I think it isn't said much, but I am convinced that the 'real' Jeff Bezos is the one we are seeing now. How does a guy who became one of the richest people in the world not believe in free markets? I think he schmoozed Democrat ideals to curry favor, and probably does feel some sense of relief to not have to pretend anymore.
Increasingly am of the belief that centers cannot hold in societies with social media. The center is just too dull, too slow, too status quo, and too milquetoast.
I mentioned it in passing on a recent post, but when analyzing Bezos’ motivations I think we’re overrating Lina Khan’s effect (he hasn’t even been the CEO of Amazon since 2021) and underrating the way Seattle demonizes local billionaires. He was really, and I would say unfairly, unpopular here. Should he have done more to prevent displacement when growing the company - sure, you can’t really import 50,000 people making $200k a year and it not drive up the cost of living for everyone else (maybe in LA or NYC but not here). But if the city hadn’t demonized him they could have probably gotten a lot more help or at least been fought less on taxes.
He’s just a human being, and one who came by his fortune more honestly than pretty much anyone. But like EVERYONE here hates him. Which is a shame. Billionaires shouldn’t exist and some like Musk or other Republicans warrant *personal* contempt, but I wouldn’t have put Bezos on that list until now with this seeming capitulation to Trump. He actually is a genius businessman and visionary that’s been good for the consumer and I dare say even the city of Seattle on net. Democrats need to learn before it’s too late that we catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Until his cowardice with the Post I would say he was one of the good guys.
"Apple is spending a non-trivial amount of time and energy on thinking about how to curry favor with Donald Trump because they want to get favorable treatment"
I really appreciate the way you are reframing preemptive capitulation to the desires of regulators/politicians to avoid frictions as some sort of new and especially corrupt form of government coercion. I look forward to your post with that framing next time we see a democratic congress haul in social media/pharmaceutical executives to debase themselves over concerns about misinformation/prescription pricing or the like...
Frankly the Opinion pages are the least vital part of legacy-media newspaper, opinion is the thing online outlets like Substack do best. As long as the news division maintains enough objectivity to deliver the news, I really don’t care what dreck Bezos puts in his opinion section. Worth noting that the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages have been a repository of right-wing crazy for years, but their news reporting is still first class.
I think the re-framing here is the perfect way to co-opt some of the issues on the right that have some resonance with the middle, but from a left-wing perspective.
A rare miss column imo. I don’t disagree with a word of it - but no novel insight, nothing interesting, just a sermon in the hopes that Jeff Bezos hears it. Boring.
"This all leads me to worry that some of our top business leaders have decided we’re in an irreparable polarization dynamic, where they must choose between an anti-capitalist left and a fascist right."
Um. Only "some of our top business leaders"? Really?
As a voter in the middle, who's shameless voted both red and blue in the (now distant) past, I certainly have decided just that. Just to pick an example mentioned and downplayed in the article, Lina Khan's appointment (and actions) sent more of a signal about "the anti-capitalist left" occupying the seats of power than Matt seems to think. I don't see the Dems doing much to win my enthusiastic vote, although the Reps have done much to lose it.
Jeff Bezos has already decided that he can't see any meaningful difference between a second-rate liberal politician from California and the only man in history who ever sought to overthrow our system of government--and in fact came closer to succeeding than most Americans are willing to admit. If the Post runs editorials or columnists that mention Trump's attempted sedition, or the way a majority of Republicans in the House voted, on Jan. 6, 2021 NOT to recognize Joe Biden as president-elect, or the way John Roberts rewrote the Constitution TWICE, first to let Trump run for the presidency in open defiance of the plain language of the 14th amendment and then again to "hold him harmless" for the many crimes he had committed in attempting to overturn his defeat in 2020, well, call me. Because I won't be reading the Post myself.
Jeff Bezos is very rich. How did be become so rich? He is a ruthless competitor in selling and delivering all things, but a key was the exploitation of labor. Avoiding corporate taxes was also a key in the growth of Amazon and avoiding taxes on increase in wealth by most or all billionaires while not paying most of their employees a living wage is scandalous.
Dear Mr Yglesias. First, I want to say that I enjoy your columns and read your perspective with interest. I wanted to take issue today with your framing of the Amazon Antitrust case. You might consider that it has little to do with competing with small biz and a lot to do with competing with other e commerce platforms and means of distribution through the use of illegal means. As you know having or obtaining a monopoly is not illegal but seeking to attain or maintain through illegal means is. The FTC's case rests on two such actions. The first is requiring a small biz that uses the amazon e commerce platform to price its goods on that platform lower than elsewhere or be denied the use of the "buy now" button. This requirement according to the FTC allegation is coupled with amazon requiring a higher "take rate" off the small biz sales than other e commerce platform. So for example, if i sell scissors for $10 and wal-mart takes 30% then I sell scissors for $13 but if Amazon takes $50% then i would be required to sell scissors for $15 to make the same amount and if Amazon requires that i sell at the lowest rate on Amazon, either I increase my price on Walmart's platform or i forego the "buy now" option. This is an illegal ty-in under the ATR laws and has the long term effect of increasing prices and decreasing competition from other E-commerce platforms. This is not Amazon competing against small biz, It is Amazon using illegal means to compete against other e commerce platforms. The 2d allegation is that in order for a small biz using Amazons platform to be able to offer 2-day delivery they are required to use Amazons distribution center. This is again an illegal ty-in and again Amazon using this illegal means to compete with UPS and FEDEX. Small Biz who want to offer 2 day shipping on Amazon cannot combine the goods they sell on Amazon with good sold on other platforms to get a better shipping deal with UPS or FED EX. Perhaps you could consider that the FTC allegations are not about fetishizing small biz but about Amazon using illegal means to compete with other large e commerce platforms and other large distribution companies in order to be able to gain a monopoly in those markets which arguably will lead to increased prices for consumers and small biz. I apologize for the length of this note. I hope it adds to the conversation. Thank you.
It depends, imagine you are a small biz selling 100 widgets, 34 on Amazon, 33 on WalMart and 33 on Targets e commerce platform. UPS says they can offer you 2 day delivery if you deliver all 100 widgets using UPS at X price. But now Amazon says to be able to advertise 2 day delivery on Amazon's platform you must use Amazon's deliver and distribution. So now you can do 34 widgets through Amazon at their price and pay a higher price to UPS to deliver 66 widgets at 2-day delivery or not offer 2 day delivery to your customers. Amazon is tying its platform offering to its delivery service which is part of what the FTC alleges is illegal. Amazon may have market share in its Ecommerce platform but may the FTC is alleging that it is trying to gain market share in its delivery and distribution service by illegally tying the use of its e-commerce platform when also offering 2 day delivery to its delivery service. Customers of Amazon may want to offer 2 day delivery when they sell widgets on Amazon without using Amazons delivery service
Ah I see! I was interpreting it as taking advantage of Amazon’s 2-day delivery options - but I guess the issue is that they didn’t let people advertise 2-day delivery without using Amazon’s options.
"The entire population of Venezuela obviously cannot move to the US. But as a lover of human freedom, don’t you feel kind of bad about that?"
I hope this doesn't make me a hater of human freedom, but no, I don't feel bad about that, and it has nothing to do with being a racist who doesn't want brown immigrants polluting the pure blood of Real Americans(TM).
Most immigrants aren't motivated by a burning love of the United States. The immigrate out of desperation - their home country is too violent/unstable/oppressive/dirt-poor, and their best chance of a decent life is immigrating to a richer, stabler country. It doesn't mean they're not sad about it. Nostalgia exists for a reason. My native country, Poland, has both a long history of immigration and of sad stories/poems/songs about how the immigrant misses their native land and how the elderly grandparents, left behind in Poland, now have no one to look after them (sure, the immigrant child/grandchild sends some dollars in an envelope regularly, but it's just Not The Same).
Where am I going with this? I'm guessing the majority of Venezuelan immigrants would much rather stay in their own country *if* that country were more peaceful, stable, and prosperous. It's kind of ironic that I have to point it out, because people like me are accused of being rootless cosmopolitans, but I understand the concept of patriotism and attachment to your native city/region. There is a sense of loss accompanying most migration. If literally ALL of Venezuelans wanted to immigrate to the US, that would mean that Venezuela has become a completely unlivable hellhole, and that would be bad!
I think there's an important missing audience in this post- the employees of The Washington Post. I don't subscribe or read, and I definitely don't see anything that doesn't get published, but I kind of see them as the primary audience.
Lina Khan's mistake was going too hard after Amazon while pussyfooting around the cryptocurrency-industrial complex after Sam Bankman-Fried, who should have been seen as the canary in the coal mine (FTX failed because cryptocurrency isn't real and eventually every one of those guys is going to meet the same fate) as opposed to an individual bad actor, and the related sports gambling-industrial complex that's taken over the broader sports industry. Amazon is just a big business that mostly doesn't harm consumers.
Is it true that China surprised people with its authoritarian economic growth? People say this a lot, but China is economically on par with Argentina, Turkmenistan, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan. We already had a model for superpower authoritarian economic growth - the USSR - demonstrating a competitive pace of industrial development with the West (albeit from a later starting point). It wasn't until they had caught up industrially and needed to develop a consumer economy and develop technologies for mass market that the cracks in the system started to show. Although China has shown strong innovation in electronics and automobiles, it's still plausible that Xi's crackdown on successful companies and entrepreneurs leads to long-term problems on that front. More immediately, Chinese growth has plateaued, and they are failing to develop consumer demand. So, aside from their ability to sustain globally strong national champions in key industries (owing largely to high population), is there anything genuinely surprising about China's growth, other than the fact that it has not been accompanied by liberalization?
>The relative economic success of the People’s Republic of China also does indicate that authoritarianism can prosper more than many people used to believe.
Can I push back on this a bit? Even with just a cursory analysis, the USSR already showed this around 1970, following a period of rapid growth that led many people to extrapolate those trends and predict they'd eventually overtake the US. At their peak, though, the USSR only reached roughly 35–40% of the US's GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted). Today, China's rapid growth has led to similar claims—but it's not clear that, in relative terms, they've yet surpassed what the USSR achieved. Currently, China's GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) is around 30–35% of the US level.
Could China continue outgrowing the US over the next 20 years? Possibly. But it's equally possible the US (assuming it retains its non-authoritarian approach!) will once again grow faster—as happened with the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s. If that happens, future generations might view today's claims about China's authoritarianism's economic potential similarly to how we now view Paul Samuelson’s optimistic USSR predictions.
Of course, one key difference is China's population, which is about four times that of the US. If China maintains even the USSR's per capita ratio relative to the US economy, they'll out-superpower the US in ways the USSR never could. But as far as quality of life for their own people, has China (yet) vindicated authoritarianism more than the USSR did?
And just to be clear, this isn't praising the USSR. I think, both the USSR and China's authoritarianism is morally reprehensible and it would be convenient if both led to to economic inferiority. I think consensus is that the USSR was economically deficient; but right now the vibes are good on China's economy whereas I'm questioning whether this might be peak-China, which doesn't actually appear better than peak-USSR. So maybe we don't need to change our thinking about economic prosperity under authoritarianism (yet, at least).
I think it isn't said much, but I am convinced that the 'real' Jeff Bezos is the one we are seeing now. How does a guy who became one of the richest people in the world not believe in free markets? I think he schmoozed Democrat ideals to curry favor, and probably does feel some sense of relief to not have to pretend anymore.
Increasingly am of the belief that centers cannot hold in societies with social media. The center is just too dull, too slow, too status quo, and too milquetoast.
I mentioned it in passing on a recent post, but when analyzing Bezos’ motivations I think we’re overrating Lina Khan’s effect (he hasn’t even been the CEO of Amazon since 2021) and underrating the way Seattle demonizes local billionaires. He was really, and I would say unfairly, unpopular here. Should he have done more to prevent displacement when growing the company - sure, you can’t really import 50,000 people making $200k a year and it not drive up the cost of living for everyone else (maybe in LA or NYC but not here). But if the city hadn’t demonized him they could have probably gotten a lot more help or at least been fought less on taxes.
He’s just a human being, and one who came by his fortune more honestly than pretty much anyone. But like EVERYONE here hates him. Which is a shame. Billionaires shouldn’t exist and some like Musk or other Republicans warrant *personal* contempt, but I wouldn’t have put Bezos on that list until now with this seeming capitulation to Trump. He actually is a genius businessman and visionary that’s been good for the consumer and I dare say even the city of Seattle on net. Democrats need to learn before it’s too late that we catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Until his cowardice with the Post I would say he was one of the good guys.
"Apple is spending a non-trivial amount of time and energy on thinking about how to curry favor with Donald Trump because they want to get favorable treatment"
I really appreciate the way you are reframing preemptive capitulation to the desires of regulators/politicians to avoid frictions as some sort of new and especially corrupt form of government coercion. I look forward to your post with that framing next time we see a democratic congress haul in social media/pharmaceutical executives to debase themselves over concerns about misinformation/prescription pricing or the like...
Frankly the Opinion pages are the least vital part of legacy-media newspaper, opinion is the thing online outlets like Substack do best. As long as the news division maintains enough objectivity to deliver the news, I really don’t care what dreck Bezos puts in his opinion section. Worth noting that the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages have been a repository of right-wing crazy for years, but their news reporting is still first class.
I think the re-framing here is the perfect way to co-opt some of the issues on the right that have some resonance with the middle, but from a left-wing perspective.
A rare miss column imo. I don’t disagree with a word of it - but no novel insight, nothing interesting, just a sermon in the hopes that Jeff Bezos hears it. Boring.
"This all leads me to worry that some of our top business leaders have decided we’re in an irreparable polarization dynamic, where they must choose between an anti-capitalist left and a fascist right."
Um. Only "some of our top business leaders"? Really?
As a voter in the middle, who's shameless voted both red and blue in the (now distant) past, I certainly have decided just that. Just to pick an example mentioned and downplayed in the article, Lina Khan's appointment (and actions) sent more of a signal about "the anti-capitalist left" occupying the seats of power than Matt seems to think. I don't see the Dems doing much to win my enthusiastic vote, although the Reps have done much to lose it.
Jeff Bezos has already decided that he can't see any meaningful difference between a second-rate liberal politician from California and the only man in history who ever sought to overthrow our system of government--and in fact came closer to succeeding than most Americans are willing to admit. If the Post runs editorials or columnists that mention Trump's attempted sedition, or the way a majority of Republicans in the House voted, on Jan. 6, 2021 NOT to recognize Joe Biden as president-elect, or the way John Roberts rewrote the Constitution TWICE, first to let Trump run for the presidency in open defiance of the plain language of the 14th amendment and then again to "hold him harmless" for the many crimes he had committed in attempting to overturn his defeat in 2020, well, call me. Because I won't be reading the Post myself.
Jeff Bezos is very rich. How did be become so rich? He is a ruthless competitor in selling and delivering all things, but a key was the exploitation of labor. Avoiding corporate taxes was also a key in the growth of Amazon and avoiding taxes on increase in wealth by most or all billionaires while not paying most of their employees a living wage is scandalous.
Amazon avoided taxes by not making a profit for the first ~15 years of its existence.
Bezos provided a superior service at a better price than other retailers. That is how he became rich.
Dear Mr Yglesias. First, I want to say that I enjoy your columns and read your perspective with interest. I wanted to take issue today with your framing of the Amazon Antitrust case. You might consider that it has little to do with competing with small biz and a lot to do with competing with other e commerce platforms and means of distribution through the use of illegal means. As you know having or obtaining a monopoly is not illegal but seeking to attain or maintain through illegal means is. The FTC's case rests on two such actions. The first is requiring a small biz that uses the amazon e commerce platform to price its goods on that platform lower than elsewhere or be denied the use of the "buy now" button. This requirement according to the FTC allegation is coupled with amazon requiring a higher "take rate" off the small biz sales than other e commerce platform. So for example, if i sell scissors for $10 and wal-mart takes 30% then I sell scissors for $13 but if Amazon takes $50% then i would be required to sell scissors for $15 to make the same amount and if Amazon requires that i sell at the lowest rate on Amazon, either I increase my price on Walmart's platform or i forego the "buy now" option. This is an illegal ty-in under the ATR laws and has the long term effect of increasing prices and decreasing competition from other E-commerce platforms. This is not Amazon competing against small biz, It is Amazon using illegal means to compete against other e commerce platforms. The 2d allegation is that in order for a small biz using Amazons platform to be able to offer 2-day delivery they are required to use Amazons distribution center. This is again an illegal ty-in and again Amazon using this illegal means to compete with UPS and FEDEX. Small Biz who want to offer 2 day shipping on Amazon cannot combine the goods they sell on Amazon with good sold on other platforms to get a better shipping deal with UPS or FED EX. Perhaps you could consider that the FTC allegations are not about fetishizing small biz but about Amazon using illegal means to compete with other large e commerce platforms and other large distribution companies in order to be able to gain a monopoly in those markets which arguably will lead to increased prices for consumers and small biz. I apologize for the length of this note. I hope it adds to the conversation. Thank you.
The point about the “buy now” button seems important. The use of Amazon warehouses though does seem naturally related to two day shipping.
It depends, imagine you are a small biz selling 100 widgets, 34 on Amazon, 33 on WalMart and 33 on Targets e commerce platform. UPS says they can offer you 2 day delivery if you deliver all 100 widgets using UPS at X price. But now Amazon says to be able to advertise 2 day delivery on Amazon's platform you must use Amazon's deliver and distribution. So now you can do 34 widgets through Amazon at their price and pay a higher price to UPS to deliver 66 widgets at 2-day delivery or not offer 2 day delivery to your customers. Amazon is tying its platform offering to its delivery service which is part of what the FTC alleges is illegal. Amazon may have market share in its Ecommerce platform but may the FTC is alleging that it is trying to gain market share in its delivery and distribution service by illegally tying the use of its e-commerce platform when also offering 2 day delivery to its delivery service. Customers of Amazon may want to offer 2 day delivery when they sell widgets on Amazon without using Amazons delivery service
Oh that is pretty eff’d up
Ah I see! I was interpreting it as taking advantage of Amazon’s 2-day delivery options - but I guess the issue is that they didn’t let people advertise 2-day delivery without using Amazon’s options.
"The entire population of Venezuela obviously cannot move to the US. But as a lover of human freedom, don’t you feel kind of bad about that?"
I hope this doesn't make me a hater of human freedom, but no, I don't feel bad about that, and it has nothing to do with being a racist who doesn't want brown immigrants polluting the pure blood of Real Americans(TM).
Most immigrants aren't motivated by a burning love of the United States. The immigrate out of desperation - their home country is too violent/unstable/oppressive/dirt-poor, and their best chance of a decent life is immigrating to a richer, stabler country. It doesn't mean they're not sad about it. Nostalgia exists for a reason. My native country, Poland, has both a long history of immigration and of sad stories/poems/songs about how the immigrant misses their native land and how the elderly grandparents, left behind in Poland, now have no one to look after them (sure, the immigrant child/grandchild sends some dollars in an envelope regularly, but it's just Not The Same).
Where am I going with this? I'm guessing the majority of Venezuelan immigrants would much rather stay in their own country *if* that country were more peaceful, stable, and prosperous. It's kind of ironic that I have to point it out, because people like me are accused of being rootless cosmopolitans, but I understand the concept of patriotism and attachment to your native city/region. There is a sense of loss accompanying most migration. If literally ALL of Venezuelans wanted to immigrate to the US, that would mean that Venezuela has become a completely unlivable hellhole, and that would be bad!
I think there's an important missing audience in this post- the employees of The Washington Post. I don't subscribe or read, and I definitely don't see anything that doesn't get published, but I kind of see them as the primary audience.
Lina Khan's mistake was going too hard after Amazon while pussyfooting around the cryptocurrency-industrial complex after Sam Bankman-Fried, who should have been seen as the canary in the coal mine (FTX failed because cryptocurrency isn't real and eventually every one of those guys is going to meet the same fate) as opposed to an individual bad actor, and the related sports gambling-industrial complex that's taken over the broader sports industry. Amazon is just a big business that mostly doesn't harm consumers.
Is it true that China surprised people with its authoritarian economic growth? People say this a lot, but China is economically on par with Argentina, Turkmenistan, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan. We already had a model for superpower authoritarian economic growth - the USSR - demonstrating a competitive pace of industrial development with the West (albeit from a later starting point). It wasn't until they had caught up industrially and needed to develop a consumer economy and develop technologies for mass market that the cracks in the system started to show. Although China has shown strong innovation in electronics and automobiles, it's still plausible that Xi's crackdown on successful companies and entrepreneurs leads to long-term problems on that front. More immediately, Chinese growth has plateaued, and they are failing to develop consumer demand. So, aside from their ability to sustain globally strong national champions in key industries (owing largely to high population), is there anything genuinely surprising about China's growth, other than the fact that it has not been accompanied by liberalization?
>The relative economic success of the People’s Republic of China also does indicate that authoritarianism can prosper more than many people used to believe.
Can I push back on this a bit? Even with just a cursory analysis, the USSR already showed this around 1970, following a period of rapid growth that led many people to extrapolate those trends and predict they'd eventually overtake the US. At their peak, though, the USSR only reached roughly 35–40% of the US's GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted). Today, China's rapid growth has led to similar claims—but it's not clear that, in relative terms, they've yet surpassed what the USSR achieved. Currently, China's GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) is around 30–35% of the US level.
Could China continue outgrowing the US over the next 20 years? Possibly. But it's equally possible the US (assuming it retains its non-authoritarian approach!) will once again grow faster—as happened with the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s. If that happens, future generations might view today's claims about China's authoritarianism's economic potential similarly to how we now view Paul Samuelson’s optimistic USSR predictions.
Of course, one key difference is China's population, which is about four times that of the US. If China maintains even the USSR's per capita ratio relative to the US economy, they'll out-superpower the US in ways the USSR never could. But as far as quality of life for their own people, has China (yet) vindicated authoritarianism more than the USSR did?
And just to be clear, this isn't praising the USSR. I think, both the USSR and China's authoritarianism is morally reprehensible and it would be convenient if both led to to economic inferiority. I think consensus is that the USSR was economically deficient; but right now the vibes are good on China's economy whereas I'm questioning whether this might be peak-China, which doesn't actually appear better than peak-USSR. So maybe we don't need to change our thinking about economic prosperity under authoritarianism (yet, at least).
They can build trains though