America is too expensive. The entire economy has been shifting away from creating new useful things and towards what I think of as extraction. A couple examples:
- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.
- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.
- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).
- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)
There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.
FTA:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.
- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.
- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.
- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).
- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)
There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.