no, winner-take-all markets being natural is one of those fibs economists have been incentivized to 'discover'. it's shrouded in numeracy to make us shrug and accept our poor lot in life. even with capital-intensive markets, if kept fair, can attract enough competition over the long term to keep monopolization in check. if you look close enough at any monopolized market, you'll find a bunch of underhanded distortions that drove it into that state (e.g., regulatory capture, bribery, collusion, etc.), rather than it evolving naturally due to intrinsic properties of the market/industry.

finance for instance has an underbelly of insider information being traded constantly, just as hollywood (and nyc real estate) is choked by cartel behavior (production and labor at least).

Let's take a look at some winners in winner-take-all markets, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Is Facebook's dominance due to regulatory capture? No. (You could argue lack of adequate regulation, but that's not what we usually mean by "regulatory capture".) Is it due to bribery? No. Collusion? No.

Same with Google. No, no, and no. Amazon? No, no, and no.

(You could make a case for collusion with Microsoft...)

all of those companies, including ms, have faced numerous fines and sanctions for anti-trust/anti-competitive behavior. these are some of the worst examples you could have raised. they all cheated, heavily and brazenly.

Definitely a weird time to try and claim that neither Facebook or Google got ahead by any sort of collusion.

Don't just claim. Prove. How, exactly, did Google cheat? What was their anti-trust behavior? Et cetera. (Don't bother trying to prove it with MS; I already know what they did.)

Google's golden goose is their tracking. Between their ad networks, Android, and Chrome, and their own search engine, they know every single page that most people view. They can then use that data to work out what to display for searches.

The reason that Google Search punishes slow loading sites, as proven by the AMP 'nice comparative boost' controversy, is because most of the time a page loads slowly is because it has multiple ad network trackers on it. Google will do anything to stop a page from doing that. The good news is this stuff is already being called out for anti-trust issues.

But in some ways, it's worse than that, because these evaluations aren't based on the top 1%, they're based on some proxy, and that proxy is assumed to be static.

So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change.

This is part of the problem too.

Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring.

Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else.

If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most.

There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense.

Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.

Medicine is an entirely different problem. Salaries for doctors in the UK and Europe are much lower in part because the AMA limits the number of residencies and thereby the supply of new doctors in the U.S. That's de facto a monopoly.

If you're a top 1% pediatrician you don't get paid much more than a median pediatrician. That's because it's pretty hard (impossible?) to be a 10x pediatrician. On the other hand, you can make the argument that 10x neurosurgeons or heart surgeons exist.

False. The number of residency slots is limited by the federal funding. The AMA has actively lobbied for more residencies.

https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding