lot of those figures look alarming, they don't strike me as that different from what I assume most supermarkets and deparment stores do.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
Not only that, but you don't know how they compare to all the small stores they and other large stores replaced.
To mention a few things not touched upon on the website just linked for Wal-Mart: if retail wages were driven down .5 to .9 percent (a decrease in retail wages, I would point out, of around $100 a year for a low-wage worker), but Wal-Mart also lowers prices on a significant fraction of the goods the worker would normally be buying, that is a net positive for the worker. That is, if the person saves more than $100 or so a year due to the presence of Wal-Mart, the overall effect is something to be encouraged, not discouraged.
I am sympathetic to the public assistance argument, but I don't think that's much of an indictment against Wal-Mart (excepting where they adopt coercive policies to avoid people earning health insurance) so much as it is an indictment of how health care is tied to employer in the US.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
oh man! I'm so sorry, I did a "post and run". I didn't mean to do that. I got really busy after I posted this and by the time I made it back to Hatrack the thread had slipped off and out of my mind. I have a lot of responding to do, but I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for the weekend. I promise to respond to people who addressed me when I get the chance!
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
