Is Amazon A Monopoly?

Franklin Foer argues that the company is “the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly that also includes Google and Walmart”:

We seem to believe that the Web is far too fluid to fall capture to monopoly. If a site starts to develop the lameness of an AltaVista or Myspace, consumers will unhesitatingly abandon it. But while that meritocratic theory might be true enough for a search engine or social media site, Amazon is different. It has a record of shredding young businesses, like Zappos and Diapers.com, just as they begin to pose a competitive challenge. It uses its riches to undercut opponents on price—Amazon was prepared to lose $100 million in three months in its quest to harm Diapers.com—then once it has exhausted the resources of its foes, it buys them and walks away even stronger. This big-footing necessitates a government response.

Yglesias counters that “having a lot of the market is not the same as having a monopoly”:

One important hint about Amazon’s non-monopoly status can be found in its quarterly financial reports. That’s where you find out about a company’s profits. In its most recent quarter, for example, Amazon lost $126 million. Losing money is pretty typical for Amazon, which is not really a profitable company. If you’d like to know more about that, I published 5,000 words on the subject in January. But suffice it to say that “low and often non-existent profits” and “monopoly” are not really concepts that go together.

Competitors hate Amazon because retail was an ultra-competitive low-margin game before Jeff Bezos ever came to town. To delve into this field and make it even more competitive and even lower-margin seems somewhere between unseemly and insane — but it’s the reverse of a monopoly.

While conceding that Amazon “does have something like a monopoly over the books market,” Annie Lowrey also fails to see how the term applies to the company overall:

Who is losing when Amazon is winning? Does the government really need to step in to protect Amazon’s rivals, provided that the market remains a market? Why is it wrong for Amazon to demand more and more from its suppliers? Is there any evidence that Amazon controls other markets like it controls the books market? All this is unclear.

She continues:

None of this is to say that Amazon should not face new regulations to force it to treat its workers better. None of this is to say that Amazon could not become a monopoly by pushing out or buying up more of its e-commerce rivals. None of this is to say that its harassment of Hachette is right or should be legal or should not face some serious pushback from the government and consumers. None of this is to say, either, that our legal framework should not view seemingly benign monopolies, like Google, with anything other than skepticism. But Amazon being a shitty, vicious competitor and Amazon being a monopoly are hardly the same thing.

Derek Thompson joins the “what monopoly?” chorus but acknowledges that Foer’s essay raises an interesting point that “there is something devilishly seductive to the conveniences of digital capitalism that makes life better for us as consumers and worse for us as workers”

Does buying diapers once from Amazon makes one morally complicit in the working conditions of its warehouse employees? What about subscribing to Amazon Prime? Having an Amazon credit card? These are harder questions, but they have nothing to do with Amazon’s mythical status as a monopolist. If the government thinks warehouse workers deserve higher wages and better conditions, we don’t have to go through the Justice Department’s anti-trust squad to improve their lot. We can just pass new laws. Don’t ask consumers to boycott a good deal.

Previous Dish on Amazon’s controversial business tactics here.

A Poem For Monday

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“Morning” by Ellen Bass:

after Gwendolyn Brooks

The morning of her death she
woke fierce, some dormant force revived,
insistent. For the last time
I sat my mother up, shifted the loose mass
of her body to lean against me. Her dried-up
legs dangled next to mine, triumphs
of will, all the mornings she forced
herself to spritz cheap perfume,
hoist each pendulum breast into
its halter, place the straps in the old
ruts. We were alone, petals
falling from bouquets crowded
around us. I pulled
some pillows behind me when I couldn’t
hold her any longer
and we rested there, the
body of my mother slumped
against my breast, the slow droop
of green stalks in their vases.
Her long-exhaled breaths
kept coming against her
resolve. And in the exquisite
pauses in between
I could feel her settle—
the way an infant
grows heavier and heavier
in your arms
as it falls asleep.

(From Like a Beggar. © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Erin Stoodley)

A Terrorized Foreign Policy

Arguing that the Middle East is not nearly as important to US interests as we’re led to believe, Justin Logan deconstructs the notion that we focus so heavily on the region because of terrorism:

This explanation for why the Middle East supposedly matters is peculiar, in that the basic contours of U.S. policy in the region predate 9/11. It is tough to think that a concern that emerged after a policy began explains the policy. But there is no evidence that terrorism is a threat that warrants an effort to micromanage the Middle East. The chance of an American being killed by terrorism outside a war zone from 1970-2012 was roughly one in 4,000,000. By any conventional risk analysis, this is an extraordinarily low risk. Perhaps this is why, as early as 2002, smart risk analysts were asking questions about counterterrorism policy such as “How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are already extremely low?”

The amount we’re paying now to fight terrorism—roughly $100 billion per year—is simply crazy.

If someone ran a hedge fund assessing risk the way the U.S. government has responded to terrorism, it would not be long for the world. Indeed, it is difficult to identify how U.S. policy across the region—with the possible exception of some drone strikes and special operations raids—have reduced the extremely low probability of another major terrorist attack. If anything, our policies may have increased them.

But terrorism, as Shana Gadarian’s research confirms, drives Americans toward more hawkish policy positions, particularly when we see images of it on TV:

Political and media observers, particularly on the left, worry that media coverage of the Islamic State is terrifying Americans and persuading them to support foreign policies and candidates that they would otherwise not support. Political science suggests that their fears are warranted. My own research – conducted in the wake of 9/11 – provides strong evidence that both the amount and tone of media coverage of terrorism can significantly influence foreign policy attitudes. Americans who were already worried about future terrorism after 9/11, were more likely to support the use of military force abroad and increased spending on security at home after seeing news stories about terrorism with images like the World Trade Center on fire.

The Gray Divorcee

Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin note that Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as they were in 1990 – and that, unlike for younger couples, education appears to offer no protection against a split. They explain:

One reason for this is what we might call the divorce echo effect. Older individuals are more often in remarriages, not first marriages, and remarriages have long been more likely than first marriages to end through divorce. People who have been divorced in the past are more willing to divorce again in the event a marriage becomes unsatisfying. In contrast, some proportion of those in first marriages are unwilling to divorce even if they have an unsatisfying marriage.

But we are also seeing an increase in the breakup rate of older people in their first marriages. More than half of gray divorces are to couples in first marriages. Long-term marriages are not immune to divorce – more than 55 percent of gray divorces involved a split for couples who had been married more than 20 years. Many of these marriages have not been marked by severe discord. Rather, the partners have simply grown apart. There is no evidence that there are more such “empty shell” marriages than in the past, but fewer older adults seem willing to remain in them.

Happy Columbus Indigenous People’s Day!

That’s what residents of Seattle and  Minneapolis, and schoolchildren in Portland, Oregon, are celebrating today. Daniel Beekman reports that “Native American activists laughed, wept and sang their way out of Seattle’s City Hall on Monday after watching the City Council unanimously approve a resolution designating the second Monday in October as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day'”:

“It’s beautiful to see,” said Matt Remle, a Seattle resident of Lakota heritage who wrote the first draft of the resolution, “the people walking out with smiles on their faces. Bringing that good energy and spirit to the people is what this was all about.” The legislation provoked some opposition because October’s second Monday also is Columbus Day, a federal holiday named for explorer Christopher Columbus and widely marked by the celebration of Italian-American history and culture. In the council chambers [last] Monday, a half-dozen people held Italian flags to demonstrate their support for Columbus Day. … But for each Italian American activist at City Hall there were scores of Native American activists, many wearing pieces of traditional garb and some carrying drums.

Brian Braiker adds:

[I]t turns out that opposition to Columbus Day is nothing new.

As far back as the 19th century, activists sought to ban celebrations of the day (which was made an official holiday in 1934) because of the Italian diaspora’s association with the Knights of Columbus — a then-secretive organization that some feared was working to expand Catholic influence. “The move to replace Columbus Day with indigenous peoples day has its roots in one of the first indigenous advocacy groups, the Society of American Indians, nearly a century ago,” [Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth author Timothy] Kubal said.

This debate is not unique to North America, either. And it doesn’t have to be an either/or question. There is a near-exact parallel debate unfolding Down Under. “Australia Day” celebrates Captain Cook’s arrival there in 1788. Some people now derisively call the holiday “Invasion Day,” points out Christine Outram, vp, invention director at DeutschLA.

[The Colbert video initially embedded above – which was autoplaying for many readers – here]

The Ingredients Of Innovation

In an excerpt from his new book, The Innovators: How A Group Of Hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created The Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson argues that “the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences”:

They believed that beauty mattered. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” [Steve] Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

Speaking with Christina Pazzanese, Isaacson suggests that people in the arts would do well to learn about the sciences:

I do believe that it’s important for people to have an appreciation for the arts and humanities. But I also think that one problem is people who love the arts and humanities are too often intimidated by science and math, and they don’t appreciate the beauty of science and math. They’d be appalled if somebody didn’t know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth, but they could happily brag that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or an integral and differential equation, or a transistor and a capacitor. So as much as I’d like to lecture the engineers that they should appreciate the humanities, I also think that people from the tradition of the humanities should embrace the beauty of engineering and science, as well.

A Poem For Sunday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Last week, the Poetry Society of America presented a reading by Kevin Simmonds and Ellen Bass at the very cool McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho as part of our ongoing series there. The poets are friends from San Francisco, and the reading had that radiant quality events do when the principles like and admire each other. In June, we featured poems from Kevin’s new book, Bend To It, so this week let’s take a turn with some of Ellen’s, from her marvelous new book Like a Beggar, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Moth Orchids” by Ellen Bass:

If you are ill or can’t sleep, you can
watch them spread their wings—the hours
it might take for a baby to be born—
the furled sepals arching, until
the petals splay like a woman stretched, flung
open, blood blooming through her veins.
And then stillness, the white fans glisten
day after day like sunlit snow
tinged with a greeny kiss.
Intricate, curved labellum like bones
of a tiny pelvis and the slender tongue reaching out
to the air as though the parts of the body
could blend: mouth fused to hips, face to sex,
the swollen pad where the bee lands.
Here they float:
eleven creamy moths, eleven white egrets
suspended in flight, eleven babies in satin bonnets,
eleven brides stiff in lace, the waxy pools
of eleven white candles, eleven planets
burning in space.

(From Like a Beggar. © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Jim Gifford)

A Story About Prayers And Pillow Talk

Elna Baker, who was raised as a Mormon, hilariously recounts a moment of truth she faced after falling in love with an atheist:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0uL_CKL9wg]

Elna subsequently left the faith a few years later, and shares that story, as well as how she came out to her parents about losing her virginity, here. The Glamour piece she refers to in that story is here. Baker also wrote a memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, and has been an occasional contributor to This American Life.

Previous live storytelling on the Dish here.

The Sanity Of Francis Fukuyama

He’s long been a hero of mine – intellectually and politically. He broke with the neocons over the Iraq catastrophe and was subjected to the familiar payback of ostracism, but went on to produce scholarly work as impressive as his The End of History and The Last Man, specifically the magisterial and widely acclaimed books, The Origins of Political Order and his latest, Political Order and Political Decay. His sanity continues with his opposition to the current intervention in Syria and Iraq to do again what we tried to do last time, i.e. to defeat a Sunni insurgency on behalf of a hapless and largely useless Shiite government in Baghdad. It’s such a mug’s game you have to have the judgment of the man who picked Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential nominee to endorse it.

Unlike so many in our political elites, Fukuyama has also had the wisdom to reassess the question of Jihadist terrorism after 9/11 and come to a different conclusion than the hysterics in the media and the political opportunists in Washington. To wit, from a great new profile in the New Statesman:

“There was a really serious question: is this the wave of something generally new and important in world history, or was this just a really lucky blow they got in?” Fortunately for his academic consistency, he concluded it was the latter. “These are really marginal people who survive in countries where you don’t have strong states . . . Their ability to take over and run a serious country that can master technology and stay at the forefront of great-power politics is almost zero,” he says now.

As ISIS threatens Baghdad and the war-machine and neocons go into high gear demanding a full scale re-invasion, that’s worth keeping in mind. And his view of our current predicament in Mesopotamia is pretty close to my own:

When I suggest that half-hearted interference is likely to prolong conflict in the region, he comes close to agreeing with me. The wars engulfing the Middle East are essentially a Sunni-Shia war, he says, that “could go on as long as the Thirty Years War in Europe”, which raged between 1618 and 1648. “Under those circumstances, I think it’s a little hard to figure out how American power is going to settle that conflict. I don’t think we’ve got the wisdom to actually see our way towards a political settlement.”

Does he believe that the rise of Isis might have been avoided if the US had intervened militarily earlier on in the Syrian conflict? It is possible, but unlikely, he concludes. “The one thing that both the Iraq and Afghan wars should have taught us is that, even with a very heavy input in boots on the ground, and nation-building, and the trillions of resources poured into these countries, our ability to bring about a specific political result like democracy, or even basic stability, is very limited.”

Let me remind my readers: this is fundamentally a reality-based conservative position. Do not let the fanatics on the right persuade you otherwise. The neo in neoconservatism stands for war – always war. It is close to an end in itself.