The economy is mostly newbs (strat predictions)

lemonhope1 Feb 2024 19:15 UTC
27 points
6 comments2 min readLW link

If the world economy were a game where the objective is to gain resources & power, then I would say that we’re collectively newbs. We’re presently protected from some of the extremes of capitalism (etc) by the fact that the board (etc) does not actually MAXIMIZE shareholder value.

As tech advances, the more ambitious players will be able to take more resources more easily. The sleepier corps will lose almost all non-govt-protected markets and die. The world will be a more pushy, grabby, competitive, profitable place.[1] People will not foolishly leave so much money on the table so often.

A few examples of recentish advances in strategy to show what I mean:

  • Mobile game companies realized they can be casinos where you never actually win money. In 2022, the mobile game market was ~$180B vs ~$40B for console or ~$30B for PC.

  • All the apps realized subscriptions are more profitable than sales.

  • Anyone who can possibly offer a credit card (Apple, Lowe’s, airlines, Amazon...) does now. For airlines, the cards are ~1/​3ish of profit.

  • Landlords in some cities are effectively fixing prices by ubiquitously using a “recommended market-rate price” from an app.

  • Google’s aquire-and-kill approach seems to be operating successfully at unprecedented scale (1 company per weekday in 2022)

Which new strategies will be viable depends much on regulation & the order of tech advances, but here’s my bets for how the state of the game will change over the next ten years.

  • better pre-IPO PR

  • ^ partly enabled by social network AI influencer swarms available for hire

  • more price “recommendation” apps across industries

  • more & better phishing & scams ofc

  • misleading loans everywhere, especially construction & renovation[2]

  • more we-don’t-tell-you-the-price like hospitals are somehow permitted to do

  • more acquisitions across industries — why shouldn’t Microsoft buy an oil company?

  • more sea steading and secret private militaries (something being a common joke does not make it a bad move)

  • military companies starting more wars

  • fewer bugs & problems in hardware & software

  • more punishing of competitors with endless court cases

  • more voting machine hacking & mail-based voter fraud (in 2022 in the US this briefly became unimaginable by people who normally have no trouble imagining such things)

  • simultaneous & targeted political lobbying (can’t believe how many companies just don’t lobby)

  • better everything (TVs, cars, etc)

  • new product categories more frequently, tested in private betas (Apple should’ve discreetly tried 500 things last year)

  • perhaps one big company will finally find the perfect formula to scale whatever it is that startups do and then actual startups will no longer exist at all (can you believe investors let frikin founders keep double digit percentages of their corps?)

  • cleaner & prettier everything (restaurants, stores, etc)

  • pricing based on estimated income

  • in the B2B world, more charge-per-use and exclusivity contracts

  • less wasting money on unneeded labor obviously

Big ones I missed or got wrong? Contradictions?

(Apologies for most of the items on my list being such bummers. Would love to hear some more strats that sound like good news for the world instead of bad news.)

What it will feel like:

  • The average consumer will mostly notice awesome new stuff, better stuff, cheaper stuff (except for the more expensive stuff), and more debt.

  • The average CEO will notice they have a lot of competition, mysterious sudden waves of change in public opinion & policy, and not much money in the bank.

  • Politicians & bureaucrats will notice they’re focusing on unusual topics they don’t usually care about and people who don’t normally win elections are winning elections.

  • The average highly-paid or barely-paid professional will notice they’re not paid at all ofc.

  • The average investor will notice almost all their investments go to zero except for a few corps lead by absolute sharks.

I have no call to action here. Seems like a lot of this will be shitty but probably not miserable or catastrophic.

If anyone wants to bet or make a manifold market then I’m game.

  1. ^

    Unless the tech or regulation leads to a chill oligopoly with a defensive advantage.

  2. ^

    My stepdad used to put up pools for a pool company with his own equipment but he quit when he realized that they made all their money with some fine-print in the payment plan that 5x’d the cost of the pool. One customer sued the pool company and lost.

lemonhope1 Feb 2024 19:15 UTC
27 points
6 comments2 min readLW link