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PeterDonis comments on Why economics is not a morality tale - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 04 June 2013 03:20PM

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Comment author: PeterDonis 27 February 2014 10:41:06PM 0 points [-]

Sorry for the late comment, but I'm just running across this thread.

The question is not whether Google reinvests their producer surplus better than other monopolies. The question is whether Google reinvests their producer surplus more efficiently, i.e., for greater total benefit to society as a whole, than would all the consumers who would otherwise get that surplus as consumer surplus. That seems highly unlikely since the options for reinvestment open to even a large company like Google will cover a much smaller range of possibilities than the options open to the entire set of consumers who would otherwise receive the surplus.

(Admittedly, there is an effect here in the other direction: Google has much more leverage than the average consumer. But I don't think that outweighs the effect I referred to above, because Google is not being compared to the average consumer; they are being compared to the sum total of activities of all consumers--more precisely, all consumers who would otherwise receive the surplus Google is getting.)