Libertarian Fail

First, all of my citations are on the first page of a Google/Google Scholar Search. If you honestly think I'm dredging the net for citations that help me, you are just wrong. Type in "cartel definition" and see for yourself.

No, I want you to tell me how you personally define oligopoly and cartel. I don't want to look up more websites more you. Prove to me that you are capable of doing this.

See, if you criticize another person's definition of the way the world/language works, and fail to provide a sufficient alternative, you have no business continuing to criticize them. You lose credibility. People do not value what you have to say. So prove me wrong. Find a better definition.

 

Who's this aimed towards?

 

One of the reasons why OPEC is so stable is that all of the leaders of these countries are distanced from the whims of public opinion. It is very easy for OPEC to cut production (and thus costs); democratic states with public opinion demanding more jobs, more cheap fuel, and better living standards would be hard-pressed to maintain a cut in production or a raise in prices. In a democratic Middle East, the Sunni-Shia divide may spur countries to under-bid the other, as would traditional processes of under-bidding. Simply put, newly-democratic states tend to not get along with each other.

 

The large number of democracies that are in the Middle East today of course backs up your claim. However, one merely needs to look throughout history to find that democracies tend to not engage in economic cooperation but competition at the onset, and that it usually takes mature governments to begin cooperating. I guess I would ask you to explain how things work "over here," but that would be asking waaayy too much of the conservatives and "libertarians" on BigSoccer.

 

How can it possibly be trolling to ask someone to back up what they say with evidence? Isn't it the other way around? Aren't trolls people who interrupt discussions with asinine comments and stupid phrases that don't do anything productive?

Couldn't it be that you might, possibly, be WRONG, and that you need to educate yourself on the topics at hand? Or am I a troll for actually bothering to do research?

 

It's a good thing I don't rely on Answers.com. What is your problem with me using citations, anyway?

 

And Iran, and Libya, and Iraq, all of whom have large reserves of oil. Democratic Peace Theory does indeed explain that democracies never go to war with other democracies, but it has nothing to do with economic competition. As autocracies, they will cooperate extensively on oil prices, but if you would just take the ten seconds and look at economic competition amongst democracies...

The OPEC cartel, however, is an oligopoly, and is popularly defined as such. Why you people are bothering with these semantics when four hundred definitions of OPEC as a cartel and an oligopoly exist is beyond me. An oligopoly is where a sufficient number of sellers controls such a large part of the market wherein they can influence the price of their good. Oligopolies typically have a small (relatively) number of sellers, allowing them to cooperate if need be. OPEC, with 43% of the market, can raise its price or cut production if they wish, and because they have that control over the markets, the rest of the market will respond in kind to a degree.

It is clear that you are thinking of oligopolies and monopolies as having hegemonic power over their respective markets. This is not the case; monopolies and oligopolies merely require that a single business or group of businesses, respectively, have enough market power to significantly influence the market.

Obviously you feel as though I have used answers.com extensively. I have taken the liberty of going through my past posts on this thread and the GOP Failure thread. Going back three days on either side, I was unable to find a single instance where I used answers.com. My main sources were Wikipedia, the Associated Press and political bloggers. If you accuse me of using a public-school created textbook that was created by a specialist in conjunction with educators, guilty as charged. Btw all textbooks are created in that very process.

I have, however, used Google Scholar to source academic studies on BigSoccer in the past, and have read news sources such as the Drudge Report, HuffPo, Politico, and FiveThirtyEight (and cited them here) when there was a relevant political discussion.

Yet you insist on personally denigrating me, telling me that you don't bother doing any work because I refuse to have an intellectual discussion. I guess habitually lying about my source material and refusing to do any of your own research makes you 'intellectual.' I apologize for having not understood that concept earlier.

 

First we need to clarify something:

That was today at 3:59pm.

That was today at 7:56pm.

Cocaine's a hell of a drug!

Secondly, I have included three academic sources (or as saosebastio refers to them, answers.com) that refer to OPEC as an oligopoly. The spoiler is that one of them completely negates the idea of OPEC as an oligopoly, and says that prices are determined in an open market with many buyers and sellers. You may make your own judgments, but I have come to realize that we are both correct. Here's how:

In economics, oligopolies are interpreted in many instances as requiring the hegemon threshold you hold them to. Here is an instance where they do not, but the first econ article does. Thus there is debate on it, but it is a valid point to believe what you do believe.

However, in political science (my field), any groups that influence the price beyond simple understandings of free, unfettered markets qualify as mono-or-oli gopolistic firms. Always. So you can claim that economics has a more nuanced view, but our simplification does not detract from the idea that there are corporations who are influential over prices. Again, we are both right.

As for this distinction, it would thus appear that all cartels are oligopolies, but that not all oligopolies are cartels? Would this be sufficient for us?

 

I tried, but you fail to see the nuance. In physics, not much has changed since Einstein's death, so it's not rare to see people cite physicists from that era. In political science, we use Robert Gilpin, Robert Jervis, Kenneth Waltz...heck some people even borrow JS Mill in their academic work. In biology, work from the 1970s and 1980s is commonly used because testing standards have been restructured to be more difficult and IRB won't allow certain tests...especially zoology, where animal testing has become extremely stringent. Psychology has gone back to some of the literature on insulin shock treatments. But I guess in economics, if things haven't been published in the last five years, they are useless. Because things in economics change much more quickly than in any other field on the planet and nothing ever repeats itself. You were right; I failed there.

Secondly, I never agreed that OPEC cannot set the price. I've always said, and will continue to say, that they influence the price by setting their own prices and manipulating production. What I said was:

Meaning that some economists believe oligopoly has to mean a domination of the market (you said above 90%, but some monopolies have been prosecuted for having less market share than that), but other economists are perfectly fine with my definition. And there's a valid debate on that. But I guess anybody who disagrees with your perfect vision is automatically brain-dead.

Which is ironic, because you disagreed with yourself over the span of three hours yesterday by ranting about the main premise of Democratic Peace Theory and then saying Democratic Peace Theory wasn't the issue...why did you bring that up, btw?

 

Actually, here's a better idea: you tell me the threshold at which point a firm becomes a monopoly, or a group of firms becomes an oligopoly, in terms of market share. If I can find successful anti-trust suits against firms that have a lower market share at the time of the suit than your threshold, I am correct. If I cannot, you are correct. And we'll call it a day. How does that sound?

 

So this means you won't take me up on my offer? That the vast majority of anti-trust lawsuits are not targeting natural monopolies? Tell you what. Here's my new offer:

1) You set a threshold for what constitutes monopoly/oligarchy.

2) YOU pick a set of fifteen companies/cartels that have been accused of price-fixing.

3) If at least HALF of them have a market share below your divinely-inspired threshold, I win.

4) If at least HALF of them have a market share at or above your divinely-inspired threshold, you win.

And btw the field of quantum mechanics has been around since 1838, according to the Wikipedia article you cited. First line of text after the intro section. Max Planck was in 1900. Einstein died in 1955.

It's very easy to criticize people on here, but apparently very difficult to produce anything. If you choose not to take me up on my offer, I have to assume you don't have enough faith in your opinion. I'm sorry, but if you cannot bring yourself to take this step then the only logical explanation is you don't believe what you're saying enough to challenge it empirically.

 

So this article says that monopolistic power is relative, i.e. that one cannot fix a set market-share because more factors need to be taken into account. Anybody who claims to have a fixed number that determines what is a monopoly must not know what they are talking about.

Oh well.

The entire point of the Sherman anti-trust act in the US was to prevent monopolization. This continued distinction between trust and monopoly, cartel and oligopoly, when I've shown you dozens of instances where they've been used synonymously, is absurd. Especially since very few people make the distinction you've used...unless EVERYBODY ELSE is stupid! That must be it.

Now here's something: The US government classifies monopolistic power merely as any group that has enough power to influence the market, i.e. not being a price-taker. Unless oligopoly and monopoly don't have the same root words, gosh, it would seem that the same rules have to apply.

Now here's something else that's interesting:

So how about my offer?