Friday March 26, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope the new year and new semester are going well for you as Spring approaches. It has been a year since much of the world went into degrees of lockdown in reasonable fear of the virus. May we all stay very well and the vaccines eventually allow something more like normal life.
One of the effects of the pandemic has been that the 30-year tradition of the Public Affairs Discussion Group has had to become an online event. We will continue in that format through the semester. Another effect is that there have been some winners from the pandemic. The most obvious is Zoom, but another is Amazon – which enjoyed a $100 billion increase in revenues, to $386 billion.
As Robin Gaster writes in his new book, “Amazon is the most extraordinary and important business story of our time. Facebook has more members and is our social network. Google sits right at the heart of the information tsunami. Apple has by far the prettiest toys. But starting 25 years ago as a tiny online bookstore, Amazon now stands astride the e-powered river of goods that flow through the American economy. It is a retailer, a marketplace, an electronic infrastructure, a publisher, an advertising channel, a distributor. It is increasingly the arbiter of retail, the pacesetter for employment, and a private taxing authority, taking its bite on every transaction on its Marketplace.”
Perhaps even more important, Amazon is built to grow, voraciously, by technical innovation and any other possible means. It has no obvious boundaries: in owner Jeff Bezos’ words, “your margin is my opportunity” – and every functional business has a margin.
How did Amazon get here, and where is it going? In his book, Dr. Gaster explains the synergies among Amazon’s distribution and delivery system, Amazon Prime, its enormous catalog of products (partly because of the Marketplace that sells – for a fee – hundreds of millions of items from other sellers), relentless price competition and relentless innovation. He also analyzes the power structures created by Amazon – such as how it has been squeezing publishers out of the book business or using some businesses to gain market share in other businesses (Bezos again: “I’m pretty sure we’re the first company to have figured out how to make winning a Golden Globe pay off in increased sales of power tools and baby wipes”). In some ways the sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace begin to look like sharecroppers, deeply dependent on the owner of, not the land, but the platform. They are subject to regulation by Amazon with no recourse to the civil justice system, due to binding arbitration clauses. Amazon has 1.2 million employees, not even counting the hundreds of thousands added during holiday periods, 400,000 delivery drivers, and others who work with limited benefits and protections.
In short Amazon is a massive structure of profit and power. Its management accepts few if any limits, and it has attained dominance in some fields, such as publishing, that should be very difficult to reverse. All this is justified as yielding low prices for consumers, and creating new efficiencies – as in Amazon’s distribution system. Much of that is true – but at what costs, and with what risks? Both sides are referred to in the book’s subtitle: “Power and Seduction in the Age of Amazon.”
How did this happen, what are the right policy questions, and what can and should be done? Join us as Robin Gaster talks about what he found when he decided to do something many of us have probably been wishing we could do for a while – figure out Amazon.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0of-yopj4vG93ye5WuWWfYnRjOCETU0LCM
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Robin Gaster earned his Ph.D. in political science at University of California, Berkeley after his A.B. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford and a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Kent. After deciding that university teaching was not his preference, he worked at the IMF and the United States Congress Office of Technology Assessment before founding his consulting business in 1992. His work has focused on many different aspects of the intersection of politics, economics, technology and culture. Examples include a multiyear and multivolume National Academies evaluation of the Small Business Innovation Research Program; an index of regional economic innovation for the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and transatlantic telecommunications. I should add that I have known Robin since I entered graduate school in 1980, and learned a lot from him over the years about politics, economic policy, and soccer – though I have not joined him as a Spurs fan.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
April 2: Student Debt: What Are the Problems? For Whom? And What Could Be Done? With Richard Kazis, Senior Consultant, MDRC, Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and Board Chair of The Institute for College Access and Services.
April 9: Healthcare, Public Health, and Population Health. With Scott Frank, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Public Health Initiatives, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 16: Dropping the Pilot? Assessing Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship. With Kenneth F. Ledford, Ph.D., Chair, Department of History.
April 23: Depression’s Past and Future. With Jonathan Sadowsky, Ph.D., Theodore J. Castele Professor of History.
April 30: The Republican Party and Demographic Change. With Girma Parris, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science.
May 7: Defending Disability Insurance. With Kathy Ruffing, Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. |
