When you buy a shirt it's s/m/l/xl with a price not bronze+ 33e 900/9000, silver turbo 99m++ 500/5000, gold thermonuke+++ 5YT 100/1000 -- now add 50 more choices with random names just as confusing. Now would you like dental... how about Turbo Teeth L5 Rts in network 1000 cap, Shiny Teeth MBS 90 Xl... etc. They could make the process a little bit simpler IMHO -- they started out alright gold, silver, and bronze then went crazy.
To be less flip than last time, something retailers can be very good at is taking complex product offers and making them compelling for customers by designing the product to give customers an easily understood and desirable value proposition. I work in electricity and the companies that retail competitively have a very clear value prop to customers -- and then there's the regulated monopoly utilities that have incomprehensible tariff schedules for what they sell. The comparison is stark. But when I look at healthcare and Obamacare, I can't help but takes lessons from my own industry. What I see in my own industry is that you can go free market and give people choice and the marketers will figure out a way to make their products comprehensible and attractive to get customers. Or, you can make it highly regulated and it'll be incomprehensible because engineers will have made the products and their pricing mechanisms, but people will trust the products because they trust the regulators. Or, you can fall between those two stools by having enough regulation so the product is incomprehensible but not so regulated that anyone trusts those products. That's where we are with Obamacare. In the tug-of-war between the regulation-championing Democrats and the free marketeer Republicans, we've produced something no one trusts nor understands. This is also why I think people are as attached as they are to employer-offered healthcare. Large companies are savvy shoppers for insurance. They have professionals that understand the complexities of the products. So, employees can rest assured that, whatever craziness there is in the industry, their company did a better job shopping for them than they can do themselves. The company creates the trust with their expertise. Never mind that the principal-agent problem of the company buying on the employee's behalf is part of the problem of runaway prices. To sum up (too late!), it's totally unsurprising that a socialist like AOC fears the choices presented by free markets. She'd like to think government regulators are wiser and anyway more virtuous than sellers and they can engineer health insurance products for everyone. And, I think I might agree with her in this instance because I don't think we can tolerate an unfettered free market for an essential service like healthcare. But, in general, I don't appreciate her attitude about choice and especially don't appreciate this talking point that there is too much choice and all way too hard for regular people's tiny brains. Choice is a good thing. We have a dysfunctional market in health insurance that prevents us from forming the value signals we usually use to navigate choice. To buy a shirt, we've already been educated about the brand promises of different stores, and the brands of different designers, and what the fashions are, what our own body image is, and what the price signals tell us -- all complex frameworks we use to effortlessly navigate the endless choices we have in shirts. In healthcare it's not the choice itself that's the problem, it's that no simplifying frameworks are being built. (And then, of course, all the irrational choices being made in the provision and pricing of healthcare services that the healthcare insurance has to pay for, which is another problem again.)
"The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez School of Economics": https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...ocasio-cortez_school_of_economics_142204.html excerpt: On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., sat for a discussion with author Ta-Nehisi Coates. She dropped a number of shocking statements -- statements that elicited nothing but murmurs of agreement from Coates. AOC claimed: "No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars." How, pray tell, are American billionaires responsible for such massive theft? According to AOC, the very mechanisms of capitalism mandate such theft. In her view, successful businesspeople simply exploit their workers while maximizing their profits. Hypothetically speaking about billionaires making widgets, she said: "You didn't make those widgets! You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages and, in some cases, real modern-day slavery ... You made that money off the backs of undocumented people." This, of course, is nonsense. Voluntary exchange of labor for wages is, as stated, voluntary, and the fact that there are many people willing and able to labor in the manufacture of widgets is presumably responsible for lower wages. Companies that refuse to pay their workers market wages will soon watch those workers migrate to other businesses or other industries. It is a patent violation of free market principles to utilize force in order to compel someone to work for you; blaming the free market for coercion is like blaming free speech for censorship. Exploitation in labor markets is typically accompanied by government subsidies, regulation and interventionism. more at the link
Thank goodness someone is there to speak up for and defend the billionaires from the unfair advantage being used against them. AOC is such a bully picking on the poor defenseless billionaires.
It’s dangerous rhetoric. There is nothing wrong with becoming a billionaire. Just like there is nothing wrong with becoming a person who has $100 million or $50 million or $10 million. AOC gets to say how much wealth someone can obtain or acquire? That’s not right. That widget rhetoric smacks of seizing the means of production and communism.
At a certain amount of wealth accumulation, you are taking advantage of the system and bad labor practices that are set to your advantage by campaign donations and lobbying rather than pure innovation and ingenuity.
There is nothing wrong with becoming a billionaire, perhaps. There is nothing wrong with believing that becoming a billionaire is most likely due to exploitation of others and that it creates an imbalance in the amount of speech, influence and power in our society. There is something wrong with acting like billionaires need protection from the likes of AOC. The article acts like they are being bullied and need to be defended. It's a bunch of crap.
AOC has a problem of walking in a cess pool of hypocrisy with her pathetic virtue signaling. She enjoys the luxury of high end consumer goods made by people in 3rd world countries who can barely afford ANY food and no means of government support. Now I absolutely agree every American should get 1 vote of support to whatever platform they choose, not by the amount of dollars they are willing to spend. That said, its not the massive corporations who are exploiting illegal immigrants. All businesses are using the basic economical concept found in American Capitalism...get the biggest return possible.
If she did say this she will never be anything other than a house rep. It also shows a very naive view of how the real world works. I am disappoint.
What? Who is doing anything like that? This is why there can't be an actual discussion on wage inequality because you get ignorant comments like what AOC said "if true" and people defending her like Trump. Do you actually believe that all billionaires took their money?
Everybody takes advantage of the system. What were Bloombergs bad labor practices or Soros or Gates? Sometimes a person has a great idea that makes a **** ton of money. With that said I think profit at all cost will be the downfall of America.
I don't believe all of any group can be lumped into a single category. Certainly people that inherited billions didn't take it. The bottom line is that we don't need any discussion on wage inequality that starts with defending billionaires from AOC whether they use unethical or illegal manipulations or not to get their money. That is a distraction. For the record, I believe that you can address problems without attacking a group of people. For instance, it is fine to say we need to cut down on sweatshop foreign labor without saying that the billionaires from Nike and Apple took their billions. If we talk about the issues around exploiting impoverished people to make that type of money, then hopefully we can do something to crack down on those exploitative practices. Since this is a Rockets website I'll reference Hakeem Olajuwon's stance against Nike. They wanted to sign him to a contract. At first he was happy but maintained that he didn't want the shoes to be overly expensive. Nike wouldn't buy it, so he went with Converse. Nike's put profit ahead of ethics. Dream stuck to his guns and was wearing shoes that cost less than $37 to play in NBA games. I think it would do more good to focus on the issues at least at first. But if AOC calls those kinds of actions billionaires taking their money instead of earning it fair and square, then it doesn't change the issues. She's correct in putting forward that exploitative and manipulative practices abound in billionaire's businesses. Whether it's all billionaires or isn't, doesn't really matter. Also, I don't believe that billionaires need a huge outrage because someone accuses them of using those practices. We should be united in whittling down their outrageously disproportionate earnings and spreading that wealth.
I think the tweeter missed that she was applying the dismissal on both levels. It is impossible to physically lift yourself up by the bootstraps and it is impossible for the wealthiest to achieve that wealth on their own without our society, government infrastructure, etc.
