The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system.
--
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor
1/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?
In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
2/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off.
3/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?
4/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?
For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it.
5/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off
With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying.
6/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends - like websites and apps - allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.
7/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags
8/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?
9/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?
10/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Unfortunately, groceries are among the most consolidated sectors in the world. Worse: grocers keep getting busted for colluding to hike prices and rip off shoppers:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaw-bread-price-settlement-1.7274820
Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when on apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to your secrets.
11/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig
12/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act.
13/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
14/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
15/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Take nurses: increasingly, US hospitals are firing their waged nurses, replacing them with gig nurses who are booked via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
16/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/
Bednar really tries, but - as she later agrees - this just isn't a very good argument.
17/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers - or offering different wages to different workers - makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.
After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs
18/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Price discrimination is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."
19/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful
20/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate.
21/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
@pluralistic My first time seeing "liztruss" as an adjective - curious if it's a neologism of your creation, or does it have an established usage and definition?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from dneary@mastodon.ie
@dneary mine!
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
@pluralistic This makes very little sense to me. Yes, oligopolies are bad, but if there’s price fixing and/or unreasonable profits, that is the case with or without price discrimination. If the prices were set without any competition, then they could always charge high prices, and people would always buy them, and they wouldn’t have to use price discrimination at all.
Also, airlines are a really bad example, since they are heavily subsidised by unpaid externalities.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from ahltorp@mastodon.nu
@pluralistic Otherwise, great article.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from ahltorp@mastodon.nu
@pluralistic
would *you "choose"
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from LeBonk@wetdry.world
@pluralistic typo: “all of this can be taken of”
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from masp@wandering.shop
@masp @pluralistic : I read this as ‘all this can be taken care of'.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from TobyBartels@mathstodon.xyz
@pluralistic 💯 for using "liztruss" in a sentence. 🤣
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from steter@mastodon.stevesworld.co
@pluralistic wow that looks like those vintage Russian Chinese propaganda posters!
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Bwacton@mastodon.social
@Bwacton Russian.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
@pluralistic I love that you’ve used liztruss as an adjective to describe rotting lettuce.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Haste@mastodon.social
@Haste @pluralistic
Liztruss can be used as a verb too, as in "be careful not to liztruss the economy".
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from godzero@sfba.social
@godzero @Haste @pluralistic sadly I don't have that #LizTruss #Sewage #Meme #Song at hand...
Maybe @fuchsiii can #reupload that again?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kkarhan@infosec.space
@godzero
Is Trump aiming for the eponym?
@Haste @pluralistic
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from EricLawton@kolektiva.social
@pluralistic @godzero @Haste that’s clever
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from manchicken@defcon.social
@Haste @godzero @pluralistic ....and can be modified to reflect a past tense verb, as in "she really liztrussed the absolute sh*t out of the economy"
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from havvyhh2@mas.to
@havvyhh2 @Haste @pluralistic
Of course! And that would result in #lizztrussification.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from godzero@sfba.social
@godzero @havvyhh2 @Haste @pluralistic
All of you then would have to admit one thing they’ve managed to increase the generation of neologisms!
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai
@godzero @havvyhh2 @Haste @pluralistic I believe you mean "total liztruction”.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from angusm@mastodon.social
@angusm @godzero @havvyhh2 @Haste @pluralistic this phrase needs a PR agent and a lot more exposure 😃
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from sashabilton@mastodon.gamedev.place
@pluralistic So much to enjoy in the headline image. Clear labor of love.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from anand@mastodon.sdf.org
@anand Thanks! I had tons of fun with it. Here's the original.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pluralistic
@pluralistic typo: s/why would your choose/why would you choose/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from heathborders@hachyderm.io
@pluralistic is the war lost?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from hlega@mastodon.social
@pluralistic I wouldn't deny this is the mainstream economics teaching, but their are some trying to change the narrative I'm sure you have heard Of : Kate Rayworth, Tim Jackson, Yanis Varoufakis, to name three.
I would say economics has globalised, politics can't keep up until it does nothing will change. National #sovereignty has to end.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Herefordrob@mindly.social
@Herefordrob @pluralistic I would say that Richard D Wolff sometimes makes a few good points, even though he has some very very iffy views
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from burnoutqueen@todon.nl
@Herefordrob
Did you mean Kate Raworth ( not Rayworth)?
(And I'd add Mariana Mazzucato as an economist worth paying attention to.)
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from PaulWermer@sfba.social
@PaulWermer @Herefordrob
here's one you might like
three women Economists, each holding up the other two's books: Raworth, Mazzucato, Kelton
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from joriki@infosec.exchange
@joriki @Herefordrob
an impressive trio. We learn a lot by listening to them
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from PaulWermer@sfba.social
@Herefordrob @pluralistic
Kelton, Keen, Hudson, Mitchell
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from joriki@infosec.exchange
@pluralistic
Everything started going to shit the moment so called "economics" discipline gained importance over everything else
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from dalek_fan@paquita.masto.host
@pluralistic well yes, obviously. In olden days, kings and emperors would employ sycophants and poets, whose job it was to write panegyric paeans to their patron. This is a continuation.
The funny thing is how economists act all huffy when you point out their incentives and conflicts of interest, when that’s what their profession is supposed to be all about. Methinks the lady protesteth too much…
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from fazalmajid@vivaldi.net This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini
