morningseagulls

>> it's a market-maker that provides a venue for other vendors to sell stuff

>That's not what a market maker is. A market maker is a market participant that guarantees to buy or sell something if no other buyer or seller can be found.

Right, but the similarity between a market maker in finance, and a marketplace maker in ecommerce, is that both of them have a lot more information than an ordinary buyer or seller. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't really act as a counterparty: the point is about how much knowledge it has, compared to the average participant.

>Running a marketplace, if it does not mean being a monopolist (which you are insisting it does not), is being a vendor, a vendor of particular services.

I was pointing out that there are two levels we're looking at:

1. Amazon as a provider of a marketplace

2. Amazon as that marketplace and what it entails about how much knowledge it possesses.

Recall that this is in the context of Hayek's arguments in The Use of Knowledge in Society, because the article's author referenced that explicitly.

Now, when I said Amazon isn't a monopolist, this is in terms of 1. Amazon is definitely not the only provider of an ecommerce marketplace with a global reach. In that sense, it's not a monopoly.

But Amazon is a "monopoly" in the sense that Hayek alluded to in his essay, i.e. in terms of 2. Hayek wrote in that essay:

The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.

Technically, it is still an oligopolist, since it is not the sole provider of ecommerce in America, but "organized industries" sounds like an apt way to describe what Amazon is doing. And it's in this particular sense of Hayek's that I referred to Amazon as a "monopoly".

Sorry. Still, it never ceases to amaze me what some people end up doing for work. "You mean they pay people for this?!" is usually my first reaction.

>The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

It also happened just a few years (very much less than a decade) after the California Gold Rush, and there were other gold rushes after that, so I'm not sure why it's "new" either.

>This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.

Good to know.

>When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).

I think the unusual names you've come across are those that've slipped through the cracks. In any case, Chinese men back then would have been given a few names before they reached adulthood: usually, a "milk name" from their parents and another (usually more dignified) name when they attend school. The honorary name comes much later. The unusual names may have been "milk names" that survived the cull because the bearers might not have attended school, for example.

Of course, the practice hasn't survived into the modern age, but you still see this practice in the Arabic world, where people can have multiple aliases. So what you labelled as the "given name" need not be the "given name" we understand today, but just the name that's survived to adulthood that's not the honorary name, which comes later.

>She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan

I've never heard of or seen this character until today.

>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.

"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.

There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.

>>it is a marketplace-as-a-service

>To the extent this makes a difference

It does, because you're arguing as if Amazon sells stuff. It doesn't (just) do that: it's a market-maker that provides a venue for other vendors to sell stuff.

So it's already an error to talk about Amazon as a monopolist, when Amazon isn't the only marketplace out there with a global reach. But you're also making a category error, because you wrote:

>A perfect monopolist, by setting monopoly prices, decreases the value of the price information it gets through transactions, because there are no other competitors offering the same goods at different prices to compare to, so the prices of the monopolist's transactions convey less information about the preferences of other market participants.

Amazon doesn't set prices per se, at least not for vendors in its marketplace that are not itself. So it doesn't do whatever you think it's doing when you were writing that paragraph. Certainly there are "other competitors offering the same goods at different prices to compare" with, because Amazon's marketplace include other vendors. But Amazon is running a marketplace, not (just) being a vendor. There's a difference in category there.

>Hayek was perfectly well aware that such market participants existed (after all, such participants existed in his day--for example, Standard Oil).

And Hayek did mention monopolies or "coordinated industries" as a "halfway house" between centrally planned economies and free markets. Sure.

>But Amazon's information is still limited to information that a market participant can have: namely, as I said, the prices at which the various goods it sells are sold. It does not have any more information than that.

Actually, Amazon does collect and process information that a market participant wouldn't normally have: consumer preferences.

Hayek argued that a central planner wouldn't be able to suck up the decentralised information embodied in every market participant. However, what Amazon is doing is mining the data it has about a consumer's purchase history, as well as the responses the consumer gave to recommendations made by its recommender engine. That is a lot more information than what most market participants would normally have access to.

Now, Hayek has outlined what he thinks is needed to construct a "rational economic order" in the beginning of "The Use of Knowledge in Society":

1) "If we possess all the relevant information",

2) "if we can start out from a given system of preferences",

3) "if we command complete knowledge of available means".

Unlike the monopolies of old, which may have 1) to some extent, Amazon also has 2), and is trying to acquire 3) with its Amazon Business offering. So its capabilities are arguably an improvement over the capabilities of the old monopolies.

>I would feel weird about giving myself a rare and ultra-high-prestige name.

Er... 司馬 isn't that rare, and people would rather advise you to select a rare but prestigious family name, rather than a rare and unknown one.

It's like given names in English: if you pick a rare and unknown name (or even a common one with an unusual spelling), people are just going to go "huh?"

>please take this article with a grain of salt as it reeks of whitesplaining.

Agreed. Also, most Chinese names are "invented" anyway, so why is that in the headline?