Noah Smith changes his mind; Greg Lukianoff's depressing data on professors canceled; Musa Al-Gharbi talks his book; Aswath Damodaran on breaking up big corporations
I don't know if Noah deserves too much credit for coming around to the view that law enforcement is an important institution in a functioning society. Maybe next week he'll have some revelation on the role of sewage and sanitation systems in modern cities.
Right. Solid evidence had been around for decades and all around the world at least since the emergence of modern professional police forces this has always been considered to be "obvious common sense" to all but nutty ideologues. There has never been any good evidence supporting or other reason to believe the contrary. Noah has fibbed too often to get the assumption of good faith or benefit of the doubt with this one, and even Radley Balko would concede these truisms before he jumped his own shark and went Full Lunatic after George Floyd. It's just that during the recent period of particularly severe wokeness it became impossible for anyone on the left to even state the obvious about the terrible trade-offs and consequences of violence and disorder they were unleashing when unjustly denigrating policemen and policing. But since elite leftist opinion- makers like living in the core of urban areas they would like to be safe and family-friendly, they were getting hoisted by their own petards, and were all eagerly waiting for things to cool down enough and the preference- falsification cascade "vibe shift" made it safe to say obviously true things again, using the cover story excuse of being convinced by evidence that is either "new" or about which they were forgivably unaware, though, somehow, at the time, they claimed they were fully educated in the relevant literature when making boldly certain and confident pronouncements about the evil racism and superfluousness of police who could be "defunded" in pure gain with no negative consequences.
Noah Smith is blinded by his adoration of authoritarian (government) solutions. He sees market failure everywhere but doesn’t notice the government’s role in them.
My late father was one of AT&T’s principal litigators in its landmark antitrust suit. His tax returns would surely confirm your claim that antitrust is a transfer from shareholders to lawyers.
If you haven't read the Rohit Krishnan article "Seeing like a network" as a contextually important background piece to what Tyler and Musa are talking about and for the social epistemology crowd you may wish to do so. It contains this nugget, "When Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec analysed email and messaging data in 2007-2008, they found an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between 240m people. In 2016, a study by Facebook’s data team found the average degree of separation was 3.57". A change in the network is a change in the information environment and a change in the signaling environment. 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon is over we are now at 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon. It would be interesting to compare and see how the network, information environment, and signaling environment changed before, during, and after previous Awakenings.
The cellular revolution would have happened regardless of whether or not AT&T were broken up because it was already in progress at the time the case was settled in 1984.
Yeah, but if ATT hadn't been broken up, then there would be only one US cellular network infrastructure in reality, with all the rest of the service companies pretending to be competitors actually being elaborate facades and exercises in price discrimination since they are in reality just legal entities contacting to use ATT infrastructure with prices and rules and limits on competition set by ATT. Thank God they broke up ATT, because, instead of that monopoly nightmare, the US now has TWO such companies, in duopoly nightmare, with service in other comparable countries being consistently cheaper and faster. Wait ... hold on ....
Snark aside, there is no doubt we got a lot of communications innovation that without the breakup would have been much less likely. And no guarantee we would have had the enormous mobile rollout - and competition there - absent the breakup.
Even 2.5 companies is a lot more competition serving innovation and lower prices than 1.
I’m generally NOT a fan of antitrust laws being used to break up companies, but for those who are, AT&T is the poster child for the benefits.
I worked for AT&T in the '90's. Mobile telephony would never have developed if the Judge Green decision hadn't happened, & the take up of IP connectivity would have been much slower [AT&T had its own, more complex & expensive 'solutions'; both mobile & IP disrupted its core business]. New players & 'pure plays' drove much of the above, but the point is that they never would have gained a foothold in their markets had AT&T had remained a monopoly. Last, by the mid '90's, Bell Labs had run out of gas; after the 'trivestiture' of the RBOC's & the hardware business [Lucent], it couldn't evolve from its legacy carrier business -> data networking hardware [which Cisco Systems drove]
The question of who benefits by a breakup is interesting. It seems like that should have a compelling answer since the entire premise is that it’s for consumer protection! Remarkable how people do what they want unconstrained by words on a page.
I think that competitive large companies benefit, like Apple and Meta and Amazon. Startups are harmed by having a smaller set of potential acquirers. I can’t think of any startups killed by Google’s behavior, or at least none that I miss. I don’t think common wisdom in startups is to even worry about such a thing.
Consumers are probably harmed on net because google gives them a lot for free, and the products are generally high quality and low price. I don’t see significant benefit tilting the balance of power towards other big tech.
“Monopoly” positions fairly earned - as Google’s and Microsoft’s and Apple’s and Amazon’s all were - are very different things than government-chartered literal monopolies like AT&T was.
I’m not saying there is never justification to impose certain restrictions on specific business practices of the Googles/Microsofts/Apples of the world, but the idea of breaking them up is just wrong as well as stupid.
Even if it was justifiable to "break a company up", there is zero reason to believe the government would do so competently (or honestly). That being said, it is a mistake for the government to find itself in special circumstances where the incumbent advantage is such that in practical reality the government becomes completely and indefinitely reliant and dependent on a single contractor for a core, indispensable function, which, like bad "industrial policy" is a recipe for monoculture-risks, higher prices, less innovation, poorer quality, and abysmal customer service. This is the description of a number of national security-related contracts and most definitely Microsoft's.
Instead of breaking Microsoft up, it would be better to force the government to always source at least, say, 15% of a contract from a second competitor, or maybe to force offices to switch or rotate into using that competitors products one out of every 6 years. Yes this is going to require Microsoft to make a lot of stuff open and transparent to ensure interoperability and information sharing and ease of switching. Well, the alternative (i.e., status quo) is worse, so they can take the terms of that deal or lose their cash cow. Hey GOP, if you wanted to "juice" (i.e., extort) a few hundred million extra per year in Microsoft lobbying campaign contributions, (i.e., bribes) just start making noises about taking this idea seriously, and watch the cash roll in.
Well, I agreed with some of what you said, and was fine on the rest until you went to “this is going to require Microsoft to make a lot of stuff open and transparent to ensure interoperability and information sharing and ease of switching.”
Given your proposed government purchasing requirements, Microsoft should still be free to do what they want on making APIs available/etc. The government forcing requirements on Microsoft to make it easier for them to do that 15% sourcing thing is still wrong.
It's forcing the government to require something; it's not forcing Microsoft to do anything. If Microsoft doesn't like the terms - which are the same terms that are imposed on all contract bidders - it can just walk away from the contract. Microsoft can't even plead for mercy like some military contractors on the basis of monopsony and having no one else to sell to. Obviously Microsoft makes plenty of money from plenty of other customers.
If Microsoft thinks sharing some proprietary information with a competitor under non-disclosure rules cuts into its bottom line, it can bid a higher price, and the government will probably still pay whatever Microsoft wants, as it pretty much already does.
Whether or not this kind of thing is 'wrong', it is already common in the national security context, where it is common for the government procurement and acquisition offices to insist on various anti-lock-in-tactic provisions, for interoperability, to avoid single-points-of-failure, and to ensure non-cooperative scrutibility when that's necessary.
Sure you can buy a cordless drill that only works with that company's batteries, a laser printer that only works with that company's toner cartridges, razor blades that only fit in that company's razor handles, but (with some exceptions) the government won't buy a missile that can only be launched from that missile company's aircraft, or a radio that will only communicate with other radios made by that same company. Companies that don't like these rules can simply refuse to deal with the government. My belief is that if MS refused to deal with USG it would be better for both MS and USG.
But of course what you propose is a fairly dangerous game of chicken for the government to choose to play, since MS might well decide to say no, and while you personally think the government would be better off, in fact it’s quite likely that the economic loss would be fairly large (in terms of lost productivity ) - and we taxpayers would be effectively stuck footing the bill.
2. The dysfunction of the legal immigration process. For example, we would like a legal immigration system that would have allowed the founder of TSMC to stay in the US instead of being forced to return to Taiwan. And many horror stories simply dealing with the system from a customer experience / length of time & delays point of view.
Especially jarring is the contrast between 1 and 2
Do people realize that the world is much better off when talented people stay where they are? Haiti is what happens when the talented all leave. Draining all the talent from the world into the US is actually an inferior outcome for everyone involved. Pareto least optimal. Who is going to run the sewage system in Lagos if all the smart Nigerians move? This is a real problem. The idea that the US needs these foreigners is also false. Somebody compiled a list of top IIT graduates in US and it was all replacement level engineers at Google. Those men would have contributed so much more to pulling India out of poverty.
“Do people realize that the world is much better off when talented people stay where they are?”
This take is just wrong.
If you feel this way, you should move to Haiti yourself. Failing that, just stay in the U.S. and move to a public school district in an inner city and send your kids to those schools.
When you think about why you don’t do this (and the second example is surely salient even if you think the culture too different to contemplate the move to Haiti yourself), perhaps you’ll better understand why your take is wrong.
Seriously, it’s one short step from that to bussing. Individual liberty has to be the guiding principle as the best alternative among things which are not perfect
No, actually, bussing is less bad than what he proposes (and I am no defender of or advocate for bussing).
Because bussing at least gets some poor kids into better schools, and required some better off kids (if, admittedly, unlikely many kids of the rich elite) to have to endure the bad schools.
His plan says the competent and capable must be condemned to the same misery of their brethren, because their brethren will be a tiny bit better off with them chained there as good role models.
Andy it's telling that you always frame the argument in terms of the people who leave and never in terms of the people who are left behind. There are 1.5 billion Indians who could benefit enormously from the skills of those high IQ Indians. Conversely the US was wealthy before Indians arrived and would be fine without them. Where could they do more good? It's no comparison.
Unless you are moving yourself to India, or moving your family to an inner city and signing your kids up for public schools there, imo it’s telling that you want to *force* others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself.
If you understood comparative advantage, you would also understand that the answers are not as simple as you suggest, even if we took away the immorality of forcing people to do your will rather than their own. If people with higher skills can earn more here than they could in India - e.g. here as an accountant or entry level programmer than they could as a senior executive at a firm in India - then their family, and indeed anyone for whom they feel obligations to help - would be better off with them moving and remitting the extra money back to India.
Indeed that is what many Mexican and Latin American immigrants do.
But yours sounds like the kind of authoritarian so-called do-gooderism that has prevented school choice in blue states and blue cities around the country and forced inner city kids - both the “basket cases” and the ones who have the capacity and interest to learn and do much better - to be stuck in horrible schools.
Go ahead and feel self-righteous with your take. But in fact it is both economically *and* morally incorrect.
What I'm proposing is good old fashioned third world nationalism. Today third world nationalism has disappeared but the Indian who cheers for the Indian cricket team from his home in NJ knows in his heart that he betrayed his own people for a few extra bucks and a Tesla in Middlesex county.
I agree that a world where you find talented people in every place and industry would be good. Is that realistic?
Would stripe exist if collisons stayed in Ireland? Probably not. Density of talent and industry has real benefits and they aren’t small. Differences in governance are very large as well. Will the state of Nigeria protect your capital assets? Probably not as well as the US. Will socialists declare your charter city illegal retroactively? Yes.
In conclusion, I agree that the results of brain drain are not good but I’m struggling to compare with the counterfactual or see how to avoid that outcome while retaining individual freedom.
The Collisons were seed funded by Paul Graham, a UK national. There is no reason why two Irishmen and an English man have to move to US to start a new company. London is a global city and financial center. Right now the wealthiest man in Africa is operating a new refinery in Nigeria that will produce 650,000 barrels a day. None of this would be possible if all the smart people left. Smart people bootstrap new opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise.
The great thing about markets is that they incentivize smart people to say home if there are productive things they can do like that. There may not be a optimal number of people staying home to build, but the number isn’t zero and it’s unclear why anyone should be trusted to know what the optimal number is
Your example of the US wasting Indian talent is not convincing given how many Indians have climbed to the top of corporate America. Your examples of being no-op engineers at google is a real concern, but presumably there are comparable jobs in India. You can’t just hand wave and say they would be hugely impactful in India but not in the US.
Seems like compensation is the main driver of movement, and that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I wonder why compensation doesn’t adjust downward for no-op engineers or up for places where talent can make an important difference in an underserved spot.
Morris Chang wasn't forced to go back to Taiwan, he was educated and spent a career in the US and even "retired" from Texas Instruments. He chose to move to Taiwan and start his own chip company there as a way to make a fortune in "offshoring arbitrage" because he knew East Asians were far more productive, diligent, hard-working and committed to high quality than Americans, something he witnessed personally in US chip plants in Japan. He was obviously right about that, and, decades later, even trying to bribe TSMC with billions of dollars to do so, they are hesitant and reluctant to expand in the US, because this fact is not just still true but worse than ever, and if the fab simply must be in America, they would prefer to bring over hundreds of Taiwanese to work in it than hire locally. Perhaps you are thinking of Qian Xuesen, one of the worst unforced errors in the history of US immigration policy, but he was sent back to China, not Taiwan.
The onslaught of people crossing the southern border is NOT a technocratic issue. It is almost purely a political one,
The issue was mostly resolved by Remain in Mexico implemented under Trump.
Most of the rest of the issue would be resolved by building more “wall” and adding more Border Patrol agents.
Yes, there would be some remaining issue, and if you claim that portion is “technocratic”, fine, but 80%-90% of the issue is pure politics, and *not* technocratic.
Verifying refugee claims? That’s easy. None of the people arriving are refugees, at least as the word was understood before it was repurposed to mean people who want to leave their dangerous poor country because it continues to be dangerous and poor.
Not true. Not at all. It does not mean coming from a dangerous country. It refers to dangers specific to the person. This is what is often difficult to verify.
"Can you please define the immigration problem." An excellent question!
The progressives have done the usual thing which is to frame their way of seeing things as merely "correct", the rational, "scientific" solution as if derived from solving simultaneous equations from natural laws, while any disagreement is partisan and necessarily irrational or bad faith manipulation. Thus have shaped the way most commentators use language to talk about immigration in a way that locks them in a narrow conceptual straightjacket and creates a lot of confusion.
Specifically, the idea that what is going on with migration is analogous to a machine which is "broken" and which one would take to a mechanic or doctor or techno-wonky "scientific" expert specialist to diagnose and repair in the one right way, to restore ideal full functionality, about which there is only one, objective definition and standards for fair-minded right-thinking non-partisans.
So, instead of talking about negotiating a merely practical and expedient -political compromise- between two sides with irreconcilably different values and perspectives, they talk about "fixing the broken system" or "solving the problem". But it is -total nonsense- to talk about solving "the" problem or fixing "the" things that are broken when the two sides do not agree whatsoever on what the problems are or what about "the system" is broken.
Specifically, many Republican voters think the problem is that the existing immigration law is not just "not being enforced" but being almost entirely ignored when not intentionally circumvented in a number of ways an army of Hawaiian Judges (and, alas, Justices) has enabled. Many Democrats think the problem is that many immigration laws -exist at all- and criminalize or heavily regulate activity that ought to be unrestricted, or unjustly discriminate between groups of people on the improper basis of mere nationality. I.e., they support "open borders", and the problem is not that the gate isn't operating correctly but that there exists a gate at all.
Arnold says that the primary reason negotiating such a political compromise is difficult is because of the "ideological purity" enforced by the current party primary system.
I disagree and think that's only a small contributing factor among other, more important ones, to include:
(1) Basic "No Zone of Possible Agreement" problem, positions are not normally distributed but bifurcated.
(2) "Electorate Shaping" / "The Great Replacement" / "The Emerging Democratic Majority" / The "Brecht Solution" - "Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" Immigration flows and descendants are disproportionately client group vote banks for the Democratic Party - there is no possibly negotiated compromise when every possible one involves suicide for one side, the only question being faster or slower.
And most importantly (and the real reason for tough primaries):
(3) When negotiating anything, people aren't actually negotiating clauses, terms, text, words - all of that is merely a way of trying to symbolically capture conceptions and contingencies about -outcomes in actual reality-. But they can use and focus on text, because, in many legal domains, the whole idea of "law" amounts to what is supposed to be a "language-to-reality map".
Lawyers are there to help their clients use the magic combinations of terms of art and arrangements of words to, in effect, find the place in text-space which best corresponds to the intended location in outcomes-in-reality-space. This mapping isn't going to be perfect, words are inherently fuzzy and reality is inherently hard to predict. But this whole idea of law depends absolutely on there being a "legal system" which creates such a reliable and predictable mapping and enforces it - one hopes - in a quick and cheap manner, which reduces uncertainty and the trust-threshold below the point above which transaction costs would otherwise prohibit many otherwise positive-sum bargains. See "low trust society" / "low state capacity society" / "poor quality institutions society", that is, "Why do such societies stay poorer?"
The trouble is the -complete breakdown- of the reliability, predictability, durability, and fairness of this mapping for actual legislation. What is the point about hammering out the details of the text of a piece of legislation when there is zero trust and good reason to believe there is zero probability the other side is negotiating in good faith and will continue to faithfully execute and enforce the laws as written if they get in power, and furthermore zero chance that the courts can be trusted to interpret the text in a fair and predictable manner? The whole idea of a bargain or agreement is illusory and void.
All sophisticated GOP voters have seen this play our repeatedly their entire lives. It is ludicrous to blame them for being too partisan to come to any kind of agreement. It is impossible to bargain for anything at all in such circumstances, that is, in the absence of actual "rule of law". Any Republication politician who pretends they are doing so in the face of this sad history is revealing themselves to be a corrupt liar that, yes, deserves to get primaried out of office, not for his policies or positions, but because of the kind of corrupt liar he is.
You may say, "well, that's all politicians," but no, it's not like that with immigration matters. Will apologies to Tolstoy, all honest people are alike, but corrupt liars and corrupt liars in their own special way, and such is most definitely the case with GOP politicians pretending that it's remotely possible to come to any kind of believable deal on immigration.
AT&T's breakup was pretty well managed when you consider what came before. "Ma Bell" as we knew it during 1960-83 was the result of a very over-regulated market, in which long distance rates, especially during business hours, were kept artificially high and used to subsidize local service prices. The intended purpose of this arrangement was to get most everybody to subscribe, and it achieved that, but it also made both innovations in phone service (including new features) and the expansion of capacity very difficult and not worth doing.
During the breakup period I asked a Bell technical staffer why the Baby Bells weren't being allowed to reduce their prices. He pointed out that they owned huge amounts of hardware that they owned outright but which the new companies had to borrow before they could build theirs. If the antitrust ruling had not included price controls they could have cut their prices to cost for one month, and all their competitors would be gone.
So I think the antitrust people did a pretty good job of cleaning up the mess they inherited.
Conservatives whose news stories are censored by Google, like those who found out only After the 2020 election that H Biden’s laptop & bribery & porn were really his, those folks interested in the truth would benefit by a Google breakup (Alphabet). And DoJ anti-trust pressure on them with rejection of mergers and acquisitions, would make real competition more likely. Doing so before Instagram was bought would have been better.
Surely there is a deal whereby an increase in visas for legal immigration is traded for border enforcement, without invoking "comprehensive immigration reform." For example, the backlog for nurses is years long (see EB3 category in the State Dept Visa Bulletin). Instead, non-vetted, low-skilled, non-English-speaking economic migrants are being waved in by the millions. Non-mutually exclusive hypotheses include: a) bleeding hearts ("baptists") are being exploited for funding ("bootleggers"), b) current and future votes are being bought, c) an ideology seeks to undermine the nation-state without voter support. Harris either can't or won't say what will be different, so one can only assume we will be receiving another 8-20 million illegal aliens over the next four to eight years should she win.
Sabramanya does a great job covering the debanking scandal. This and the Supreme Courts' penchant for protecting clandestine government operations against politically active citizens would seem to be reason enough to resurrect postal banking which would presumably be operated more transparently and afford citizens greater protection from political debanking shenanigans. https://www.investopedia.com/what-is-postal-banking-5217341
“On immigration, I think that the issue is too salient to be solved. That is, if a politician compromises with the other party, everyone finds out about it, and he gets primaried out of office. Even though most of the public probably would be happy with the compromise.”
I fear you might be correct. However, I do see one possible way out of the mess.
If Dems lose this election, they may be persuaded that is was because of the border czar Harris-Biden illegal immigration policy.
If so, they may be willing to actually go along with policies that radically reduce illegal immigration.
Once that happened, there is at least a decent chance - though surely not until after 2028 - that we can come up with a sane legal immigration policy involving agreement on high-skill immigration, and then the parties can continue to fight on a lesser scale about the annual amount of legal low-skill immigration and what the legalization process looks like for those in the country illegally.
Not an extremely high probability, admittedly, but at least a possibility.
P.S. I strongly agree with you on energy and policing.
1 yes, policing works. But not if the offenders are released the next day and charges dropped.
2 Yes, decentralized innovation is critical to improve energy production. That doesn't mean there isn't a role for technocrats. And technocrats can make a boatload of mistakes and still help move the ball forward vs leaving it entirely to the decentralized innovators. If you aren't familiar with the success of the DARPA Challenge in moving driverless cars forward (accidental pun), you should look into it. Pretty amazing.
3 Yes, immigration is mostly a political issue. If that were ever to be addressed a smaller technocratic issue would remain. Doesn't seem important in the current environment.
4 It's not exactly clear to me why policing is on this list but maybe DNA is an example. Sequencing was a decentralized innovation (with significant government funding) but technocrats still had to determine how to obtain and use relative DNA data to implement procedures to find who left their DNA at a crime scene.
5 if I'm not mistaken, Verizon and the current AT&T were baby bells. Breaking up AT&T created an environment of competition, at minimum between those parts but maybe, probably in my opinion, also giving greater opportunity to others.
5a Regarding breakup of large companies, there is no solution, only tradeoffs. One of those is allowing them to absorb companies that help them improve while preventing them from buying competitors to avoid competition that makes markets work better for everyone but them.
Verizon and the current AT&T are sets of Baby Bells who bought each other and then also bought MCI and the long-distance portion of AT&T, respectively.
After the breakup, it was the Baby Bell’s dominant local access positions (originally due to their monopoly, but then also due to their huge asset base) that had most of the value, while the long distance piece was much more easily subject to competition and so high price declines.
MCI and AT&T were long distance companies. A bunch of baby bells were spun out of the original AT&T.
The baby bells did not have much competition in any of their local areas. And what little they had didn’t really come about because of the breakup.
The breakup did cause long distance prices to crash (great for consumers) and almost surely was good for innovation. But the Baby Bells remained valuable *because of* their own continued monopoly positions in last mile access, and them eventually buying each other up and then buying long distance companies was mostly irrelevant to the issue of benefits of breaking up monopolies.
Perhaps you find this hard to believe, give our back and forth history here on Substack, but I wasn’t trying to argue with you, I didn’t claim it was irrelevant.
I was merely adding some background to this particular point, since it’s related to an industry I know really well.
But if you want a synthesis, the portions that were true literal monopolies - the baby Bells - remained monopolies after the breakup and IMO the breakup caused no meaningful innovation in “their” sector. The long distance portion being broken apart from the rest is what helped facilitate most of the innovation.
Re the cellular business, if you look at the early 2000s peak in terms of the number of major cellular players there were 6: two were grown by Baby Bells (Verizon and Cingular), 2 were long distance players (AT&T and Sprint), and two were startups (Nextel and T- Mobile).
We can’t run the counterfactual, but IMO the reality is that separating the baby bells from each other generated only one additional wireless network, while the separation of the long distance business from local access, and “national” startups generated the other 4. To me this clearly buttresses my claim that the innovation didn’t come from breaking up the true monopolies (the bell local access stuff) from each other, but rather from creating competition in “long distance” national communications.
I didn't exactly think you were disagreeing though we disagree on the benefits of the breakup. (Not saying it should have been broken up, though I lean that way.)
I think I need to repeat that I see a benefit in creating the baby bells that had different leadership, different approaches, etc , regardless of their regional monopolies.
Ok you list of six, I'm not sure why you don't count at&t along with the two babies as part of the ones broken up. And two babies are two of the three that currently remain. Maybe there's no causation but it seems a pretty good outcome as far as competition remaining compared to old at&t being all one.
Maybe at&t internet would have been national and a bigger competitor to Xfinity?
“I think of the whole antitrust arena as a huge transfer from shareholders and consumers to the legal profession.“ What part of the legal profession isn’t a huge transfer from consumers? Serious question. What can we do to improve this?
For the second time today I'm reminded there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I don't mean to dismiss your question but one way to improve it is to go back to a simpler (poorer) society where there weren't so many issues to be addressed. I suspect other improvements are mostly or entirely in the margin and very incremental.
I think at least in some ways we’re headed to a simpler (poorer) society. I’m personally interested in simplifying certain parts of family and community life. It just doesn’t seem like we’re going to agree or that we should aim to agree, better just to go separate ways. More people are probably going to be simplifying. Just a vague, distant feeling I have.
There's a rather tiny minority that talks about simplifying but I see no indication of being a major force. Nor do I see indications of getting poorer overall. I've seen stats showing less near the median. Depending on subjective assumptions you can show those below the median getting poorer but those above are definitely getting much wealthier.
The changes that I envision won’t be so much a conscious choice to simplify, but rather simplicity will be one of the consequences. Work less because you can make more in less time. Move to a rural area because you can work remotely. Cook your own food because restaurants are more expensive than they used to be. Vacation in a car rather than a motor home because electric coolers are available to keep food cold. Ride bikes instead of drive because there are more bike paths. Skip college because more learning can be done piecemeal online and through Amazon purchased books.
I don't know if Noah deserves too much credit for coming around to the view that law enforcement is an important institution in a functioning society. Maybe next week he'll have some revelation on the role of sewage and sanitation systems in modern cities.
Right. Solid evidence had been around for decades and all around the world at least since the emergence of modern professional police forces this has always been considered to be "obvious common sense" to all but nutty ideologues. There has never been any good evidence supporting or other reason to believe the contrary. Noah has fibbed too often to get the assumption of good faith or benefit of the doubt with this one, and even Radley Balko would concede these truisms before he jumped his own shark and went Full Lunatic after George Floyd. It's just that during the recent period of particularly severe wokeness it became impossible for anyone on the left to even state the obvious about the terrible trade-offs and consequences of violence and disorder they were unleashing when unjustly denigrating policemen and policing. But since elite leftist opinion- makers like living in the core of urban areas they would like to be safe and family-friendly, they were getting hoisted by their own petards, and were all eagerly waiting for things to cool down enough and the preference- falsification cascade "vibe shift" made it safe to say obviously true things again, using the cover story excuse of being convinced by evidence that is either "new" or about which they were forgivably unaware, though, somehow, at the time, they claimed they were fully educated in the relevant literature when making boldly certain and confident pronouncements about the evil racism and superfluousness of police who could be "defunded" in pure gain with no negative consequences.
he's such an idiot. it's embarrassing and i fail to understand why Arnold ever cites or quotes him on anything.
Noah Smith is blinded by his adoration of authoritarian (government) solutions. He sees market failure everywhere but doesn’t notice the government’s role in them.
My late father was one of AT&T’s principal litigators in its landmark antitrust suit. His tax returns would surely confirm your claim that antitrust is a transfer from shareholders to lawyers.
If you haven't read the Rohit Krishnan article "Seeing like a network" as a contextually important background piece to what Tyler and Musa are talking about and for the social epistemology crowd you may wish to do so. It contains this nugget, "When Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec analysed email and messaging data in 2007-2008, they found an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between 240m people. In 2016, a study by Facebook’s data team found the average degree of separation was 3.57". A change in the network is a change in the information environment and a change in the signaling environment. 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon is over we are now at 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon. It would be interesting to compare and see how the network, information environment, and signaling environment changed before, during, and after previous Awakenings.
https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network
The cellular revolution would have happened regardless of whether or not AT&T were broken up because it was already in progress at the time the case was settled in 1984.
Yeah, but if ATT hadn't been broken up, then there would be only one US cellular network infrastructure in reality, with all the rest of the service companies pretending to be competitors actually being elaborate facades and exercises in price discrimination since they are in reality just legal entities contacting to use ATT infrastructure with prices and rules and limits on competition set by ATT. Thank God they broke up ATT, because, instead of that monopoly nightmare, the US now has TWO such companies, in duopoly nightmare, with service in other comparable countries being consistently cheaper and faster. Wait ... hold on ....
Snark aside, there is no doubt we got a lot of communications innovation that without the breakup would have been much less likely. And no guarantee we would have had the enormous mobile rollout - and competition there - absent the breakup.
Even 2.5 companies is a lot more competition serving innovation and lower prices than 1.
I’m generally NOT a fan of antitrust laws being used to break up companies, but for those who are, AT&T is the poster child for the benefits.
I worked for AT&T in the '90's. Mobile telephony would never have developed if the Judge Green decision hadn't happened, & the take up of IP connectivity would have been much slower [AT&T had its own, more complex & expensive 'solutions'; both mobile & IP disrupted its core business]. New players & 'pure plays' drove much of the above, but the point is that they never would have gained a foothold in their markets had AT&T had remained a monopoly. Last, by the mid '90's, Bell Labs had run out of gas; after the 'trivestiture' of the RBOC's & the hardware business [Lucent], it couldn't evolve from its legacy carrier business -> data networking hardware [which Cisco Systems drove]
The question of who benefits by a breakup is interesting. It seems like that should have a compelling answer since the entire premise is that it’s for consumer protection! Remarkable how people do what they want unconstrained by words on a page.
I think that competitive large companies benefit, like Apple and Meta and Amazon. Startups are harmed by having a smaller set of potential acquirers. I can’t think of any startups killed by Google’s behavior, or at least none that I miss. I don’t think common wisdom in startups is to even worry about such a thing.
Consumers are probably harmed on net because google gives them a lot for free, and the products are generally high quality and low price. I don’t see significant benefit tilting the balance of power towards other big tech.
“Monopoly” positions fairly earned - as Google’s and Microsoft’s and Apple’s and Amazon’s all were - are very different things than government-chartered literal monopolies like AT&T was.
I’m not saying there is never justification to impose certain restrictions on specific business practices of the Googles/Microsofts/Apples of the world, but the idea of breaking them up is just wrong as well as stupid.
Even if it was justifiable to "break a company up", there is zero reason to believe the government would do so competently (or honestly). That being said, it is a mistake for the government to find itself in special circumstances where the incumbent advantage is such that in practical reality the government becomes completely and indefinitely reliant and dependent on a single contractor for a core, indispensable function, which, like bad "industrial policy" is a recipe for monoculture-risks, higher prices, less innovation, poorer quality, and abysmal customer service. This is the description of a number of national security-related contracts and most definitely Microsoft's.
Instead of breaking Microsoft up, it would be better to force the government to always source at least, say, 15% of a contract from a second competitor, or maybe to force offices to switch or rotate into using that competitors products one out of every 6 years. Yes this is going to require Microsoft to make a lot of stuff open and transparent to ensure interoperability and information sharing and ease of switching. Well, the alternative (i.e., status quo) is worse, so they can take the terms of that deal or lose their cash cow. Hey GOP, if you wanted to "juice" (i.e., extort) a few hundred million extra per year in Microsoft lobbying campaign contributions, (i.e., bribes) just start making noises about taking this idea seriously, and watch the cash roll in.
Well, I agreed with some of what you said, and was fine on the rest until you went to “this is going to require Microsoft to make a lot of stuff open and transparent to ensure interoperability and information sharing and ease of switching.”
Given your proposed government purchasing requirements, Microsoft should still be free to do what they want on making APIs available/etc. The government forcing requirements on Microsoft to make it easier for them to do that 15% sourcing thing is still wrong.
It's forcing the government to require something; it's not forcing Microsoft to do anything. If Microsoft doesn't like the terms - which are the same terms that are imposed on all contract bidders - it can just walk away from the contract. Microsoft can't even plead for mercy like some military contractors on the basis of monopsony and having no one else to sell to. Obviously Microsoft makes plenty of money from plenty of other customers.
If Microsoft thinks sharing some proprietary information with a competitor under non-disclosure rules cuts into its bottom line, it can bid a higher price, and the government will probably still pay whatever Microsoft wants, as it pretty much already does.
Whether or not this kind of thing is 'wrong', it is already common in the national security context, where it is common for the government procurement and acquisition offices to insist on various anti-lock-in-tactic provisions, for interoperability, to avoid single-points-of-failure, and to ensure non-cooperative scrutibility when that's necessary.
Sure you can buy a cordless drill that only works with that company's batteries, a laser printer that only works with that company's toner cartridges, razor blades that only fit in that company's razor handles, but (with some exceptions) the government won't buy a missile that can only be launched from that missile company's aircraft, or a radio that will only communicate with other radios made by that same company. Companies that don't like these rules can simply refuse to deal with the government. My belief is that if MS refused to deal with USG it would be better for both MS and USG.
Fair enough.
But of course what you propose is a fairly dangerous game of chicken for the government to choose to play, since MS might well decide to say no, and while you personally think the government would be better off, in fact it’s quite likely that the economic loss would be fairly large (in terms of lost productivity ) - and we taxpayers would be effectively stuck footing the bill.
“On immigration, I think that the issue is too salient to be solved.“ Arnold - Can you please define the immigration problem(s)? What is to be solved?
I presume he means addressing
1. The large number of illegal immigrants
2. The dysfunction of the legal immigration process. For example, we would like a legal immigration system that would have allowed the founder of TSMC to stay in the US instead of being forced to return to Taiwan. And many horror stories simply dealing with the system from a customer experience / length of time & delays point of view.
Especially jarring is the contrast between 1 and 2
Do people realize that the world is much better off when talented people stay where they are? Haiti is what happens when the talented all leave. Draining all the talent from the world into the US is actually an inferior outcome for everyone involved. Pareto least optimal. Who is going to run the sewage system in Lagos if all the smart Nigerians move? This is a real problem. The idea that the US needs these foreigners is also false. Somebody compiled a list of top IIT graduates in US and it was all replacement level engineers at Google. Those men would have contributed so much more to pulling India out of poverty.
“Do people realize that the world is much better off when talented people stay where they are?”
This take is just wrong.
If you feel this way, you should move to Haiti yourself. Failing that, just stay in the U.S. and move to a public school district in an inner city and send your kids to those schools.
When you think about why you don’t do this (and the second example is surely salient even if you think the culture too different to contemplate the move to Haiti yourself), perhaps you’ll better understand why your take is wrong.
Seriously, it’s one short step from that to bussing. Individual liberty has to be the guiding principle as the best alternative among things which are not perfect
No, actually, bussing is less bad than what he proposes (and I am no defender of or advocate for bussing).
Because bussing at least gets some poor kids into better schools, and required some better off kids (if, admittedly, unlikely many kids of the rich elite) to have to endure the bad schools.
His plan says the competent and capable must be condemned to the same misery of their brethren, because their brethren will be a tiny bit better off with them chained there as good role models.
Andy it's telling that you always frame the argument in terms of the people who leave and never in terms of the people who are left behind. There are 1.5 billion Indians who could benefit enormously from the skills of those high IQ Indians. Conversely the US was wealthy before Indians arrived and would be fine without them. Where could they do more good? It's no comparison.
Unless you are moving yourself to India, or moving your family to an inner city and signing your kids up for public schools there, imo it’s telling that you want to *force* others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself.
If you understood comparative advantage, you would also understand that the answers are not as simple as you suggest, even if we took away the immorality of forcing people to do your will rather than their own. If people with higher skills can earn more here than they could in India - e.g. here as an accountant or entry level programmer than they could as a senior executive at a firm in India - then their family, and indeed anyone for whom they feel obligations to help - would be better off with them moving and remitting the extra money back to India.
Indeed that is what many Mexican and Latin American immigrants do.
But yours sounds like the kind of authoritarian so-called do-gooderism that has prevented school choice in blue states and blue cities around the country and forced inner city kids - both the “basket cases” and the ones who have the capacity and interest to learn and do much better - to be stuck in horrible schools.
Go ahead and feel self-righteous with your take. But in fact it is both economically *and* morally incorrect.
What I'm proposing is good old fashioned third world nationalism. Today third world nationalism has disappeared but the Indian who cheers for the Indian cricket team from his home in NJ knows in his heart that he betrayed his own people for a few extra bucks and a Tesla in Middlesex county.
I agree that a world where you find talented people in every place and industry would be good. Is that realistic?
Would stripe exist if collisons stayed in Ireland? Probably not. Density of talent and industry has real benefits and they aren’t small. Differences in governance are very large as well. Will the state of Nigeria protect your capital assets? Probably not as well as the US. Will socialists declare your charter city illegal retroactively? Yes.
In conclusion, I agree that the results of brain drain are not good but I’m struggling to compare with the counterfactual or see how to avoid that outcome while retaining individual freedom.
The Collisons were seed funded by Paul Graham, a UK national. There is no reason why two Irishmen and an English man have to move to US to start a new company. London is a global city and financial center. Right now the wealthiest man in Africa is operating a new refinery in Nigeria that will produce 650,000 barrels a day. None of this would be possible if all the smart people left. Smart people bootstrap new opportunities that wouldn't exist otherwise.
If opportunities keep/attract smart people to poor countries, fantastic.
If kept due to restrictive laws, not fantastic at all.
Reality is malleable but only the truly talented can change it. Things will always stay the same if the talented take the first plane to New Jersey.
The great thing about markets is that they incentivize smart people to say home if there are productive things they can do like that. There may not be a optimal number of people staying home to build, but the number isn’t zero and it’s unclear why anyone should be trusted to know what the optimal number is
I’m sometimes asked whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland. It’s impossible to really know the counterfactual, but I suspect not.
https://patrickcollison.com/post/stripe-ireland
Your example of the US wasting Indian talent is not convincing given how many Indians have climbed to the top of corporate America. Your examples of being no-op engineers at google is a real concern, but presumably there are comparable jobs in India. You can’t just hand wave and say they would be hugely impactful in India but not in the US.
Seems like compensation is the main driver of movement, and that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I wonder why compensation doesn’t adjust downward for no-op engineers or up for places where talent can make an important difference in an underserved spot.
Morris Chang wasn't forced to go back to Taiwan, he was educated and spent a career in the US and even "retired" from Texas Instruments. He chose to move to Taiwan and start his own chip company there as a way to make a fortune in "offshoring arbitrage" because he knew East Asians were far more productive, diligent, hard-working and committed to high quality than Americans, something he witnessed personally in US chip plants in Japan. He was obviously right about that, and, decades later, even trying to bribe TSMC with billions of dollars to do so, they are hesitant and reluctant to expand in the US, because this fact is not just still true but worse than ever, and if the fab simply must be in America, they would prefer to bring over hundreds of Taiwanese to work in it than hire locally. Perhaps you are thinking of Qian Xuesen, one of the worst unforced errors in the history of US immigration policy, but he was sent back to China, not Taiwan.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware that he could have stayed but chose not to.
Sounds reasonable, except I don't see these as technocratic issues. They are political.
But I do see two related technocratic issues:
How do we best manage (reduce) the onslaught of people crossing the southern border?
How do we verify refugee claims?
The onslaught of people crossing the southern border is NOT a technocratic issue. It is almost purely a political one,
The issue was mostly resolved by Remain in Mexico implemented under Trump.
Most of the rest of the issue would be resolved by building more “wall” and adding more Border Patrol agents.
Yes, there would be some remaining issue, and if you claim that portion is “technocratic”, fine, but 80%-90% of the issue is pure politics, and *not* technocratic.
I don't follow. Are you agreeing or do you think you are disagreeing? I don't understand your tone.
My apologies, I simply misread your first sentence. We are in fact in total agreement here.
Verifying refugee claims? That’s easy. None of the people arriving are refugees, at least as the word was understood before it was repurposed to mean people who want to leave their dangerous poor country because it continues to be dangerous and poor.
Not true. Not at all. It does not mean coming from a dangerous country. It refers to dangers specific to the person. This is what is often difficult to verify.
Rob is incorrect, true enough.
But *almost all* are not refugees (at the southern border) is in fact today correct.
How do you know that?
Regardless, it's rather irrelevant to my point. And the border is irrelevant too.
There are still tens of thousands of refugee applications every year and many are difficult to confirm.
Well said.
"Can you please define the immigration problem." An excellent question!
The progressives have done the usual thing which is to frame their way of seeing things as merely "correct", the rational, "scientific" solution as if derived from solving simultaneous equations from natural laws, while any disagreement is partisan and necessarily irrational or bad faith manipulation. Thus have shaped the way most commentators use language to talk about immigration in a way that locks them in a narrow conceptual straightjacket and creates a lot of confusion.
Specifically, the idea that what is going on with migration is analogous to a machine which is "broken" and which one would take to a mechanic or doctor or techno-wonky "scientific" expert specialist to diagnose and repair in the one right way, to restore ideal full functionality, about which there is only one, objective definition and standards for fair-minded right-thinking non-partisans.
So, instead of talking about negotiating a merely practical and expedient -political compromise- between two sides with irreconcilably different values and perspectives, they talk about "fixing the broken system" or "solving the problem". But it is -total nonsense- to talk about solving "the" problem or fixing "the" things that are broken when the two sides do not agree whatsoever on what the problems are or what about "the system" is broken.
Specifically, many Republican voters think the problem is that the existing immigration law is not just "not being enforced" but being almost entirely ignored when not intentionally circumvented in a number of ways an army of Hawaiian Judges (and, alas, Justices) has enabled. Many Democrats think the problem is that many immigration laws -exist at all- and criminalize or heavily regulate activity that ought to be unrestricted, or unjustly discriminate between groups of people on the improper basis of mere nationality. I.e., they support "open borders", and the problem is not that the gate isn't operating correctly but that there exists a gate at all.
Arnold says that the primary reason negotiating such a political compromise is difficult is because of the "ideological purity" enforced by the current party primary system.
I disagree and think that's only a small contributing factor among other, more important ones, to include:
(1) Basic "No Zone of Possible Agreement" problem, positions are not normally distributed but bifurcated.
(2) "Electorate Shaping" / "The Great Replacement" / "The Emerging Democratic Majority" / The "Brecht Solution" - "Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" Immigration flows and descendants are disproportionately client group vote banks for the Democratic Party - there is no possibly negotiated compromise when every possible one involves suicide for one side, the only question being faster or slower.
And most importantly (and the real reason for tough primaries):
(3) When negotiating anything, people aren't actually negotiating clauses, terms, text, words - all of that is merely a way of trying to symbolically capture conceptions and contingencies about -outcomes in actual reality-. But they can use and focus on text, because, in many legal domains, the whole idea of "law" amounts to what is supposed to be a "language-to-reality map".
Lawyers are there to help their clients use the magic combinations of terms of art and arrangements of words to, in effect, find the place in text-space which best corresponds to the intended location in outcomes-in-reality-space. This mapping isn't going to be perfect, words are inherently fuzzy and reality is inherently hard to predict. But this whole idea of law depends absolutely on there being a "legal system" which creates such a reliable and predictable mapping and enforces it - one hopes - in a quick and cheap manner, which reduces uncertainty and the trust-threshold below the point above which transaction costs would otherwise prohibit many otherwise positive-sum bargains. See "low trust society" / "low state capacity society" / "poor quality institutions society", that is, "Why do such societies stay poorer?"
The trouble is the -complete breakdown- of the reliability, predictability, durability, and fairness of this mapping for actual legislation. What is the point about hammering out the details of the text of a piece of legislation when there is zero trust and good reason to believe there is zero probability the other side is negotiating in good faith and will continue to faithfully execute and enforce the laws as written if they get in power, and furthermore zero chance that the courts can be trusted to interpret the text in a fair and predictable manner? The whole idea of a bargain or agreement is illusory and void.
All sophisticated GOP voters have seen this play our repeatedly their entire lives. It is ludicrous to blame them for being too partisan to come to any kind of agreement. It is impossible to bargain for anything at all in such circumstances, that is, in the absence of actual "rule of law". Any Republication politician who pretends they are doing so in the face of this sad history is revealing themselves to be a corrupt liar that, yes, deserves to get primaried out of office, not for his policies or positions, but because of the kind of corrupt liar he is.
You may say, "well, that's all politicians," but no, it's not like that with immigration matters. Will apologies to Tolstoy, all honest people are alike, but corrupt liars and corrupt liars in their own special way, and such is most definitely the case with GOP politicians pretending that it's remotely possible to come to any kind of believable deal on immigration.
AT&T's breakup was pretty well managed when you consider what came before. "Ma Bell" as we knew it during 1960-83 was the result of a very over-regulated market, in which long distance rates, especially during business hours, were kept artificially high and used to subsidize local service prices. The intended purpose of this arrangement was to get most everybody to subscribe, and it achieved that, but it also made both innovations in phone service (including new features) and the expansion of capacity very difficult and not worth doing.
During the breakup period I asked a Bell technical staffer why the Baby Bells weren't being allowed to reduce their prices. He pointed out that they owned huge amounts of hardware that they owned outright but which the new companies had to borrow before they could build theirs. If the antitrust ruling had not included price controls they could have cut their prices to cost for one month, and all their competitors would be gone.
So I think the antitrust people did a pretty good job of cleaning up the mess they inherited.
Conservatives whose news stories are censored by Google, like those who found out only After the 2020 election that H Biden’s laptop & bribery & porn were really his, those folks interested in the truth would benefit by a Google breakup (Alphabet). And DoJ anti-trust pressure on them with rejection of mergers and acquisitions, would make real competition more likely. Doing so before Instagram was bought would have been better.
Surely there is a deal whereby an increase in visas for legal immigration is traded for border enforcement, without invoking "comprehensive immigration reform." For example, the backlog for nurses is years long (see EB3 category in the State Dept Visa Bulletin). Instead, non-vetted, low-skilled, non-English-speaking economic migrants are being waved in by the millions. Non-mutually exclusive hypotheses include: a) bleeding hearts ("baptists") are being exploited for funding ("bootleggers"), b) current and future votes are being bought, c) an ideology seeks to undermine the nation-state without voter support. Harris either can't or won't say what will be different, so one can only assume we will be receiving another 8-20 million illegal aliens over the next four to eight years should she win.
I’m curious. Can anyone give an example of a monopoly that the government didn’t subsidize in ANY way, that lasted more than a year?
Sabramanya does a great job covering the debanking scandal. This and the Supreme Courts' penchant for protecting clandestine government operations against politically active citizens would seem to be reason enough to resurrect postal banking which would presumably be operated more transparently and afford citizens greater protection from political debanking shenanigans. https://www.investopedia.com/what-is-postal-banking-5217341
“On immigration, I think that the issue is too salient to be solved. That is, if a politician compromises with the other party, everyone finds out about it, and he gets primaried out of office. Even though most of the public probably would be happy with the compromise.”
I fear you might be correct. However, I do see one possible way out of the mess.
If Dems lose this election, they may be persuaded that is was because of the border czar Harris-Biden illegal immigration policy.
If so, they may be willing to actually go along with policies that radically reduce illegal immigration.
Once that happened, there is at least a decent chance - though surely not until after 2028 - that we can come up with a sane legal immigration policy involving agreement on high-skill immigration, and then the parties can continue to fight on a lesser scale about the annual amount of legal low-skill immigration and what the legalization process looks like for those in the country illegally.
Not an extremely high probability, admittedly, but at least a possibility.
P.S. I strongly agree with you on energy and policing.
1 yes, policing works. But not if the offenders are released the next day and charges dropped.
2 Yes, decentralized innovation is critical to improve energy production. That doesn't mean there isn't a role for technocrats. And technocrats can make a boatload of mistakes and still help move the ball forward vs leaving it entirely to the decentralized innovators. If you aren't familiar with the success of the DARPA Challenge in moving driverless cars forward (accidental pun), you should look into it. Pretty amazing.
3 Yes, immigration is mostly a political issue. If that were ever to be addressed a smaller technocratic issue would remain. Doesn't seem important in the current environment.
4 It's not exactly clear to me why policing is on this list but maybe DNA is an example. Sequencing was a decentralized innovation (with significant government funding) but technocrats still had to determine how to obtain and use relative DNA data to implement procedures to find who left their DNA at a crime scene.
5 if I'm not mistaken, Verizon and the current AT&T were baby bells. Breaking up AT&T created an environment of competition, at minimum between those parts but maybe, probably in my opinion, also giving greater opportunity to others.
5a Regarding breakup of large companies, there is no solution, only tradeoffs. One of those is allowing them to absorb companies that help them improve while preventing them from buying competitors to avoid competition that makes markets work better for everyone but them.
Verizon and the current AT&T are sets of Baby Bells who bought each other and then also bought MCI and the long-distance portion of AT&T, respectively.
After the breakup, it was the Baby Bell’s dominant local access positions (originally due to their monopoly, but then also due to their huge asset base) that had most of the value, while the long distance piece was much more easily subject to competition and so high price declines.
What's your point?
MCI and AT&T were long distance companies. A bunch of baby bells were spun out of the original AT&T.
The baby bells did not have much competition in any of their local areas. And what little they had didn’t really come about because of the breakup.
The breakup did cause long distance prices to crash (great for consumers) and almost surely was good for innovation. But the Baby Bells remained valuable *because of* their own continued monopoly positions in last mile access, and them eventually buying each other up and then buying long distance companies was mostly irrelevant to the issue of benefits of breaking up monopolies.
Mostly?
It created nine smaller companies that competed with two surviving.
If att hadn't been broken up, who do you think would be the biggest cellular companies?
Right or wrong, it doesn't seem irrelevant.
Perhaps you find this hard to believe, give our back and forth history here on Substack, but I wasn’t trying to argue with you, I didn’t claim it was irrelevant.
I was merely adding some background to this particular point, since it’s related to an industry I know really well.
But if you want a synthesis, the portions that were true literal monopolies - the baby Bells - remained monopolies after the breakup and IMO the breakup caused no meaningful innovation in “their” sector. The long distance portion being broken apart from the rest is what helped facilitate most of the innovation.
Re the cellular business, if you look at the early 2000s peak in terms of the number of major cellular players there were 6: two were grown by Baby Bells (Verizon and Cingular), 2 were long distance players (AT&T and Sprint), and two were startups (Nextel and T- Mobile).
We can’t run the counterfactual, but IMO the reality is that separating the baby bells from each other generated only one additional wireless network, while the separation of the long distance business from local access, and “national” startups generated the other 4. To me this clearly buttresses my claim that the innovation didn’t come from breaking up the true monopolies (the bell local access stuff) from each other, but rather from creating competition in “long distance” national communications.
I didn't exactly think you were disagreeing though we disagree on the benefits of the breakup. (Not saying it should have been broken up, though I lean that way.)
I think I need to repeat that I see a benefit in creating the baby bells that had different leadership, different approaches, etc , regardless of their regional monopolies.
Ok you list of six, I'm not sure why you don't count at&t along with the two babies as part of the ones broken up. And two babies are two of the three that currently remain. Maybe there's no causation but it seems a pretty good outcome as far as competition remaining compared to old at&t being all one.
Maybe at&t internet would have been national and a bigger competitor to Xfinity?
“I think of the whole antitrust arena as a huge transfer from shareholders and consumers to the legal profession.“ What part of the legal profession isn’t a huge transfer from consumers? Serious question. What can we do to improve this?
For the second time today I'm reminded there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I don't mean to dismiss your question but one way to improve it is to go back to a simpler (poorer) society where there weren't so many issues to be addressed. I suspect other improvements are mostly or entirely in the margin and very incremental.
I think at least in some ways we’re headed to a simpler (poorer) society. I’m personally interested in simplifying certain parts of family and community life. It just doesn’t seem like we’re going to agree or that we should aim to agree, better just to go separate ways. More people are probably going to be simplifying. Just a vague, distant feeling I have.
There's a rather tiny minority that talks about simplifying but I see no indication of being a major force. Nor do I see indications of getting poorer overall. I've seen stats showing less near the median. Depending on subjective assumptions you can show those below the median getting poorer but those above are definitely getting much wealthier.
The changes that I envision won’t be so much a conscious choice to simplify, but rather simplicity will be one of the consequences. Work less because you can make more in less time. Move to a rural area because you can work remotely. Cook your own food because restaurants are more expensive than they used to be. Vacation in a car rather than a motor home because electric coolers are available to keep food cold. Ride bikes instead of drive because there are more bike paths. Skip college because more learning can be done piecemeal online and through Amazon purchased books.
Not what I thought you meant. I like this better but it sounds more like something you'd like than a prediction.
Fantasy prediction