#economics (71 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
Via marionnestle.
- 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
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.
- Why investors should forget about delayed gratification economist.com
Distant profits are worth less and less these days Sep 15th 2022 This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists,…
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.
- The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation economist.com
I T SOUNDS VAGUELY elvish, like something from the pages of Tolkien. In fact, the Charter of the Forest is one of Britain’s founding political documents, dating…
- Why Private Equity Should Not Exist mattstoller.substack.com
- How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation buzzfeednews.com
I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.…
- Statistics, Fast and Slow timharford.com
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has…
- Goodhart's law - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases…
- Generation Screwed highline.huffingtonpost.com
WHOA! Show me the (slightly less cool) mobile version instead. Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the…
So: me and bitcoin, you already knew I disliked it, right? (Let's discriminate between Blockchain and Bitcoin for a moment. Blockchain : a cryptographically…
Illustration by Amanda Wray Robots are hiding in plain sight. It’s time we stop ignoring them. There’s a chart I came across earlier this year, and not only…
- UK tech industry not immune to Brexit, trade group warns theguardian.com
- Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency - The New Yorker newyorker.com
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.
- The paradox of soil economist.com
Apr 4th 2015 THE history of economics has been, among other things, a story of learning to care less about land. The physiocrats of 18th-century France saw it…
- The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman theguardian.com
- Tech's tunnel vision (Phil Gyford’s website) gyford.com
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...
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?
- London’s Great Exodus nytimes.com
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.
Gentrification has adopted an exaggerated and accelerated form in the capital, hurting communities from Brixton to Belgravia.
- Invaders from Mars - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
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.
Via kevan.
- 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