"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation. It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic debate or in workhorse models."
"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation. It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic
debate or in workhorse models."
"We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including
temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation.
It made price increases peak higher and remain more persistent than they would have
been in a world with less market power. To be clear: corporate profits were thus not the
sole driver of inflation, nor are dominant corporations to blame for the energy shock
caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But we argue that their market power exacerbated
the fallout – and that this is not sufficiently captured in the prevailing macroeconomic
debate or in workhorse models."
My latest #LocusMagazing column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
While they all claim they want to save energy and resources, they are corporations. They only care about optimizing revenues, which they are legally obligated to by being corporations. The real reason they want to save energy and resources is because they think it will make them earn more money in the end.
Remember that poll #Patreon did where creators could vote for a variety of features?
At the bottom of the barrel were crypto currencies, still a hot topic at the time of the poll. #Crypto was the only feature that received an overwhelming amount of "please don't" votes. No other feature even had double digits of "please don't". But guess what Patreon still offers anyway:
A thing @ploum wrote about corporations wrecking and killing decentralized things (in this case, Google and XMPP) -- and why it's essential to learn from history to resist further corporate destruction: