Excellent illustration of the truly shocking scale of the impacts of corporate consolidation & winner takes all economics.<p>The scope and scale of companies is just so high. Unlike the world as it used to be, where lots of companies were doing the same jobs, we've concentrated industries into so few titans.<p>It's hard to imagine how we keep the social contract alive, with conditions as is.<p>It feels like America has made leap and bounds of progress towards de-governance, towards making legislating and regulating harder and harder. The FTC has finally awoken from a near total slumber, but with the courts aligned as they are it's hard to see that they'll really be allowed leverage to tilt the scales towards more human scaled, competitive markets.<p>Competitive markets wouldn't just be good for consumers; making competition viable is necessary to allow new opportunities to get started. Right now, the Thomas Piketty cycle of rich organizations and people getting wealthier has no remedy, has so few vectors open for others to try to match this.<p>(Addressing housing and health care costs, such that the risk of doing other things is less, would help enormously.)
Any discussion of 'social recession' has to include something about the dwindling amount of free time an individual has to actually do things unrelated to basic survival (work, school, groceries, cooking, transportation time).<p>That's just scratching the surface. After all that, there's the decline and disappearance of third places, the hollow mirage of dating apps and the exorbitant cost of social activities (gyms, bowling, camping, even going for a coffee/drink etc.) which are now marketed as "lifestyle activities" with the corresponding markup.
> Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No.<p>Where is all that money going? How can a house cost so much more, but wages are stagnant? Who benefits?
I recently finished Peter Turchin's "End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration": <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62926960-end-times" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62926960-end-times</a>. I thought his insight (that societies often fall into so-called secular cycles, rather profound and illuminating).