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   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:33 JST Cory Doctorow

   Have you heard that tariffs wll drive prices up? Me too. There's a good reason we're hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers. Trump plans to raise $6t in tariffs, making them the largest tax increase in US history:

   https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/04/03/as-trump-throws-the-world-economy-into-chaos-with-his-tariff-trade-war-heres-what-ohio-can-expect/

   --

   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/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

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   • Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:25 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But never let it be said that monopolists can't innovate. Thanks to the total failure of Congress to pass consumer privacy legislation since 1988, the humble price-fixing data-broker has transformed into the "surveillance pricing" industry:

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

     With surveillance pricing, sellers buy your financial data from the unregulated data-broker industry and use it to set a different price for every customer.

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     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:26 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     And it's true with rent:

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

     This kind of third-party price-rigging is illegal, of course, but decades of antitrust neglect allowed these "economic termites" to multiply and fill the walls of our society:

     https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-everywhere

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     Kim Scheinberg repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:27 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But we live in the computer age. We aren't cavemen, confined to whispering prices to one another with our flapping meat-mouths. We have *computers*! Better still, we have *data brokers*, who allow for collusive price-raising, gather price data from all the dominant players in a sector, then "advising" each company on how to set its prices. Somehow, the optimal, coordinate pricing strategy is always to make prices *higher*. That's true with meat:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:28 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They're godparents to each others' children, executors of one-another's estate, members of the same polycules. No wonder the Communist revolutionary Adam Smith wrote:

     > People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:29 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But what if we were to waste 40 years, waving through anticompetitive mergers until most sectors of the economy were dominated by five or fewer companies:

     https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

     When a sector is controlled by a handful of firms, there's plenty of opportunities for "tacit collusion." And not all the collusion is tacit: in concentrated sectors, all the C-suite types know each other. They've worked with each other for their whole careers, jumping from one company to another.

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     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:30 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Neoclassical economists insist that this is impossible. For greedflation to be real, companies would have to somehow collude to raise prices. After all, if prices go up for one seller and not another, shoppers will follow the invisible hand as it points them to those bargains. There's some truth to that, in a competitive market.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     How do we know that bosses were jacking up prices? They told us so! In investor calls, corporate executives boasted that "consumer expectations" gave them "pricing power," and that they were making bank from it. From oil to eggs, excuseflation - greedflation - is everywhere:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Monday, 21-Apr-2025 23:36:33 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But that $6t is just for starters. If there's one thing we learned from the pandemic supply-chain shocks, it's that corporate CEOs never let an emergency go to waste. Bosses, knowing that you'd been warned to expect higher prices, went ahead and jacked up their prices *way* over inflation, blaming it on covid, on stimulus checks, on Biden, on the phase of the moon. Blaming it on anything - except greed. That's why we called it "excuseflation":

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

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   • Embed this notice
     Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary (pteryx@dice.camp)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Apr-2025 09:51:08 JST Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

     in reply to

     @pluralistic A frightening thought: What if, in addition to using surveillance pricing to adjust prices based on perceived means to pay, prices were also adjusted based on what the panopticon concludes your politics are?

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Apr-2025 09:53:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     For example, McDonald's has invested in a company called "Plexure" that can tell when someone at the drive-through has just been paid, so that the seller can add a dollar to the price of their daily breakfast sandwich. And surveillance pricing isn't limited to buyers - sellers can get surveillance-priced, too.

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     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Apr-2025 09:53:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Take nurses, whose staffing agencies have been replaced by a cartel of three apps that buy nurses' credit data before offering them a shift, so that they can offer a lower wage to nurses carrying high credit-card debts (indebted, desperate workers will sell their labor for less):

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

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