#economics (59 links)
- The quiet grief of adult friendship timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Humanity spent two centuries fitting those systems with partial controls. In the case of corporations, those controls include independent boards of directors, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure rules and regulators, not to mention public disapproval and consequent activism. Each was a feedback loop, a way to correct the system when its objectives drove it somewhere monstrous. Mr Musk is removing those loops one at a time.
- How does food get traded around the world? | Our World in Data ourworldindata.org
- Scotland just showed us how to keep wealth in local communities. betterfuturemedia.substack.com
A new Scottish law will quietly shift how wealth circulates – and who actually benefits from economic growth.
- The Inference Shift stratechery.com
I think it will be increasingly clear that there is a difference between providing an answer — what I will call “answer inference” — and doing a task — what I will call “agentic inference.” Cerebras’ target market is “answer inference”; in the long run, I think the architecture for “agentic inference” will look a lot different, not just from Cerebras’ approach, but from the GPU approach as well.
- The Free Ride Is Over: AI Economics Is Now Your Most Important Strategy Decision | Product Impact productimpactpod.com
The question that matters for the next three years is: what are we willing to pay per unit of value delivered, and what model, architecture, and workflow achieves that at scale?
- Did baby boomers eat all the pies? John Lanchester on the truth about the generation gap theguardian.com
It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market
- The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete joelgouveia.substack.com
- The Benefits of Bubbles stratechery.com
- Frank Chimero · Selling Lemons frankchimero.com
More and more, debates are shaped by a mindset that sees the world as a fixed pie—where one person’s or one group’s gain is another’s loss. That mindset is known as zero-sum thinking. And it is crucial to understanding the politics and economics of America today.
- The Job Market Is Frozen - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
“The national insurance rise, minimum wage increase and employment rights bill suggest the government is prioritising getting more people into higher quality jobs rather than just seeking to increase employment at all costs in the short run,” Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation said.
Interesting take.
- What campus protesters get wrong about divestment economist.com
Divesting from something has obvious symbolic value. But many protesters hope to have a real-world impact, too. Divestment campaigns may exert influence by starving their targets of capital. Scare enough investors from an industry or country and, so the argument goes, companies will find it harder to raise or borrow money, which will force them to change their behaviour [...] How likely is this to work?
Most public services deteriorated in the decade from 2010 under the pressure of austerity, and then deteriorated again during the pandemic. It is not easy to see how they will recover, since many years of weak economic growth have left the UK somehow achieving the trifecta of high taxes, chronic budget deficits and inadequate public services.
Good times.
- Paying Ourselves To Decarbonize - NOEMA noemamag.com
As we transition to a green economy, we must compensate petro-states for their lost income. Otherwise, the world economy will collapse like a house of cards.
The combination of geopolitical shocks, corporate strategies, and changing societal values will affect trade and investment patterns along four main axes. As companies opt for resilience over efficiency, they will increasingly shift their approach to supply chains from “just in time” to “just in case.” This will come at a time when security concerns gain greater weight in commercial considerations, and companies will move away from risk-sharing and general partnerships to more narrowly designed arrangements. Meanwhile, consumers will increasingly look for an emphasis on purpose in their commercial interactions.
- Dieter Helm: “Capitalism works best with a strong state” magazine.newstatesman.com
Helm recently described the UK’s privatised utilities as “not fit for purpose”, but he thinks it is not a matter of “private bad, public good”. “Neither the nationalisation model nor the pure privatisation that we’ve inherited are fit for purpose,” he said. Rather, Helm sees it as the job of the state to provide rules – a “system framework” – within which the private sector competes.
- Mini-Budget. Major Catastrophe. kamikwasi.tax
- Works in Progress worksinprogress.co
- The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress worksinprogress.co
Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.
- Cryptocurrencies: A Necessary Scam? - BIG by Matt Stoller mattstoller.substack.com
The traditional populist view is that we should reform our social order through politics, things like mass education, elections, and civic engagement. That’s how Elizabeth Warren sees the world. She wants to strengthen the state so it can restore the social order, one that will tolerate less cheating and will involve the rule of law applied to the powerful.
The crypto response is different. The crypto response is to reject the social contract itself as irredeemably corrupt. Their goal is put pressure on the state itself by creating a money-like instrument outside of the public rule-setting capacity of the government. This is framed in the name of consumer choice, as in the state shouldn’t be able to boss you around and tell you what you can do with your money. After all, it’s yours. And anyone who doesn’t buy into this idea is inherently defending a set of collusive bailout-friendly institutions that we sometimes call liberal democracy.
- Why Private Equity Should Not Exist mattstoller.substack.com
- UK tech industry not immune to Brexit, trade group warns theguardian.com
- Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency - The New Yorker newyorker.com
<blockquote>“The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”</blockquote>
- The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman theguardian.com
- Tech's tunnel vision (Phil Gyford’s website) gyford.com
<blockquote>Trying to imagine a tech conference that would embody an alternative viewpoint — a more “socialist / social democratic” alternative — actually seems like a good way in. I don’t have to imagine a whole new society and economic model, but only try to imagine what kinds of topics might be talked about at a conference along those lines. Some topics I quickly wrote down...</blockquote>
<blockquote>The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?</blockquote>
- London’s Great Exodus nytimes.com
<blockquote>The property market is no longer about people making a long-term investment in owning their shelter, but a place for the world’s richest people to park their money at an annualized rate of return of around 10 percent. It has made my adopted hometown a no-go area for increasing numbers of the middle class.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Gentrification has adopted an exaggerated and accelerated form in the capital, hurting communities from Brixton to Belgravia.</blockquote>
- Invaders from Mars - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
<blockquote>"The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. [...] We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals."</blockquote>
- HSBC to Pay $1.92 Billion to Settle Charges of Money Laundering - NYTimes.com dealbook.nytimes.com
- Degrowth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
- New Statesman - The tax haven in the heart of Britain newstatesman.com
One of the biggest, most silent players behind so much offshore activity has been identified: a Teflon-like, medieval institution, wrapped around the neck of Britain and dedicated to keeping finance strong and free.
- The Great Olympic Tax Swindle ethicalconsumer.org
Without these tax sweeteners the IOC would simply take their corporate circus elsewhere and so begins a race to the bottom in a bidding process that echoes the offshore system. New tax rules ushered in as part of the winning Team GB bid include ‘a temporary exemption from UK Corporation Tax and UK Income Tax for certain non-resident companies’.
- Why People in Cities Walk Fast - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities theatlanticcities.com
"With the exception of Nairobi — insert joke here about Kenyans crushing everyone at the New York City Marathon — the fastest walking cities were from wealthy nations. The statistical analysis confirmed this general perception: two of the three strongest social predictors of walking speed were a country's G.D.P. and its purchasing power parity (the other was its individualism). Indeed, when Levine considered all his "pace of life" metrics, he found that pace of life was swifter in "economically productive countries" like Western Europe and Japan than in undeveloped countries."
- Republicans: we don't need no regulation guardian.co.uk
Taking this tack has allowed the renaissance right to do a very remarkable thing: to pretend to be an enemy of big business, on the grounds that big business is insufficiently capitalist.
- 3D printing: The printed world | The Economist economist.com
This suggests that success in manufacturing will depend less on scale and more on the quality of ideas. Brilliance alone, though, will not be enough. Good ideas can be copied even more rapidly with 3D printing, so battles over intellectual property may become even more intense. It will be easier for imitators as well as innovators to get goods to market fast. Competitive advantages may thus be shorter-lived than ever before. As with past industrial revolutions, the greatest beneficiaries may not be companies but their customers.
- The Cynical Musician » What the “new music experts” don’t tell you. thecynicalmusician.com
- afeeld » Cultivated Play: Farmville reddyeno5.com
This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."
- Microloans in Hackney | Feature | Society | The Observer guardian.co.uk
When you start dealing with people with unpredictable lifestyles and with income that might be variable month by month, you can't just use the same computerised systems of default and interest that you use for people in regular salaried employment. Muhammad Yunus's microfinance model, which operated in parts of the world where everyone's lifestyle was precarious, had shown that. You had to know exactly who you were lending to, and establish more intimate and flexible models based on that knowledge.
#microfinance #development #london #money #poverty #uk #economics #hackney #community #banking#credit