The Big 4 Face Congress
The United States Congress has labelled Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook as monopolies officially for the record. In a statement at the hearing it was said that “some need to be broken, and all need to be regulated”. As big tech gets even bigger, governments around the world seek to regulate them in some way. We just saw congress, in a widely publicized event, ask some really hard questions to the tech leaders in a bipartisan way, even during these increasingly polarized times!
Dr. Seth Benzell
Speaking with Dr. Seth Benzell, a digital economist from MIT, we learned about how we should look at the issues that have come up from Big Tech and the drastic imbalance of wealth that they have created. Seth has spent a lot of time thinking of ways to keep Facebook accountable and make sure that the gains being made out of our data are shared across users rather than just the Zuck at top. He takes us through some of the options of how to even start thinking about regulating these companies, like taxes and transfers.
Why Inequality Matters
Inequality should be important to everyone because of the following beliefs.
Ultra wealthy individuals have a diminishing marginal utility from their wealth (remember money doesn’t buy you happiness, but instead freedom and access to things most will never experience)
The utility for society goes up overall when someone gets access to food more than Bezos getting a 5th yacht (more for the common good)
We should think of the economy as a pie and split it in a equitable way
These points bring up the question, Can we slice the pie in a more equitable way and how do we do that exactly?
Seth states that “The way we all win is by making the pie bigger… with more equal pay in a more equitable way.”
Taxes and Transfers
Similar to the approach in France, where they've decided a 3% tax on the fains of tech giants, predominantly American companies. This comes after wide-criticism from the public that big tech extracts more value than it gives back to it’s workers and the economy.
For example, Amazon reported a net income of $11.59 Billion while it paid only $162 Million at a cooool tax rate of 1.2%.
Let me get into that tax bracket please. So while Amazon is gaining massive profits from a government’s citizens, it’s barely paying anything back to be distributed back to the economy. Seth takes us through a few different ways in which we can administer a transfer of wealth and ensure that there is less inequality.
Tune in our episode to hear about how we can better manage Big Tech to make the pie bigger for all stakeholders of the global economy. We touch on how cheap capital, STEM majors, and taxing robots all play into tackling this issue.
If you like the above, you can also check out out conversation with Dr. Seth Benzell, on How Technology Created a Winner Take All Economy