[id: series of photos of trees, moss, and other plant life growing over a sign, a ship, a Ferris wheel, a tank, a train, a car, a building, a fence, another ship, and a metal slide]
Imagine being rushed into the ER and reading this as they push you through though
Lol when my appendix burst, I had initially refused to go to the ER because it was a Saturday night (which are always busy helltimes for ERs of course) – and when I arrived I was told there were eight people ahead of me. I agreed and just asked for something to drink and something for the nausea. They took my vital signs, looked at each other, and then whisked me back immediately to a room and within five minutes the ER attending physician came in (as opposed to a resident physician).
“Hahaha, holy shit, am I dying?” I asked him – because HOSPITAL T-REX IS CORRECT
Okay but the T-Rex has abs drawn onto it in pen.
P90 Rex
Too bad this is apparently not true in my country…
I know I wasn’t in immediate danger and it was like 2am, but sitting in a waiting room for nearly an hour and a half with a dislocated jaw suuuuuuuuuucked.
Hospital T-Rex has it right.
Last time I went to the ER they took my vitals and rushed me to a bed, got me sorted, then kept me for observation for 4 hours.
If I had been forced to wait in the waiting room, I wouldn’t be here today.
Khan’s paper jumpstarted an important intellectual shift in the global
perception of antitrust and Big Tech. For one thing, it revealed the
thinness of the argument that Big Tech got big because of “network
effects” or “first mover advantages, arguing instead that Big Tech’s
concentration was the result of utterly mundane monopolistic tactics that would be instantly recognizable to Brandeis, Carnegie and other players from the Gilded Age and the age of trustbusting.
One important focus of this critique is the idea of “monopsony”, when a single entity is the only buyer in a market, meaning that it can put pressure on suppliers, contractors and other parts of the value chain, distorting markets.
Sussman’s argument is basically that even if you accept the Reaganist
version of anti-trust where the only thing that matters is "consumer
harm,” then you should still be worried about Amazon’s monopsism,
because when Amazon squeezes profits at the expense of its suppliers,
those suppliers lower the quality of their goods in order to stay
profitable despite Amazon’s profit-taking.
Sussman points out that Amazon has been unprofitable (on paper) since
its inception, but it continues to grow, in defiance of market
orthodoxy, which predicts that companies that pursue predatory pricing
schemes where they subsidize each sale will eventually run out of money
and investors, but that this hasn’t happened to Amazon. Sussman
hypothesizes that this the result of Amazon’s monopsony, and that Amazon
can get a discount on its predatory pricing by forcing suppliers to
foot part of the bill.
Sussman proposes regulatory oversight of big companies that grow while
consistently losing money, in the name of preventing the consumer harm
of lowered quality. It’s a really fascinating argument, because it makes
the case that the ideologues who’ve dismantled antitrust over the past
40 years should, by their own lights, regulate companies even when those
companies aren’t raising prices.
But for my money (so to speak), the more important part of the argument
is how it shows that market concentration is harmful even when prices
aren’t going up. If suppliers are getting squeezed and cutting wages,
reducing quality, and cutting costs (through reduced workplace safety,
reduced employee benefits etc), these social harms that are accruing to
people other than consumers tells you that antitrust needs a focus
beyond mere consumer issues.
I’m excited by all the work that these young legal and economic scholars
are putting into the reframing of pre-Reagan antitrust concerns as
“consumer harms” but ultimately, our future rests in abolishing the
“consumer harm” orthodoxy and returning to the idea that market
concentration is always suspect, even when no one can point to prices going up.
