income inequality

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pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Consider the United States first: the graph shows that when we add social transfers to market income (to get gross income) and then deduct direct taxes (to get disposable income), the level of inequality is reduced each time; that is, both social transfers and taxes do indeed reduce inequality. However, the trend in the increase of disposable income inequality is almost the same as the trend in the increase of market income inequality. Market income inequality went up from 42 to just over 50 Gini points (an eight-point increase), while disposable income inequality rose from about 36 to 41 Gini points (a five-point increase). Redistribution became slightly more important, or more progressive, but it failed to offset the underlying increase in market income inequality. FIGURE 2.23. Market, gross, and disposable income inequality in the United States and Germany, 1970–2010 This graph compares inequality in market, gross, and disposable income in the United States (a) and Germany (b) between 1970 and 2013.

Intersectoral wage inequality measures inequality between wages in different industrial sectors; it is not the same as wage inequality between individuals or income inequality among households, so it is at best a proxy of “real” interpersonal inequality.17 Nevertheless, Zhang’s results may reflect a similar trend in interpersonal inequality, especially because in the past, changes in intersectoral wage inequality closely paralleled those in overall income inequality.18 FIGURE 4.4. Income inequality in China, 1975–2012 This graph shows the evolution of income inequality across individuals (measured by Gini values) in China against China’s real GDP per capita. We see that inequality in China has increased steadily since the reforms started (after 1975) but has recently been stable.

Inequality of market income and disposable income in selected rich Asian and Western countries (around 2010) This graph shows the relationship between inequality of disposable income (income after social transfers and direct taxes) and inequality of market income (income before social transfers and direct taxes) for selected rich Asian and Western countries. The line shows the situation where disposable income inequality is equal to market income inequality. The distance between the line and the dots shows how much market income inequality is reduced as a result of government redistribution through social transfers and taxes. The three Asian countries have low market income inequality and low government redistribution (their dots lie close to the line). Country abbreviations: Asia: JPN Japan, KOR South Korea, TWN Taiwan; Western countries: AUS Australia, AUT Austria, BEL Belgium, CAN Canada, CHE Switzerland, DEU Germany, DNK Denmark, ESP Spain, FIN Finland, FRA France, GBR Great Britain, GRC Greece, IRL Ireland, ISR Israel, ITA Italy, LUX Luxembourg, NLD Netherlands, NOR Norway, SVN Slovenia, SWE Sweden, USA United States.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

We already know from census data that in 2010 income share for the bottom 40 percent fell and that the poverty rate climbed to its highest point in nearly two decades.7 In addition to having an unusually high level of income inequality, the United States has seen income inequality increase at a much faster rate than most other countries. Among the twenty-four OECD countries for which Gini-coefficient change can be measured from the mid-1980s to the mid-aughts, only Finland, Portugal, and New Zealand experienced a faster growth rate in income inequality. Of these, only Portugal ended up with a Gini rating worse than the United States’. Another important point of comparison is that some OECD countries saw income inequality decline during this period. France, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey all saw their Gini ratings go down (though the OECD report’s data for Ireland and Spain didn’t extend beyond 2000).

The scholars who have struggled to understand why income inequality is growing so much worse in the United States than in other countries have their share of disagreements, and in the coming pages I’ll air some of them. Probably the biggest is between those who believe that higher education and the advent of computers played a significant role in creating income inequality in the United States and those who believe the only factor that matters was the stratospheric income growth enjoyed by the top 1 percent, and especially the top 0.1 percent and even the top 0.01 percent. But any considered review of the income-inequality trend dating back to 1979 should, I think, reveal that all of these factors played significant roles, albeit at different stages.

Now we live in an age of growing income inequality. How do we measure it? What accounted for the change? Why has it continued for so long? What does it mean for the future of democracy and civil society? I’ll begin my inquiry with an account of how income inequality first came to be measured in the United States during the early part of the twentieth century. Next I’ll relate what scholars, politicians, and others made of that inequality as it dissipated from the 1930s through most of the 1970s and then reversed course to grow with a vengeance. In chapter 2 I’ll set aside the question of income inequality to consider why Americans believe their country has more upward mobility relative to other nations than it actually does.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is worth noting that he assigned considerable importance to political factors, especially with respect to the development of net income inequality after taxes and transfers: fiscal measures and welfare benefits, in narrowing income inequality . . . must have accentuated the downward phase of the long swing, contributing to the reversal of trend in the secular widening and narrowing of income inequality. Yet in his model, even these factors were preceded by and logically predicated upon economic change; for this reason, the long swing in income inequality must be viewed as a part of a wider process of economic growth. Although Kuznets himself self-effacingly characterized his contribution as perhaps 5 per cent empirical information and 95 per cent speculation, some of it possibly tainted by wishful thinking . . . a collection of hunches calling for further investigation, this model eventually rose to great prominence.

Absolute income gaps have continued to grow even in Latin America, where a recent reduction in relative income inequality coincided with strong economic growth. Worldwide, absolute income inequality has risen to new heights. Between 1988 and 2008, the real incomes of the global top 1 percent posted percentage gains similar to those in the world’s fifth, sixth, and seventh deciles but grew about forty times as much in per capita terms. Finally, as I discuss in more detail in the appendix, the maximum degree of income inequality that is theoretically feasible in a given society varies with per capita GDP. When we control for the fact that advanced economies are systemically less tolerant of an extreme maldistribution of resources than their agrarian precursors were, it is not at all clear that the United States today is effectively less unequal than it was 100 or 150 years ago.1 It is true that the last caveat only applies to modern economies with relatively high levels of nominal inequality.

My simple model omits other factors that are also bound to play a role—most notably, political institutions. 11 With reference to the study of ancient Roman inequality by Scheidel and Friesen 2009, online media outlets reported that contemporary U.S. income inequality was higher than it had been in the Roman Empire, an observation based on market Gini coefficients that failed to take account of modern postmarket redistribution and the respective IPFs: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/, partially reported by http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/19/us-income-inequality-ancient-rome-levels_n_1158926.html. This statement would be correct only if the actual IPF for the current United States were as low as 0.5.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Olausson, ‘Social class differences in infant mortality in Sweden: comparison with England and Wales’, British Medical Journal (1992) 305 (6855): 687–91. 319. S. V. Subramanian and I. Kawachi, ‘Whose health is affected by income inequality? A multilevel interaction analysis of contemporaneous and lagged effects of state income inequality on individual self-rated health in the United States’, Health and Place (2006) 12 (2): 141–56. 320. M. Wolfson, G. Kaplan, J. Lynch, N. Ross and E. Backlund, ‘Relation between income inequality and mortality: empirical demonstration’, British Medical Journal (1999) 319 (7215): 953–5. 321. S. J. Babones, ‘Income inequality and population health: correlation and causality’, Social Science and Medicine (2008) 66 (7): 1614–26. 322.

Alone among the numerous health and social problems we examine in this book, we found no relationship between adult male mental illness and income inequality among the US states. State-specific estimates of mental illness are collected both by the United States Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Study and by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, but the lack of a relationship between income inequality and mental illness among men was consistent in both sources. However, income inequality is associated with mental illness in adult women. It is not a particularly strong relationship, but too strong to be dismissed as chance.

.* But the relationship with inequality is still strong enough for us to be confident it isn’t due to chance. Other researchers have found similar relationships. One study found that higher state-income inequality was associated with abdominal weight gain in men,111 others have found that income inequality increases the risk of inactive lifestyles.112 Overweight among the poor seems to be particularly strongly associated with income inequality. Figure 7.2 More children are overweight in more unequal countries. For children in the USA, we obtained data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (Figure 7.4).


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Under these conditions, competition for workers seems to lead to a never-ending spiral of productivity improvements and wage increases. These circumstances led economists to believe that income inequality narrows as countries grow richer—what economists call a Kuznets curve, after Simon Kuznets, the economist who theorized it. In agrarian economies, where a small cabal of landowners initially controls the means of production, industrialization of those economies often broadens ownership of the means of production and raises wages, which narrows income inequality. Similarly, where a broad base of uneducated talent becomes educated, income inequality again may narrow. But this provides a cautionary tale. Economists often make their bones by discovering generalizable truths.

Arvid Malm and Tino Sanandaji, “The Role of Entrepreneurship in Rising Wealth and Income Inequality,” Royal Institute of Technology, Paper No. 398, CESIS: (2015), https://static.sys.kth.se/itm/wp/cesis/cesiswp398.pdf. Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” November 2010, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Bakijaetal2010.pdf. 4. Bakija, Cole, and Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality.” 5. Seth H. Giertz and Jacob A. Mortenson, “Recent Income Trends for Top Executives: Evidence from Tax Return Data,” National Tax Journal 66, no. 4 (2013): 913–38, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

Because my business partner, Mitt Romney, was running for president when Unintended Consequences was published, the media held up my book as a defense of the 1 percent. At the time, a leading proponent of income redistribution wrote, “the biggest surprise, on opening Unintended Consequences, lies in discovering that this book isn’t about income inequality at all.”1 The critics’ demand for a comprehensive defense of income inequality planted the seeds for this book. Since 2012, accusations that crony capitalism and the success of the 1 percent slow middle- and working-class income growth have only grown louder. While the incomes of the 0.1 percent have soared, the growth of middle-class and working-class incomes has continued to remain slow.


pages: 165 words: 45,129

The Economics of Inequality by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

affirmative action, basic income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, Gini coefficient, income inequality, low skilled workers, means of production, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Simon Kuznets, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, very high income, working-age population

See also Taxes Flat tax, on capital, 64–65 France: attitudes toward inequality, 99; average and marginal rates of redistribution, 102, 102f; capital and labor shares of value added, 41t; effective minimum wage, 110–111; Generalized Social Contribution, 34, 38; household income sources, 6t; income inequality, 12–15, 12t, 24–25; income inequality (1870–1994), 16–17, 16t; income inequality, historical evolution of, 18–19, 22; minimum wage, 91; percentage of obligatory taxes, 101; profit share in, 49–55, 50t; social charges, 46–48; taxes receipts as percent of GDP, 44; unions in, 91–92; wage inequality, 8–11, 11t, 72–73 Freeman, Richard, 87–88 Friedman, Milton, 1, 3, 112 Generalized Social Contribution (CSG), in France, 34, 38 Geographic mobility, wage inequality and human capital, 96 Germany: employment, 24, 25; income inequality, 14; percentage of obligatory taxes, 101; profit share, 53; unions, 91–92; wage inequality, 10, 91, 99 Gini coefficient, 10 Globalization: market integration, 59–60; wage inequality, 73–74 Goolsbee, Austen, 107 Grameen Bank, 63 Grenelle Accords (1968), 49 Gross operating surplus (GOS), 42 Guaranteed basic income, 3, 23, 104, 112–113 Hamermesh, Daniel, 49 Health insurance: adverse selection and, 115; justifications for compulsory, 115–117; as percentage of social charges in 1966 France, 103 Herrnstein, Richard, 82, 87 Hidden underemployment, 25 Household size, income and, 12, 14, 22 Human capital: elasticity of supply of, 78–79, 82–83, 87, 107; measuring types of productivity and, 98; unequal distribution of, 58–60; wage inequality and, 88–89, 92–99 Human capital, structural causes of inequality, 78–79; affirmative action versus fiscal transfers, 86–88; discrimination in labor market and, 85–86; efficiency and, 79–81; inefficient social integration and, 83–84; role of family and education expenses, 81–83 Human capital theory, 66–68; globalization and wage inequality, 73–74; historical inequalities and, 68–69; rise of wage inequality since 1970, 70–71; skill-biased technological change and, 71–73, 76–77, 92; supply and demand and, 69–70 Incentives: basic income and, 113; credit markets and, 60, 62, 114; effects of redistribution on, 105–110; of households to save and invest, 35; human capital and investments, 78–88, 90, 93; of owners to accumulate capital and invest, 28–29 Income: distribution by deciles and centiles, 5–8, 6t; household size and, 12; inequality of, 12–16, 12t, 15t; inequality of, historical evolution, 17–25, 19f, 21t; left-right debate about inequality of, 1–3; types and distribution of, 5–8, 6t.

See also Self-employment compensation Norway: historical evolution of inequality, 22; income inequality, 14; wage inequality, 10 OECD countries: evolution of shares of profits and wages, 49–53, 50t; historical evolution of inequality, 21; income inequality, 14–15, 15t; wage inequality, 10–11, 11t Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 83 Pareto efficiency, 2–3, 57, 79 Part-time work, income inequality and, 25 Pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) pension systems, 117–118 Payroll taxes. See Social charges Pension plans: private, 118; public, 115–119 Phelps, Edmund, 85 Poverty traps, human capital and, 108, 110, 113 P ratios: income inequality, 12–14, 12t, 15t, 16–17, 23–25, 76–77; inequality’s historical evolution, 20–23, 21t; minimum wage, 91; P defined, 7; sources of household income and, 6t; wage inequality, 8–11, 77 Price system: allocative role of, 30–33, 37–40, 100; elasticity of substitution and, 32–40; housing and educational outcomes, 84; role in capital-labor share of total income, 27–30, 32; social justice and, 106 Primary distribution, 28 Prison population, underemployment and, 24 Private sector jobs, unemployment and fiscal redistribution, 111–112 Profit share: constancy of, 41t, 45–46; historical and political time and, 49–53; in US and UK, 53–55 Progressive estate tax, 19, 64 Progressive income tax, 19, 48, 64, 102–103, 106 Public investment banks, as possible intervention in credit market, 62–63 Public-sector jobs: pensions and, 115–119; unemployment and fiscal redistribution, 111–112; wages, 10 Purchasing power, of workers: changes in twentieth century, 45, 50–51, 68–69, 91, 96, 111; inequality in time and space, 16–17, 16t; redistribution of, 120–121 Pure redistribution, 32, 55, 67; absence of redistribution between workers, 102–104; average and marginal rates of redistribution, 100–102, 102f; Earned Income Tax Credit, in US, 108–109; fiscal redistribution to reduce unemployment and, 109–112; fundamental purposes of, 105–106; high taxes and revenue, 106–108; negative income tax and basic income, 112–113; Pareto efficiency and, 2–3; U-shaped curve of marginal rates, 104–105, 109 Rawls, John, 2, 35, 106 Redistributive policy, left-right conflict about, 1–3.

In all Western countries, it is clear that the downward trend of the previous period has been reversed: income inequality, like wage inequality, ceased to decrease everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s, and it increased significantly in those countries where wage inequality resumed its upward trend. The Kuznets curve is definitely dead. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret the evolution of income inequality as a simple mechanical consequence of the evolution of wage inequality, even though the latter is undeniably the main force at work (Gottschalk, 1993). For example, nearly half of the increase in US household income inequality between 1970 and 1990 was in fact due to increased correlation of the incomes of members of the same household: in other words, high earners are increasingly likely to marry other high earners, whereas the lowest earners are often single women with children (Meyer, 1995).


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

In the present day, the question of income inequality has returned to the spotlight for economists, social science researchers, and the political world. During the last few years, rising inequality in certain countries, notably the United States, has been the subject of or inspiration for several major books—among which it would be difficult to overstate the importance of two recent books by Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, the success of which is a clear sign of the mounting public interest in the issue of inequality.2 While few books address global income inequality directly, with the exception of Branko Milanovic’s Worlds Apart,3 many have analyzed inequalities in development between 2 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3 Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart, Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Conversely, we must also recognize that, given the heterogeneity mentioned above, we should be cautious about estimating the average well-­being of a national population using data on income or consumption taken Know about Global Income Inequality?” Journal of Economic Literature 46, no. 1 (2008): 57–94; and “The Global Distribution of Income” in Anthony B. Atkinson and François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, volume 2 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming). For the GDP per capita approach, see Xavier Sala-­i-­Martin, “The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and . . . Convergence, Period,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2 (December 2006): 351–97; and for its critique, see Branko Milanovic, “The Ricardian Vice: Why Sala-­i-­Martin’s Calculations of World Income Inequality Are Wrong” (Washington, DC: World Bank, November 2002). 5 Joseph E.

It first focuses on several dimensions of income and wealth inequality and then moves to non-­monetary aspects of economic inequality which, at the national level, may be equally important in 48 Chapter 2 the public perception of changes in the social fairness or unfairness of the economy they live in. The Rise in National Income Inequality It would be difficult to begin a discussion of national inequality with any country other than the United States, given how spectacular the rise in inequalities has been in that country. Figure 2, which extends Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s estimates, illustrates this quite well.1 By 2008, just before the recent crisis, the level of income inequality, as measured by the share of the top 10% tax units in total household market income, had returned to levels that had not been seen in a century.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Of eighteen quantitative studies using standardized data for the OECD countries over the past thirty years, half of them concluded that income inequality slowed growth, six concluded the opposite, and three reported mixed results. See Federico Cingano, “Trends in Income Inequality and Its Impact on Economic Growth” (Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 163, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2014), http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/trends-in-income-inequality-and-its-impact-on-economic-growth-SEM-WP163.pdf. 33. Alain Cohn et al., “Social Comparison in the Workplace: Evidence from a Field Experiment” (discussion paper no. 5550, Institute of Labor Economics, March 2011), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

But it nonetheless has the advantage of making it possible to trace the development of secular trends. The authors show that political polarization evolved in tandem with income inequality during the course of the twentieth century, the two falling together between 1913 and 1957 and then rising dramatically from the mid-1970s onward. For this phenomenon—“the dance of ideology,” in their phrase—McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal offer the following explanation: with growing income inequality, the wealthiest have fewer and fewer objective reasons to support policies aimed at reducing it (for they will be taxed at ever higher rates); and this in turn has led to a rightward shift in the policy positions of the Republican Party.

For the moment, the few studies that do make use of individual-level data do not suffice to decide the matter one way or the other.17 Even so, Wilkinson and Pickett offer a cogent explanation of the connection between inequality and public health that deserves to be taken very seriously. Figure 1.1. Income inequality and social well-being. Disposable income inequality measured in terms of the Gini coefficient. In Japan, where the level of inequality is low, health and social well-being scores are the highest among OECD countries. Data for 2005. Sources and series: Wilkinson and Pickett (2010); www.lucaschancel.info/hup. INEQUALITY, HEALTH, AND ANXIETY How does economic inequality affect the physical and mental health of individuals?


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Look first at the lines for market income inequality, which measures inequality in income before taxes and transfers. In both countries (as in practically all rich countries), market income inequality increased dramatically, driven by the factors discussed earlier. The increase was even sharper in Germany than in the United States. The middle line in both graphs shows gross income inequality, that is, the inequality level that exists after taking transfers (such as public pensions and welfare benefits) into account, and the bottom line shows disposable income inequality—after the effects of direct taxes have been included as well.

Germany has almost succeeded in offsetting rising market income inequality; inequality in disposable income (the bottom line) shows only a modest increase since the early 1980s. This was achieved through large social transfers (notice the widening gap between the top and middle lines) and to a lesser extent through higher or more progressive taxation (the gap between the middle and the bottom lines has been about the same since 1990). Income redistribution in the United States, in contrast, has become only slightly more progressive, such that disposable income inequality has risen by a similar amount as market income inequality (shown by the parallel movements of the top and bottom lines).

The closest real-world example is that of Taiwan, where distribution of both labor and capital incomes is markedly more egalitarian than in any other rich country (see Figure 2.2) and where, as a result, the level of disposable income inequality is similar to that of Canada, an outcome achieved with minimal redistribution. To continue the example to the extreme, consider an imaginary world with absolutely equal endowments of capital and labor: market income inequality would be zero, and no redistribution would be needed; disposable income inequality would be zero as well.39 But how can the distribution of capital and skill endowments be made less unequal? As far as capital is concerned, it could be done by deconcentrating ownership of assets.


pages: 251 words: 69,245

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The industrial sector also sees more differentiation in incomes between individual workers than is the case among farmers simply because tasks required by modern industry are more diversified. Therefore, income inequality increases both because of the growing gap in average earnings between industry and agriculture and because of rising inequality among industrial workers. Finally, in even more advanced societies, the state begins to play a redistributive role (see Vignette 1.7), education becomes more widespread, and inequality goes down (see Vignettes 1.1 and 1.2). Thus was formulated the famous “Kuznets’ hypothesis” of an inverted U curve charted by income inequality in the course of economic development: Inequality must first increase before it goes down.

When we speak of regional income differences in the USSR and Yugoslavia, we need to explain that it does not contradict Vignette 1.5, where I argued that the overall income inequality under communism was low. The former refers to differences in mean incomes between the constituent republics, the latter to low differences in interpersonal incomes. It is striking that such overall low interpersonal inequality coexisted with large differences in mean incomes between the republics. This implies that within each republic interpersonal income inequality must have been extremely small. Why? Because total inequality between individuals in a country, call it A, can be decomposed into two parts: (B) interregional inequality, that is, inequality due to the differences in mean regional incomes, and (C) interpersonal inequality within each region (see Essay I).

To understand the origins of the crisis, one needs to go to rising income inequality within practically all countries in the world, and the United States in particular, over the past thirty years. In the United States, the top 1 percent of the population doubled its share in national income from around 8 percent in the mid-1970s to almost 16 percent in the early 2000s.2 That eerily replicated the situation that existed just prior to the crash of 1929, when the top 1 percent share reached its previous high-water mark. American income inequality over the past hundred years thus basically charted a gigantic U, going down from its 1929 peak all the way to the late 1970s, and then rising again for thirty years.


pages: 237 words: 72,716

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

The Gini coefficient, a commonly used indicator of inequality, has been applied in Figure 1,3 but much the same conclusions would be reached with other measures. 0.50 0.45 0.40 0.35 0.30 0.20 Denmark Sweden Luxembourg Austria Czech Republic Slovakia Finland Belgium Netherlands Switzerland Norway Iceland France Hungary Germany Australia OECD-30 Korea Canada Spain Japan Greece Ireland New Zeeland Great Britain Italy Poland USA Portugal Turkey Mexico 0.25 Figure 1: Gini coefficients of income inequality in OECD countries, mid-2000s (Source: OECD income distribution questionnaire) What about trends in income inequality? In the same report, the OECD observed that income inequality rose at a “moderate but significant” pace, with the data suggesting an average increase across countries of approximately two Gini points in the last 20 years (see Figure 2). Likewise, data from the Luxembourg Income Study,4 perhaps the best comparative resource on income and inequality in rich countries, show that most countries have experienced at least a modest rise in income inequality at some 3 The Gini coefficient for income measures the dispersion or spread of income across a society.

We are witnessing for the first time in many decades a vigorous public debate in the United States and many European countries as to whether income inequality is approaching unjustifiable levels. The financial crisis has drawn special attention to remuneration at financial firms, as well as other more broadly based increases in inequality, and the pendulum may well have swung back toward attitudes favoring strengthened regulations. It is against this background of shifting public and political views about income inequality that the Roland Berger Foundation decided to solicit the opinions of U.S. and European political, business, and labor leaders by partnering with the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality.

In the summer of 2009, we interviewed thirteen political, business, and labor leaders and presented these interviews in their original form. Ten years ago, we doubt that so many prominent leaders would have agreed to discuss issues of income inequality, and their willingness to do so now is an important signal that times have changed. This new orientation also suggests that issues of income inequality deserve a more prominent and constructive place on the contemporary public agenda. We have framed the thirteen interviews with our own accompanying commentary to introduce the topic of inequality, summarize some of the themes in the interviews, and put forward various remedies.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

Note that prior to 1991, “Germany” refers to West Germany. Data source: International Labour Organization. The labor share of income and income inequality are not the same thing, since income inequality can also arise from an increased dispersion of labor incomes, if workers at the top experience higher wage increases than workers at the bottom.8 Notably, income inequality has also increased in many (but not all) other countries, despite a wide variety of economic policies and circumstances. Still, income inequality has increased more rapidly in the United States than in most other countries (fig. 2.6). Are Things Really So Bad?

Are Things Really So Bad? The data reported above come from work that uses the broadest definition of income, including capital income from investments.9 Using other sources of data would somewhat moderate the increase in income inequality, though all sources of data agree that income inequality in the United States has increased substantially in recent decades. Inequality need not be associated with wage stagnation, but it is particularly troubling when it is.10 Some argue that the wage stagnation of the US middle class is not measured accurately, since there have been huge gains in standards of living due to new products.

The success of superstars fuels changes in social norms about what level of compensation is “justified” by the marketplace. Still, different societies mediate these same economic forces in different ways. While many countries have experienced aspects of the trends described here (increased income inequality, surges in top 1 percent shares, reduced labor income shares), the United States’ experience of increasing income inequality, accompanied by middle-income economic stagnation, has been particularly dramatic and sustained. Common economic forces like trade and technological change create different consequences in different places, due to different institutions, social norms, and economic policies.43 The remainder of this book will argue that global forces (namely, international trade, international capital mobility, international business, and immigration) are not the chief culprits behind the woes of the American middle class—and that, while these global forces certainly contribute to the economic insecurity facing American workers, clamping down on globalization would harm American workers more than it would help them.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Following the financial crash in the rich world, only six out of thirty OECD countries saw a reduction in market (pre-tax and benefit) income inequalities. Of all OECD countries, it was in Spain that disposable income inequality rose fastest in the first three years after the financial crash.27 Ireland saw the highest increase in market income inequality, but state action resulted in the increase in disposable income inequality being modest (see Figure 6.3). The greedy used the crash to become richer, to buy assets cheaply, and to make new profits out of others’ impoverishment. But it doesn’t have to be this way. State action resulted in disposable income inequality falling in another dozen countries, most dramatically in Iceland, reversing the changes in market income inequality.

Finally, calculating entire distribution measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, tends to cause many more readers’ eyes to glaze over. Fortunately there is a strong correlation between the complex Gini coefficient of income inequality (measured after tax and benefits and adjusting for household size) and the simple measure of how much of total income the best-off 1 per cent receives each year. When the 1 per cent receives a low proportion of national income, inequality for the rest of the population is forced to be lower, because no other group can receive more than the best-off 1 per cent. Simply concentrating on the share taken by the 1 per cent is enough.

Having a high opinion of yourself – believing you are part of a deserving minority who has got to the top and that there are only a few others like you – is a trait that is much more common in more unequal countries. A comparison of attitudes in fifteen nations which did not include the UK found that ‘people in societies with more income inequality tend to view themselves as superior to others, and people in societies with less income inequality tend to see themselves as more similar to their peers’.56 The study implied that high self-esteem and self-enhancement might be an accurate, justified attitude, but that it is often viewed by others as signalling an arrogant and unwarranted sense of superiority.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Wage inequality, we found, is statistically associated with the concentration of college graduates, high-tech industry, and knowledge and professional workers.15 Little wonder then that wage inequality is particularly high in leading knowledge hubs. Income inequality is more reflective of long-standing poverty and economic distress at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. William Julius Wilson and other sociologists have long argued that inequality is a product of both poverty and racial disadvantage.16 Our findings bear this out: income inequality across metro areas is statistically associated with both poverty and race as measured by the African American share of metro population, controlling for other factors.17 Furthermore, income inequality is lower where the unionized share of the workforce is higher, and higher in places with lower rates of taxation.

William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). 17. The correlation between income inequality and poverty is 0.50, and the correlation between income inequality and race is 0.30. 18. See Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Also see Dierk Herzer, “Unions and Income Inequality: A Panel Cointegration and Causality Analysis for the United States,” Economic Development Quarterly (March 3, 2016). 19. Richard Florida, “Inequality and the Growth of Cities,” CityLab, January 20, 2015, www.citylab.com/work/2015/01/inequality-and-the-growth-of-cities/384571; Richard Florida, “The Connection Between Successful Cities and Inequality,” CityLab, January 6, 2015, www.citylab.com/politics/2015/01/the-connection-between-successful-cities-and-inequality/384243. 20.

In New York City, for example, the 1 percent hauls in more than forty times the average income of the bottom 99 percent; in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, they make about thirty times as much.8 The overall level of income inequality in the United States as a whole is bad enough—it is 0.450 on the Gini coefficient index, the standard for measuring income inequality. (Gini coefficient values range from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating zero inequality and 1 indicating the most extreme inequality.) The US value is about the same as Iran’s, and worse than Russia’s, India’s, or Nicaragua’s. But within many US cities and metro areas, the Gini coefficient is even worse, rivaling some of the most unequal countries on earth.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The border controls we now take for granted were an invention of the twentieth century: they limit the ability of entrepreneurial workers to go in search of economic opportunities in other parts of the world. Even if the global economic cake is bigger as a result of this latest wave of globalization, there are both winners and losers. The heightened gravitational pull of the emerging world may be reducing income inequality between nations, but it is also increasing income inequality within nations. Over the last forty years, for example, income inequality in the US has risen dramatically.2 The rise of the emerging nations thus creates a whole new set of challenges which, all too often, are either swept under the carpet by the supporters of globalization or, instead, distorted to suit the varying interests of xenophobes, nationalists and the anti-big business lobby.3 Globalization has undoubtedly led to higher global incomes but, at the same time, individual nations are struggling to cope with some of its other effects: greater economic instability, heightened income inequality and financial market turmoil.

It’s one reason why global commodity prices have tended to rise since the late 1990s. As people become richer, their command over global resources tends to rise. In the emerging world, however, not all people get richer at the same pace. As I shall explain in more detail in Chapter 6, levels of income inequality are remarkably high. China, for example, has a level of income inequality similar to that of the US, an ironic result given the countries’ differing political systems. In an attempt to deliver social cohesion in the light of rising commodity prices, many fast-growing emerging markets choose to subsidize the prices of staples such as food and energy.

By ignoring the underlying reasons that are driving prices, capital markets and trade, we are in danger of ignoring one of the biggest political implications of globalization. The competitive forces disrupting our economic barometers are also responsible for heigh-tened income inequality. How governments react to this challenge will help determine the future of globalization. For governments dissatisfied with and uneasy about ‘market’ outcomes, the incentive is surely to intervene, for better or worse. Part Three offers three perspectives on this return of ‘political economy’. This chapter explores the reasons behind rising income inequality both in the West and in the emerging nations. Many explanations for rising inequality are domestically focused, but I contend that one of the most important reasons behind rising inequality, too often ignored, is the integration of previously independent economies.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Table of Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Page Dedication About the Authors Preface PART I: THE WORLD I GREW UP IN 1 75 Years of Global Growth and Development Foundations of the Post-War Global Economic Order Notes 2 Kuznets’ Curse The Original Kuznets’ Curse: GDP as Measure of Progress The Second Kuznets’ Curse: Inequality The Third Kuznets Curse: The Environment Notes 3 The Rise of Asia China's Special Economic Zones The Bigger Picture Notes 4 Divided Societies German Division and Reunification The Erosion of the Political Center Societal Unrest The Lesson to Draw from a Divided Society Notes PART II: DRIVERS OF PROGRESS AND PROBLEMS 5 Globalization Indonesia and Globalization Early Beginnings and Spice Routes6 Notes 6 Technology A Changing Labor Market A Changing Business Landscape Pre-Industrial Revolutions The First Industrial Revolution The Second Industrial Revolution The Third Industrial Revolution The Fourth Industrial Revolution Notes 7 People and the Planet Thunberg at Davos Notes PART III: STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM 8 Concept The History of the Stakeholder Concept The Stakeholder Model Today Principles and Beliefs Underlying the Stakeholder Model Stakeholder Capitalism in Practice Notes 9 Companies Mærsk Notes 10 Communities New Zealand during the COVID-19 Crisis The Key Tasks of National Governments Singapore as a Model of Stakeholder Government New Zealand and the Move Away from GDP Civil Society and the International Community Notes Conclusion: The Road to Stakeholder Capitalism Notes Acknowledgments Index End User License Agreement List of Illustrations Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 World GDP Growth Has Been Trending Downward since the 1960s Figure 2.2 Kuznets waves: How income inequality waxes and wanes over the ver... Figure 2.3 The Impact of China and India on Global Income Inequality (Measur... Figure 2.4 In the US, Income Inequality Has Risen Sharply Figure 2.5 Expected Pattern of Changes in Inequality versus Income per Capit... Figure 2.6 “Earth Overshoot Day” Has Been Taking Place on an Earlier Date Al... Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 After a China-Fuelled Boom in the 2000s, Emerging Markets Growth ...

Inequality in fact began rising again in highly developed countries. In a 2016 note, economist Branko Milanovic suggested that the current upswing in inequality could be viewed "as a second Kuznets curve", or indeed, as a "Kuznets wave" (Figure 2.2). Income Inequality There is a festering wound in our global economic system, and that wound is rising income inequality. The story starts with an unexpected twist. Global income inequality, measured by plotting incomes of everyone from all over the world, has actually been steadily declining over the last 30 years37 (see Figure 2.3). This may come as a surprise to many readers, given the perception that the opposite is true in many countries.

One striking visual representation, which we saw in Chapter 6, comes from the United States, where the Economic Policy Institute plotted union membership against income inequality over the past 100 years. It showed that income inequality was high when organized labor was absent and that it dropped during the golden age of American organized labor, roughly between 1940 and 1980, as union membership surged. Finally, when union membership started falling again, inequality increased again, hitting an all-time high in the mid-2010s. And, as we have seen earlier in the case of Denmark, in those countries where union representation remained strong, income inequality remained low as well, even in the context of today's globalized and technology-driven economy.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Table of Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Page Dedication About the Authors Preface PART I: THE WORLD I GREW UP IN 1 75 Years of Global Growth and Development Foundations of the Post-War Global Economic Order Notes 2 Kuznets’ Curse The Original Kuznets’ Curse: GDP as Measure of Progress The Second Kuznets’ Curse: Inequality The Third Kuznets Curse: The Environment Notes 3 The Rise of Asia China's Special Economic Zones The Bigger Picture Notes 4 Divided Societies German Division and Reunification The Erosion of the Political Center Societal Unrest The Lesson to Draw from a Divided Society Notes PART II: DRIVERS OF PROGRESS AND PROBLEMS 5 Globalization Indonesia and Globalization Early Beginnings and Spice Routes6 Notes 6 Technology A Changing Labor Market A Changing Business Landscape Pre-Industrial Revolutions The First Industrial Revolution The Second Industrial Revolution The Third Industrial Revolution The Fourth Industrial Revolution Notes 7 People and the Planet Thunberg at Davos Notes PART III: STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM 8 Concept The History of the Stakeholder Concept The Stakeholder Model Today Principles and Beliefs Underlying the Stakeholder Model Stakeholder Capitalism in Practice Notes 9 Companies Mærsk Notes 10 Communities New Zealand during the COVID-19 Crisis The Key Tasks of National Governments Singapore as a Model of Stakeholder Government New Zealand and the Move Away from GDP Civil Society and the International Community Notes Conclusion: The Road to Stakeholder Capitalism Notes Acknowledgments Index End User License Agreement List of Illustrations Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 World GDP Growth Has Been Trending Downward since the 1960s Figure 2.2 Kuznets waves: How income inequality waxes and wanes over the ver... Figure 2.3 The Impact of China and India on Global Income Inequality (Measur... Figure 2.4 In the US, Income Inequality Has Risen Sharply Figure 2.5 Expected Pattern of Changes in Inequality versus Income per Capit... Figure 2.6 “Earth Overshoot Day” Has Been Taking Place on an Earlier Date Al... Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 After a China-Fuelled Boom in the 2000s, Emerging Markets Growth ...

Inequality in fact began rising again in highly developed countries. In a 2016 note, economist Branko Milanovic suggested that the current upswing in inequality could be viewed "as a second Kuznets curve", or indeed, as a "Kuznets wave" (Figure 2.2). Income Inequality There is a festering wound in our global economic system, and that wound is rising income inequality. The story starts with an unexpected twist. Global income inequality, measured by plotting incomes of everyone from all over the world, has actually been steadily declining over the last 30 years37 (see Figure 2.3). This may come as a surprise to many readers, given the perception that the opposite is true in many countries.

One striking visual representation, which we saw in Chapter 6, comes from the United States, where the Economic Policy Institute plotted union membership against income inequality over the past 100 years. It showed that income inequality was high when organized labor was absent and that it dropped during the golden age of American organized labor, roughly between 1940 and 1980, as union membership surged. Finally, when union membership started falling again, inequality increased again, hitting an all-time high in the mid-2010s. And, as we have seen earlier in the case of Denmark, in those countries where union representation remained strong, income inequality remained low as well, even in the context of today's globalized and technology-driven economy.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

As such, stagnation is in danger of becoming a trait hard-wired into our collective consciousness. THE FIRST SCHISM: INCOME INEQUALITY Countries with high levels of trust among their citizens tend also to be countries that enjoy high living standards. Intriguingly, countries with high levels of trust tend also to be countries with low levels of income inequality. Within the OECD, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland all have high levels of trust, high living standards and low levels of income inequality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Turkey, Mexico and Portugal have low levels of trust, low living standards and high levels of income inequality. It would seem to follow, then, that reducing income inequality should raise levels of trust and, at the very least, make societies a bit happier.

As we've seen, many of the world's richest nations – measured through per capita income – had low levels of income inequality. Some of the world's poorest nations, meanwhile, had very high levels of income inequality. In some cases, their ruling elites had established de facto kleptocracies. Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic are two obvious examples. Yet for each example, there is a counterexample. Hong Kong – a wealthy, dynamic and fast-growing economy – has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Brazil and China – paragons of economic success at the beginning of the twenty-first century – are not far behind.10 In itself, a high level of income inequality appears to be a constraint neither on economic growth nor, indeed, on average living standards.

In any case, without expansion, the risk of Smith-style melancholy becomes that much greater. At the same time, economies with low per capita incomes and rising income inequality may be able to expand relatively easily if, for example, there is support for political reform to allow a faster rate of economic growth. Think, for example, of China's economic success – thanks to reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping – since the 1980s. Even with high levels of income inequality, rapid growth can keep Smith's melancholy at bay. Indeed, China's success has been accompanied by a persistent rise in income inequality. Fast-developing economies typically go through a period of rapidly rising inequality as the new urban ‘rich’ see their incomes fast outstripping those of the rural poor, thanks to higher levels of productivity in manufacturing than in rural endeavours.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Minimum wage in France and the United States, 1950–2013 Figure 9.2. Income inequality in Anglo-Saxon countries, 1910–2010 Figure 9.3. Income inequality in Continental Europe and Japan, 1910–2010 Figure 9.4. Income inequality in Northern and Southern Europe, 1910–2010 Figure 9.5. The top decile income share in Anglo-Saxon countries, 1910–2010 Figure 9.6. The top decile income share in Continental Europe and Japan, 1910–2010 Figure 9.7. The top decile income share in Europe and the United States, 1900–2010 Figure 9.8. Income inequality in Europe versus the United States, 1900–2010 Figure 9.9. Income inequality in emerging countries, 1910–2010 Figure 10.1.

Nevertheless, the magical Kuznets curve theory was formulated in large part for the wrong reasons, and its empirical underpinnings were extremely fragile. The sharp reduction in income inequality that we observe in almost all the rich countries between 1914 and 1945 was due above all to the world wars and the violent economic and political shocks they entailed (especially for people with large fortunes). It had little to do with the tranquil process of intersectoral mobility described by Kuznets. Putting the Distributional Question Back at the Heart of Economic Analysis The question is important, and not just for historical reasons. Since the 1970s, income inequality has increased significantly in the rich countries, especially the United States, where the concentration of income in the first decade of the twenty-first century regained—indeed, slightly exceeded—the level attained in the second decade of the previous century.

Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This approach was introduced by Robert Lampman in 1962 to study changes in the inequality of wealth in the United States from 1922 to 1956. Later, in 1978, Anthony Atkinson and Alan Harrison studied the British case from 1923 to 1972.27 These results were recently updated and extended to other countries such as France and Sweden. Unfortunately, data are available for fewer countries than in the case of income inequality. In a few cases, however, estate tax data extend back much further in time, often to the beginning of the nineteenth century, because estate taxes predate income taxes.


The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market by Paul de Grauwe, Anna Asbury

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit motive, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, very high income

Kuznets’s Dream Based on a statistical analysis of US tax data between  and , the American economist Simon Kuznets came to the remarkable conclusion in  that income inequality in the US had dropped substantially. Based on this fact, Kuznets decided that capitalism contains a law which ensures that as a country becomes richer, income inequality drops. He expressed this in what would later be called the Kuznets curve, as shown in Figure .. The horizontal axis represents income per capita, the vertical axis income inequality. We can see that when income per capita rises, inequality initially rises. Once a certain level of wealth is achieved, income inequality begins to fall.  T HE U TO PIA OF SE LF - RE GUL ATIO N INCOME INEQUALITY INCOME PER CAPITA Figure ..

This optimistic theory implied that as capitalism developed it would lose the unattractive feature of income inequality and become more socially acceptable. According to Kuznets, a self-regulating mechanism ensured that capitalism would not lead to revolutionary developments, as Marx had predicted. In retrospect it seems that Kuznets’s vision was just a dream, based on a very limited period of history, between the two world wars. During this period income inequality did indeed drop in many Western countries, as shown in Figure .. This drop in income inequality had a great deal to do with the revolutionary circumstances evoked by the wars, which weakened the position of the highest income earners in many countries.

The empirical evidence collected since then by economists such as Atkinson, Piketty, Saez, and others point to increased income inequality since the s.15 This was also illustrated in Figure . and is particularly true of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Piketty recently  THE L IMI TS OF TH E MAR KET investigated the reasons for this trend. We will discuss his theory in Chapter . Here it is sufficient to conclude that no self-regulating mechanism exists in capitalism to reduce income inequality and prevent the system from clashing violently with its limits. In Conclusion In this chapter we questioned whether the market contains selfregulating processes which can prevent the system from ending in self-destruction.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

If each person in each country had the average income of the whole country, Figure 5 would show that the living standards of all the people in the world have drawn closer together, although there has been no narrowing of the average living standards of countries. Of course, it is not at all true that everyone shares the same income in each country; not only is there income inequality within countries but, as we shall see in Chapter 6, income inequality is widening in many (but not all) countries. Once within-country income inequality is taken into account, what is happening to income inequality over all the citizens of the world is much less clear, though a good case can be made that it is decreasing. The rapid growth of China and India has not only enabled hundreds of millions of the world’s citizens to make the Great Escape but made the world a more equal place.

While I do not believe that there is any statement about income inequality that is true in every country of the world—except that it is difficult to measure—it is clear that the general trend has been toward higher income inequality, especially in recent years. The United States is exceptional, both in its level of inequality and in the size of the recent explosion, particularly at the top, but it is certainly not the only country where income inequality is currently increasing. In several of the rich countries, income inequality as measured by the share of the top 1 percent went on falling well into the 1980s, as it had fallen for most of the century, so that the recent uptick was not only smaller than that in the United States but also later.

Economists have a strong attachment to something called the Pareto principle, which we first met in the Introduction: If some people are made better off and no one is made worse off, the world is a better place. Envy should not be counted. This maxim if often cited as a reason to focus on poverty and not to worry about what is happening at the top. In the words of Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist, “income inequality is not a problem in need of remedy.”29 There is a lot to be said for the Pareto principle, but, as we shall see, it does not imply that rising income inequality is not a problem. But to get there, we need to know more about why the top incomes have risen so rapidly in recent years, and what the consequences were. One story is that the top is not so different from the rest of the distribution, only more so.


pages: 268 words: 89,761

Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality by Richard G. Wilkinson

attribution theory, business cycle, clean water, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, full employment, fundamental attribution error, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, invisible hand, land reform, longitudinal study, means of production, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, twin studies, upwardly mobile

Providing strong confirmation of the relative income interpretation of this paradox is the relationship between income inequality and average life expectancy which has been shown to exist in both rich and poor countries. This has now been demonstrated crosssectionally and on data dealing with changes over time, and the relationship cannot be plausibly attributed to some intervening variable. There is also evidence that the scale of income differences in developed countries is related to the scale of health inequalities within them. This appears to be true in cross-country comparisons as well as within countries over time. The implication is that income inequalities influence national mortality rates primarily by determining the strength of the impact of relative deprivation on health.

Adjusting for the log of median income in each state marginally increases the strength of the correlation from the 0.72 (P<0.001) shown in figure 8.1. These correlations suggest that differences in income inequality may account for as much as half the very large differences in homicide rates from one state to another (they vary from 2 to 18 per 100,000 population per year). Earlier reports showing that homicide rates in the United States are more closely related to income inequality than to absolute poverty confirm these results (Balkwell 1990; Crutchfield 1989; Blaus and Blaus 1982; Currie 1985). A much earlier report using data from the period 1967–73 for the 192 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas of the United States found clear relationships between most of the major categories of crime and the size of the ‘income gap’ between the incomes of the poorest 20 per cent of the population and average incomes in each area (Braithwaite 1979).

Using data from thirty-one countries, Braithwaite and Braithwaite (1980) also showed a statistically significant relationship between greater inequality of earnings and higher homicide rates. Messner (1982) found that the extent of income inequality accounted for 35 per cent of the differences in homicide rates among the thirty-nine countries for which he had data. That the links between crime and income inequality to some extent parallel those between health and inequality is highly indicative of the channels through which health is affected. It not only provides independent confirmation that income distribution has The symptoms of disintegration 157 Figure 8.1: The relationship between income distribution and homicide among the states of the USA in 1990 Source: Data calculated from US Census and National Centre for Health Statistics by Kaplan, Pamuk, Lynch, Cohen and Balfour (1996) who kindly provided it for publication here important psychosocial effects on society, but shows that the effects are consistent with the view that wider income differences are socially divisive.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Overall, the British tax system is less effective at reducing inequality than the tax systems of most EU countries, including France, Germany and Italy.33 Now we come to the biggest weakness in the claims that inequality has not increased. Wealth has risen faster than income. Wealth inequality in the UK is much greater than income inequality and is well above the OECD average. As private wealth has risen from about three times GDP in the 1960s and 1970s to nearly seven times now,34 the shift from income to wealth must have raised total inequality, even if wealth inequality and income inequality had stayed the same, which is doubtful. So, wealth and income inequality combined must have increased. Since the Big Bang liberalization of financial markets under the Thatcher government, Britain has become much more reliant on the financial sector.

As the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Amber Rudd proclaimed at the end of March 2018, ‘Since we entered government in 2010, income inequality has fallen.’ In the same month, her own department issued a report admitting that inequality had increased due to a rise in the earnings of highpaid workers and the continuing freeze on the level of benefits.5 Battling Eight Giants 10 In May 2019, when the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) announced a five-year study of inequality led by Nobel Laureate Sir Angus Deaton, its report accompanying the launch also claimed that income inequality had been stable.6 US-based Angus Deaton spoke at the launch as if the giant had not been growing for decades but was merely in danger of growing.

Another unappreciated factor in the growth of inequality is the plunder of the commons, accelerated by the austerity regime and systemic privatization. This has led to deepening and perceptible ‘social income’ inequality, depriving people of free or subsidized public services and amenities on which many low-income households depend, including parks, libraries, leisure centres, bus services, playgrounds and youth clubs, as well as health, education and care services.31 Finally, the tax system has become less progressive. According to the ONS, in recent years ‘overall, taxes had a negligible effect on income inequality’.32 Traditionally, taxes have tended to reduce inequality, but changes introduced since 2010 have reversed that.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

This is an issue to which we will return in the final chapter, but there is another argument popular with American economists embracing the view that income inequalities are a result of changes in technologies. Is There a Hi-Tech Elephant in the Room? The idea that income inequalities are explained by the introduction of new technologies rather than global trade is intuitively attractive. It asserts that as new technologies are introduced into the workplace, some jobs are automated while more skilled workers are required to exploit the productive potential of new technologies. Widening income inequalities reflect the growing disparity in productivity achieved by high- as opposed to low-skill employees.

Three of four final-salary programs have already closed their doors to new members, and one in four of those that remain intended to follow suit.26 This is to say nothing of longer working hours and the rise of the dual-earner family required to make middle-class ends meet in America and beyond. Keeping the Promise of Human Capital Alive To what extent are income inequalities in the earnings of those with a college education explained by the outstanding performance of a few in a global auction for skills? Gary Becker, awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on human capital, has highlighted what he sees as the “upside of income inequality,” arguing that the earning gap has widened “because the demand for educated and other skilled persons is growing.”27 These inequalities, he argues, reflect the new realities of a global economy that offer exceptional rewards to those with scarce skills, knowledge, and talent at the same time as penalizing those with poor marketable skills or mediocre records of performance.

A Global Auction for Jobs The trends outlined in this book reveal a complex interplay between the global and local. The importance of national context in shaping the global auction for American workers is shown in cross-national studies of income inequalities. If wage inequalities are a reflection of the returns to human capital in the global market, we would expect to find a similar pattern in all high-cost countries. But countries including Sweden, Japan, and France have maintained much lower levels of income inequalities at the same time that America and Britain experienced a headlong rush to inequality. Of course, it is possible that these differences reflect a time lag, and other countries will witness a similar increase in wage inequalities in the future.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The OECD also finds evidence of a wage gap “between skilled and unskilled workers.”16 Based on comparable evidence, Martin Rama of the World Bank concludes, “If exposure to international trade and foreign direct investment increase the wage premium to skill, access to education for all should be a priority.”17 Although the effects of globalization on within-country inequality differ between countries,18 in most cases integration into the world economy increases income inequality. China, for example, has experienced a moderate but persistent increase in income inequality—as measured by the GINI index—since the 1980s.19 Even India, which has benefited from low and stable levels of inequality over the same time period (with a GINI index hovering around 31.0), exhibits a small increase if the latest (post–financial crisis) data points are included.20 Figure 7.3 highlights some of the within-country income inequalities in the United States as well as in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Figure 7.2.

As the OECD has observed, “Globalisation, skill-biased technological progress and institutional and regulatory reforms” are among “the most important impacts on widening inequality in OECD countries.”14 Figure 7.1. Income inequality in OECD countries, mid-1980s and late 2000s. The data for the mid-1980s refer to the early 1990s for the Czech Republic and Hungary. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 2011b, Growing Income Inequality in OECD Countries: What Drives It and How Can Policy Tackle It?, OECD Forum on Tackling Inequality, Paris, 2 May, 6, accessed 3 February 2013, http://www.oecd.org/els/socialpoliciesanddata/47723414.pdf.

This, however, is inconsistent with evidence on heightened inequality globally, including in poor countries.22 World Bank researcher Branko Milanović and economist Lynn Squire show that innovation has an adverse initial impact among those who are constrained in their ability to profit from it, that is, people with lower levels of skill and initial investments.23 However, some dispute that global integration unequivocally leads to growing income inequality. Some studies, for example, appear to show that “rising imports from developing countries are associated with declining income inequality in advanced countries.”24 This finding refers specifically to the effect of trade openness. It also serves as evidence that thoughtfully managed integration has the potential to bring about decreasing inequality and the aforementioned improvements in living standards, especially when the detrimental effects of financial integration can be contained.25 TABLE 7.1 WAGE DIFFERENTIALS, SKILLED VERSUS UNSKILLED LABORERS (US$), 2009 Notes: Food prices are estimated from a basket of 39 food products with weights reflecting West European consumption patterns.


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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

I’ve been in rooms and seen people stand up and say, ‘I’m Bob Kenny and I’m rich.’ And then they burst into tears.” — It is not just the super-rich who don’t like to talk about rising income inequality. It can be an ideologically uncomfortable conversation for many of the rest of us, too. That’s because even—or perhaps particularly—in the view of its most ardent supporters, global capitalism wasn’t supposed to work quite this way. Until the past few decades, the received wisdom among economists was that income inequality would be fairly low in the preindustrial era—overall wealth and productivity were fairly small, so there wasn’t that much for an elite to capture—then spike during industrialization, as the industrialists and industrial workers outstripped farmers (think of China today).

Until the past few decades, the received wisdom among economists was that income inequality would be fairly low in the preindustrial era—overall wealth and productivity were fairly small, so there wasn’t that much for an elite to capture—then spike during industrialization, as the industrialists and industrial workers outstripped farmers (think of China today). Finally, in fully industrialized or postindustrial societies, income inequality would again decrease as education became more widespread and the state played a bigger, more redistributive role. This view of the relationship between economic development and income inequality was first and most clearly articulated by Simon Kuznets, a Belarusian-born immigrant to the United States. Kuznets illustrated his theory with one of the most famous graphs in economics—the Kuznets curve, an upside-down U that traces the movement of society as its economy becomes more sophisticated and productive, from low inequality, to high inequality, and back down to low inequality.

The income of the middle class started to stagnate and those at the top began to pull away from everyone else. This shift was most pronounced in the United States, but by the twenty-first century, surging income inequality had become a worldwide phenomenon, visible in most of the developed Western economies as well as in the rising emerging markets. — The switch from the America of the Great Compression to the America of the 1 percent is still so recent that our intuitive beliefs about how capitalism works haven’t caught up with the reality. In fact, surging income inequality is such a strong violation of our expectations that most of us don’t realize it is happening. That is what Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely discovered in a 2011 experiment with Michael Norton of Harvard Business School.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

These developments would have important economic ramifications in future years. Perhaps not unrelated to these developments, and indicating how the world was changing at that time, in 1912 an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, had proposed a way to measure income inequality in countries. The use of the so-called Gini coefficient, which soon became a popular statistic, may indicate that income inequality had become a serious social concern by that time. Workers’ associations and labor unions were being created in various countries and were pushing for more rights and better working conditions for workers. Some of the labor unions would acquire increasing political and economic power with the passing of time, especially, but not only, in Europe.

Dixit, Avinash K., 1996, The Making of Economic Policy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Dollar, D. and A. Kray, 2002, “Growth Is Good for the Poor,” Journal of Economic Growth 7 (4), pp. 195–225. Dorn, Florian, 2016, “On Data and Trends in Income Inequality,” CESifo DICE REPORT Journal for Institutional Comparisons 14 (4) (Winter), pp. 54–64. Drennan, Matthew P., 2015, Income Inequality: Why It Matters and Why Most Economists Didn’t Notice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Bibliography 407 Dudley, Susan E., 2013, “OMB’s Reported Benefits of Regulation: Too Good to Be True?” Regulation 36 (2) (Summer), pp. 26–30.

See Sovereign debt Deconstruction of administrative state, 86 Defense spending lobbyists and, 178–79 as public good, 175–78 in US, 178 Deficits, 72 430 Index Democracy income inequality and, 400 income redistribution and, 223 legal rules and, 134 regulations and, 134 welfare policies and, 384 Demsetz, Harold, 151 Denmark executive compensation in, 364 ex post income distribution in, 118 income redistribution in, 210 marginal tax rates in, 376 public spending in, 122 taxation in, 371, 381 Dependency, income redistribution and, 209–10 Dependent workers income inequality and, 221, 316, 387 increase in, 384–85 marginal tax rates for, 373 regulations and, 23 in US, 250 Depreciation, 308 Deregulation overview, 87–88 economic freedom and, 86 income redistribution and, 197 potential for future crises and, 108, 109 in US, 82 Deutsche Bank, 364 Dickens, Charles, 358–59 Direct government intervention, 32–33, 36, 230 Discretion, 71, 151–52 Dishonesty, effect on market, 79, 83 Djokovic, Novak, 351–53 Dorfman, Robert, 3 Drones as externality, 165 Drucker, Peter, 82 Duesenberry, James R., 3, 319 Du Pont, Pierre, 307 Dutch Republic, welfare policies in, 50 Dynamic scoring, 76 Eastern Europe Gini coefficient in, 317 laissez faire in, 35 taxation in, 381–82 Easy credit, 107–9 Eckstein, Otto, 2–5 Economic aristocracy, 117–18 Economic freedom deregulation and, 86 economic planning and, 159 income redistribution and, 159–60 regulations, effect of, 130–31 Economic growth.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

expenditure on education: Mark Aguiar and Mark Bils, “Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?,” American Economic Review 105, no. 9 (September 2015): 2725–56, 2746, 2753. Hereafter cited as Aguiar and Bils, “Has Consumption Inequality Mirrored Income Inequality?” Aguiar and Bils study rising consumption inequality between 1980 and 2010 and report that over the course of these three decades, consumption inequality increased by a little more than 30 percent, a rise that roughly equaled the increase of income inequality over the same period. They also break down rising consumption inequality across categories of consumption and report that by 2008–10, education expenditures had become the single most income elastic expenditure category.

between the 50th and 75th percentiles: Drennan, Income Inequality, 41; Bricker et al., “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2007 to 2010: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 98, no. 2 (June 2012): 55, http://federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2012/PDF/scf12.pdf. See also Robert Hockett and Daniel Dillon, “Income Inequality and Market Fragility: Some Empirics in the Political Economy of Finance” (unpublished manuscript, January 21, 2013), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2204710. Hereafter cited as Hockett and Dillon, “Income Inequality and Market Fragility.” Debt payments unsurprisingly rose alongside debt for the middle class, reaching roughly a fifth of income for the bottom 90 percent by 2010.

The same period naturally produced a reciprocal divergence in time allocated to work’s mirror image, leisure: the gap between hours spent in leisure by those at the 90th and the 10th percentiles of the leisure distribution increased by fourteen hours per week between 1965 and 2003. Rising income inequality coincides with rising inequality in labor and a mirror-image trend in leisure. Moreover, income inequality and the time divide turn out to be closely correlated, and indeed intertwined, so that the same people who capture rising incomes also provide rising labor (and enjoy falling leisure). The increase in long work hours has been concentrated among highly paid and highly educated workers and the increase in leisure among low-paid, less educated workers.


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The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Household Incomes: A 51-Year Perspective,” Advisor Perspectives, October 16, 2018, https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective (accessed June 27, 2019). 20. Chad Stone et al., “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 11, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality (accessed June 27, 2019). 21. Jeff Guo, “Income Inequality Today May Be Higher Today Than in Any Other Era,” Washington Post, July 1, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/01/income-inequality-today-may-be-the-highest-since-the-nations-founding/?utm_term=.0759a7e38717 (accessed June 27, 2019); and “GINI Index for the United States,” Federal Reserve Bank of St.

For a time—almost half a century—the good job defined workers’ identities, provided them with self-esteem and a gateway to the middle class, and played an important role in reducing income inequality.38 A product of social phase change, the good job has been with us for less than seventy-five years. As we discuss in chapter 6, the new economic and work structures that have been unleashed by the Autonomous Revolution pose an existential threat to it. For all our leaders’ efforts to bring them back, good jobs are rapidly disappearing—and income inequality has returned to levels that haven’t been seen since the Gilded Age. The steam engine and electricity also triggered structural transformations driven by thought.

“Labor Unions in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States#/media/File:United_States_union_membership_and_inequality,_top_1%25_income_share,_1910_to_2010.png (accessed June 26, 2019). 37. Ibid., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Union_membership_in_us_1930-2010.png (accessed June 26, 2019). 38. “Income Inequality in the United States,” Inequality.org, https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/ (accessed June 26, 2019). 39. Jennifer 8. Lee, “When Horses Posed a Public Health Hazard,” City Room (blog), New York Times, June 9, 2008, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/when-horses-posed-a-public-health-hazard/?_r=0 (accessed June 26, 2019). 40.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Schumpeter, Joseph Second World War Senior, Nassau Serco share prices shareholder value short-termism and investments empirical evidence of investors’ discount rates policy implications value of future cash-flows single European market smart phones social care Solyndra Spain austerity debt problems GDP investment activity private debt unemployment stagnation economic secular state investment banks funding for green projects renewable energy investments Stirling, Andy stock market values Szczurek, Mateusz T taxation avoidance and evasion energy and materials favourable rates income tax rates inequality policy preferential treatment reform revenues short-term gains tax breaks technological revolutions consumer demand diffusion green direction green growth history recessions telecommunications Tesla Motors Thatcher, Margaret top earners Australia Canada United Kingdom United States trade unions Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) transparency Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance Turkey income inequality U unemployment Europe global southern Europe United Kingdom United States young people universal basic income United Kingdom GDP income inequality inequality investment labour productivity growth private debt public deficit Public Finance Initiative (PFI) recessions and recovery research and development sectoral financial balances support for banks top earners unemployment wages United States average real wage index business models emergency loans to banks energy policies GDP income inequality investment Japanese competition labour productivity growth National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform poverty private debt public deficit research and development sectoral financial balances Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme top earners trickle-down strategy unemployment wages wealth US legislation Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Taxpayer Relief Act 2012 V Veblen, Thorstein venture capital venture capitalism Volcker, Paul Von Hayek, Friedrich W wages and labour productivity average real wage index higher-skilled workers legal minimum lower-skilled workers United Kingdom wealth creation welfare payments welfare state western capitalism collapse failures Wolf, Martin Woodford, Michael world economy Cambridge Alphametrics Model (CAM) Y Yellen, Janet youth unemployment

‘Advanced economies’ includes all high-income OECD countries, with the exception of South Korea. 21 ILO, Global Wage Report 2012/13, Geneva, International Labour Organisation, 2013. 22 OECD, World Economic Outlook: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy, Paris, OECD Publishing, 2007, Figure 5.15. 23 OECD, Income Inequality: The Gap between Rich and Poor, Paris, OECD Publishing, 2015. 24 T. Piketty and E. Saez, ‘Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 118, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–39, Tables A3 and A6—Updated version downloaded from http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/. Figures are in real 2013 dollars and include capital gains (accessed 12 April 2016). 25 OECD, OECD Employment Outlook 2012, Paris, OECD Publishing, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/empl_outlook-2012-en (accessed 12 April 2016).

Ostry, Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?, International Monetary Fund Staff Discussion Note No. 11/08, April 2011, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1108.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016); F. Cingano, Trends in Income Inequality and Its Impact on Economic Growth, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 163, December 2014, http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/trends-in-income-inequality-and-its-impact-on-economic-growth-SEM-WP163.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016). 57 J. D. Ostry, A. Berg and C. G. Tsangarides, Redistribution, Inequality and Growth, IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN 14/02, 2014, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016).


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The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Then, from the late 1980s, banking failures and financial crises started to re-appear again with the advent of a new era of ‘selfregulation’. 238 Moss then compared his work on the history of US financial regulation and bank failures with the historical evidence on income inequality charted by Piketty and Saez, and shown earlier in figure 1.2. The two data sets showed a near complete correlation.239 Bank failures and the level of income inequality both rose sharply in the 1920s. From the 1930s through to the end of the 1970s, there were virtually no bank failures while income inequality fell. From the early 1980s, the pattern of the 1920s was repeated. Income inequality rose along with the incidence of financial and banking crises. ‘I could hardly believe how tight the fit was—it was a stunning correlation,’ Moss told the New York Times.

There is some evidence about trends in global inequality as measured using individual incomes across countries. One such study has concluded that global inequality has been rising over the last twenty years. See eg, B Milanovic, Global Inequality Recalculated, World Bank, 2010. 44 M. Feldstein, ‘Is Income Inequality Really a Problem?’, in Income Inequality Issues and Policy Options: A Symposium Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, August 27-29, 1998. 45 A O’Hear, ‘Equality’, New Statesman, 23 April 2001. 46 R North, Rich Is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence, Social Affairs Unit, 2005. 47 http://www.imf.org/external/np/vc/2011/010411.htm. 2 ‘ZAPPING LABOUR’ Throughout her political career, Margaret Thatcher liked nothing more than to drop the name of Friedrich von Hayek—the leading, post-war, prophet of free-markets and small government.

, New York Times, 14 December, 2010; JP Fitoussi and F Saraceno, Inequality and Macroeconomic Performance, Centre de recherché en economie de sciences Po, 2010; R J Rajan, Faultlines, Princeton University Press, 2010, chapter 1; Holtham, op. cit; ‘Interview with Dr Ravi Batra’, Truthout, 16 March, 2009; R Batra, The Great Depression of 1990, Dell Publishing, 1988; M Kumhof and R Rancière, ‘Inequality, Leverage and Crisis’, IMF Working Paper, WP/10/268, November 2010, p 3. 243 Kumhof and Rancière, op. cit. 244 D Laibson, ‘Did Rising Income Inequality Help to Generate the Recent Financial Crisis?’, The Economist, 29 August, 2010. 245 Glaeser, op. cit. 246 Atkinson and Morelli, op. cit. p 57. 247 JP Fitoussi and F Saraceno, op. cit. 248 M Iacoviello, ‘Household Debt and Income Inequality, 1963-2003’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, August, 2008. 249 Kumhof and Rancière, op. cit. p 3. 250 T Cowen, ‘The Inequality That Matters’, The American Interest Online, Jan-Feb, 2011. 251 Moss, Harvard Magazine, op. cit. 252 Ajay Kapur et al, ‘The Global Investigator: Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances’, Citigroup Equity Research, October 14, 2005. 253 RN Goodwin, ‘The Selling of Government’, Los Angeles Times, 30 January 1997. 254 J Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties, Allen Lane, 2003. 255 K Phillips, ‘Too much wealth, too little democracy.’


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

That changed in the early 1980s when the government stopped enforcing antitrust laws and the US corporate sector started the first of a series of merger waves. Each economic boom has led to greater market power for corporations. It is unsurprising that income inequality then starts to rise again in the 1980s. When markets have become more concentrated after merger waves, income inequality has risen. When antitrust laws have been vigorously enforced, income inequality has been lower (Figure 10.7). Figure 10.7 Income Inequality in the United States versus Antitrust Enforcement SOURCE: Einer Elhauge, “Horizontal Shareholding,” Harvard Law Review 129, no. 5 (March 2016). The increase in inequality started after the antitrust revolution under President Ronald Reagan.

In the following pages, we'll review the consequences of concentration in turn: higher prices, fewer startups, lower productivity, lower wages, higher income inequality, less investment, and the withering of American towns and smaller cities. Lower Wages and Greater Income Inequality Almost all the focus in industrial concentration has been on profits, productivity, and investment, but the biggest impact has been on wages. Workers have systematically lost power versus large companies that now dominate industries. Dozens of studies now document how industrial concentration is driving income inequality. The smoking gun, however, has been missing. Researchers had the intuition but could not prove that monopsonies, particularly at the local level, affected consumer wages.

Table of Contents Cover Introduction Chapter One: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Two: Dividing Up the Turf Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Three: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Lower Wages and Greater Income Inequality Higher Prices Fewer Startups and Jobs Lower Productivity Lower Investment Localism and Diversity Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Four: Squeezing the Worker Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Five: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Six: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Monopolies (and Local Monopolies) Duopolies Oligopolies Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Seven: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Eight: Regulation and Chemotherapy Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Nine: Morganizing America Key Thoughts from the Chapter Chapter Ten: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Key Thoughts from the Chapter Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Principles for Reform Solutions and Remedies And Finally, What You Can Do … Notes Introduction Chapter 1: Where Buffett and Silicon Valley Billionaires Agree Chapter 2: Dividing Up the Turf Chapter 3: What Monopolies and King Kong Have in Common Chapter 4: Squeezing the Worker Chapter 5: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade Chapter 6: Toll Roads and Robber Barons Chapter 7: What Trusts and Nazis Had in Common Chapter 8: Regulation and Chemotherapy Chapter 9: Morganizing America Chapter 10: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom Acknowledgments About the Authors Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 2 Table 2.1 The Largest Highly Concentrated Industries List of Illustrations Chapter 1 Figure 1.1 Merger Manias: 1890–2015 Figure 1.2 Collapse in the Number of US Public Companies Since 1996 Figure 1.3 Collapse in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Figure 1.4 Frequency of the Words “Competition,” “Competitors,” and “Pressure” in Annual Reports Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Zero and Negative Central Bank Rates Promote Cartels Chapter 3 Figure 3.1 The US Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial over Time Figure 3.2 New Firms Play a Decreasing Role in the Economy Figure 3.3 Growth Phases of Organisms and Companies Figure 3.4 Lower Productivity Growth as Fewer Firms Enter Figure 3.5 Investment Significantly Lagging Profitability Chapter 4 Figure 4.1 Variant Perception US Wages Leading Indicator Figure 4.2 Percentage of Workers with Noncompete Agreements, by Group Figure 4.3 States That Do Not Enforce Noncompetes Have Higher Wages Figure 4.4 Rural Areas Are Lagging (aggregate wage growth, year-over-year, third quarter 2016) Figure 4.5 Monopsonies in Labor Markets: Commuting Zones with High Labor Concentration Figure 4.6 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Figure 4.7 Union Membership versus Income Distribution to Top 10% Figure 4.8 Wage Growth Closely Associated with Strikes Figure 4.9 The Great Suppression: Falling Unions and Increasing Licensing, 1950s–Today Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 Rail Mergers: Making of the Big Four Figure 6.2 Airline Mergers in Today's Oligopoly Figure 6.3 Banking Mergers in the United States Figure 6.4 Life Expectancy versus Health Expenditure over Time (1970–2014) Figure 6.5 Leading Global Meat Processing Firms Timeline of Ownership Changes, 1996–2016 Chapter 7 Figure 7.1 The First and Second Merger Waves (1890–1903, 1920–1930) Figure 7.2 Antitrust Enforcement Budget Figure 7.3 Twenty Years of Industry Consolidation Figure 7.4 Three Mega Merger Waves in the Past Three Decades Figure 7.5 Proportion of Completed Mergers and Acquisitions Chapter 8 Figure 8.1 Total US Patents Issued Annually, 1900–2014 Figure 8.2 Pages in the Federal Register (1936–2015) Figure 8.3 Companies That Lobby Extensively Have Higher Returns Figure 8.4 Revolving Door between Goldman Sachs and the Federal Government Figure 8.5 Revolving Door between Monsanto and the Federal Government Chapter 9 Figure 9.1 Largest Owners of US Banks (as of 2016 Q2) Figure 9.2 Share of Passively Managed Assets in US Markets Figure 9.3 S&P 500 Ownership by “Big 3” Figure 9.4 Net Investment by Nonfinancial Businesses Figure 9.5 Buybacks Zoom to Record Highs Chapter 10 Figure 10.1 Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2015 Figure 10.2 The Global Wealth Pyramid, 2017 Figure 10.3 Rising Inequality. Selected Gini Coefficients Figure 10.4 Rising CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio, 1965–2014 Figure 10.5 Worker Pay Is Not Keeping Up with Worker Productivity Figure 10.6 Corporate Profits versus Employee Compensation Figure 10.7 Income Inequality in the United States versus Antitrust Enforcement Figure 10.8 Higher Markups Lead to Lower Wages Figure 10.9 Markups in Advanced Economies Have Been Rising since the 1980s Figure 10.10 US Net Wealth Shares: Top 0.1% versus Bottom 90% “I think the book is too hard on some companies and CEOs.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

And when all the measures, applied to lots of different countries, are taken together, the big picture is clear: in the most prosperous parts of the world, we are seeing a move toward societies with greater income inequality. Figure 8.3: Income Shares of the Top 1 Percent from 1981 to 2016 (or Latest)18 Why is income inequality rising, though? The short answer is that valuable capital is being shared out in an increasingly unequal way. As a result, the income that flows to those who hold that capital is increasingly unequal, too. More specifically, rising income inequality comes from increasingly unequal returns both on human capital and on traditional capital. Let us take each of those in turn.

Indeed, in many countries salaries and wages make up about three-quarters of the total income in the economy.19 It should therefore come as no surprise that much of the general rise in income inequality from before is rooted in a rise in labor income inequality in particular. In other words, inequality is rising because workers are being paid more and more unequally for their efforts.20 One way to see that labor income inequality is rising is to compare different income deciles. Anthony Atkinson, a leading scholar of inequality, found that over the last few decades, the wages of the best-paid 10 percent of workers have risen relative to the wages of the lowest-paid 10 percent of workers almost everywhere around the world, with “very few exceptions.”21 Another way to see it is to look right at the very top of the labor income distribution, much as we did with income in general.

This is not an inconvenient fact to be brushed aside, but a revealing one, suggesting that what countries do in response to technological change really matters. As the leading scholars of inequality put it, “income inequality has increased in nearly all world regions in recent decades, but at different speeds. The fact that inequality levels are so different among countries, even when countries share similar levels of development, highlights the important roles that national policies and institutions play in shaping inequality.”51 Income inequalities are not inevitable. The only thing that is inevitable is that when some people arrive in this world, the lottery of life might or might not have granted them some unique talents and abilities, might or might not have placed them with particularly pleasant and affluent parents.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

The gap between the top fifth—those with household incomes of $112,000 or more in 201410—and the 80 percent below them is the ‘Great Divide’ in both the American economy and in American society. Let’s look at income first. While there is plenty of disagreement about the extent and causes of income inequality, one thing is absolutely clear and uncontested: it is the result of the top pulling away. As Bill Gale, Melissa Kearney, and Peter Orszag put it, “The high level of U.S. income inequality is characterized by a wide divergence in income between higher-income households and those at the middle and below.”11 Over the last three or four decades, income inequality has increased in the United States, but only at the top. There has been no increase in inequality in the bottom 80 percent of the population.

Raj Chetty’s team, working with the highest quality data, concluded that “[relative] social mobility has remained stable over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States.”12 On the other side of the argument, scholars like Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist at the Chicago Fed, are busy producing evidence that relative mobility rates began to decline at some point in the 1970s, at around the same time inequality started to rise.13 The idea that rising income inequality will mean lower rates of intergenerational mobility is intuitively persuasive. As Sawhill puts it: “When the rungs of the income ladder get too far apart, it is harder to climb.”14 In a 2012 speech, the economist Alan Krueger coined a vivid phrase for this relationship between the gap between rich and poor and the lack of mobility: “The Great Gatsby Curve.”15 Kreuger cited work from economist Miles Corak showing that nations with higher income inequality seemed to have lower rates of intergenerational mobility.16 A lot of ink has been spilled and a lot of regressions have been run by economists attempting to prove or disprove this hypothesis.17 On balance, the thesis has to be described as not proven, but not not proven either.

Census Bureau, “Percent Distribution of Households, by Selected Characteristics Within Income Quintile and Top 5 Percent in 2014,” Table HINC-05 (www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-hinc/hinc-05.html). 11. William Gale, Melissa Kearney, and Peter Orszag, “Would a Significant Increase in the Top Income Tax Rate Substantially Alter Income Inequality?” Brookings, September 2015 (www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/would-top-income-tax-alter-income-inequality.pdf). 12. Pablo Mitnik, Erin Cumberworth, and David Grusky, “Social Mobility in a High-Inequality Regime,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 663, no. 1 (January 2016): pp. 140–84. 13. It is worth noting, however, that there have also been income gains in the bottom 40 percent and the “middle” 40 percent.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

–Peter Boettke, University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University “Arguing the unarguable, Watkins and Brook blow the top off established wisdom on the evil of income inequality and the culpability of the 1%. Today’s one-sided debate on income inequality amounts to envy politics, not logic or fact, as these authors demonstrate in their explosive and entertaining book, Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. This book shows why the profit motive is noble and shows that government intervention in all areas of our lives—not income inequality—is what’s really threatening the American Dream. A must read for those who desire prosperity for more of the world’s people.”

A key element is statistical data compiled by French economist Thomas Piketty. Building on research he conducted with economist Emmanuel Saez beginning in the early 2000s, Piketty uses tax data from the IRS to trace the path of income inequality over the last century. As we can see in Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3, he finds that, after declining during the post–World War II era, income inequality has been rising for the last forty years, driven primarily by the top 1 percent of earners. In addition to income inequality, which refers to differences in the amount of money that people earn on a regular basis, such as their annual salaries, Piketty also found a rising wealth inequality, which refers to differences in people’s net worth.3 For our purposes, the details of these trends aren’t important.

Auerbach and Kevin Hassett, “Capital Taxation in the Twenty-First Century,” American Economic Association, January 3, 2015, https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2015conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=421 (accessed April 12, 2015). On problems with Piketty’s data on income inequality, see Phil Gramm and Michael Solon, “How to Distort Income Inequality,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/phil-gramm-and-michael-solon-how-to-distort-income-inequality-1415749856 (accessed April 12, 2015); and Alan Cole, “Income Data Is a Poor Measure of Inequality,” Tax Foundation, August 13, 2014, http://taxfoundation.org/article/income-data-poor-measure-inequality (accessed April 12, 2015). 5.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

In short, the top 1 percent now have nearly twice as large a share of the nation’s wealth as the bottom 90 percent, thoroughly justifying the labeling of our age as a new Gilded Age.37 A closer comparison of Figures 2.8 and 2.9 reveals that the U-turn toward inequality in wealth lagged about five to ten years behind the comparable U-turn in the distribution of income (mid-1980s vs. mid-1970s)—presumably, it takes several years of multimillion-dollar bonuses to afford your first private jet. As Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman observe, “Income inequality has a snowballing effect on wealth distribution.”38 On the other hand, the dramatic recent increase in wealth inequality has begun to feed back into income inequality: Since about 2000 most of the increase in income inequality has been due to inequality in capital income.39 These two forms of economic inequality are thus mutually reinforcing. Emmanuel Saez, a leading scholar in this field, concludes: U.S. income and wealth concentrations both fell dramatically during the first part of the 20th century, and remained low and stable during three decades after World War II, but there has been a sharp increase in inequality since the 1970s.

The assumptions underlying this approach remain controversial among economists, but an alternative, more conventional approach yields similar long-term inverted U-curves. See Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530360535135. For a recent independent review of multiple statistical approaches to historical trends in income inequality that confirms the basic inverted-U pattern shown in Figure 2.8, see Chad Stone et al., “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality” (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 21, 2019). Generally speaking, conservative analysts argue that mainstream estimates of inequality are too high, but our focus here is not on the absolute level of inequality, but on the long-run trends, up and down, and the basic inverted U curve of income and wealth inequality is essentially accepted by experts of all partisan stripes. 30 Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains, 194–95. 31 Goldin and Katz, “Decreasing (and then Increasing) Inequality in America,” 37–82. 32 For an authoritative account of long-run trends in wealth, see Edward N.

Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) and Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 60 See C. Cindy Fan and Emilio Casetti, “The Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of US Regional Income Inequality, 1950–1989,” The Annals of Regional Science 28, no. 2 (June 1994): 177–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01581768; David J. Peters, “American Income Inequality Across Economic and Geographic Space, 1970–2010,” Social Science Research 42, no. 6 (November 1, 2013): 1490–1504, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.06.009; Orley M. Amos, “Evidence of Increasing Regional Income Variation in the United States: 1969–2006,” Modern Economy 5 (January 1, 2014): 520–32, https://doi.org/10.4236/me.2014.55049; Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, “Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S.


pages: 267 words: 79,905

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage by Ruth Fincher, Peter Saunders

barriers to entry, classic study, ending welfare as we know it, financial independence, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, open economy, pink-collar, positional goods, purchasing power parity, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

For example, the United Nations Human Development Report 1993 showed that among the twenty industrialised countries for which figures were available for the period 1985–89, the income share of the lowest 40 per cent of households was smallest in Australia, and the ratio of the incomes of the highest 20 per cent to those of the lowest 20 per cent was greatest.9 When the Human Development Index (HDI) is adjusted for this relatively unequal distribution, Australia’s HDI rank drops from seventh to eleventh among the industrial countries, one of the largest falls recorded. The Economist (November 5–11, 1994, pp. 19–23) cited similar figures, giving the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland the highest level of income inequality among thirteen countries, and Sweden and Japan the lowest inequality. Table 2.2 presents the results of a survey by Atkinson (1994), which shows income inequality in seventeen OECD countries in the late 1980s. The level of income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, was highest in the United States, with Australia being ranked as the sixth most unequal of these countries, with a Gini coefficient 15 per cent higher than the mean.

x PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 x Figures and tables FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES 4.1 Percentage of births attributable to women aged 15–19 4.2 Labour force participation of mothers by age of youngest child 4.3 Apparent retention rates to year 12 4.4 Young people at work, in education, and on the margins, 1996 6.1 Residential turnover rate, Kelsey, Cairns, Australia, 1991–96 6.2 Unemployment rate, Kelsey, Cairns, Australia, 1996 6.3 Cairns, demarcated by statistical subdivisions, 1996 6.4 Total population, Cairns, 1981–96 6.5 Concentration of public housing by postcode, Cairns, 1996 7.1 Employment levels, 1978–98 7.2 Relative changes in salaries and wages, 1984 to 1998 7.3 Incidence of low-paid male workers within industries, 1981 and 1993 7.4 Incidence of low-paid female workers within industries, 1981 and 1993 108 109 113 119 165 167 169 170 174 197 201 202 203 xi PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xi CREATING UNEQUAL FUTURES? TABLES 2.1 Relationship between poverty and social exclusion 2.2 Income inequality in OECD countries, late 1980s 2.3 Income inequality in countries in LIS database, mid-1980s 2.4 Comparison of estimates of poverty in Australia from LIS studies 2.5 Alternative estimates of relative low income in developed economies in the early 1990s 3.1 Articles on poverty and welfare in international news: 1 July–30 September 1998 3.2 Articles on poverty and welfare in domestic news: 1 July–30 September, 1998 4.1 Child poverty rates: relative poverty line 4.2 Child poverty rates: ‘real poverty line’ 4.3 Children aged 0–4 years and 5–14 years to 2006 4.4 Living circumstances of children, 1992 and 1996 4.5 Labour force status of parents with children aged under 15 years 4.6 Access and participation indicators for low socioeconomic status group, 1991–95, age group 15–24 4.7 18- to 19-year-old school leavers engaged in marginalising and non-marginalising activities, May 1996 4.8 Characteristics of 19-year-olds in 1994 and 1995 who have been consistently engaged in marginalising activities from age 16 years 5.1 Head count measures of poverty as measured by the per cent of households and income units with income below various percentages of the Australian median income, 1994–95 5.2 Multi-dimensional nature of indigenous poverty, 1994 5.3 Factors potentially correlated with poverty among indigenous households, 1994 6.1 Five-yearly population growth rate, Cairns, Kelsey, Australia, 1981–86 6.2 Dwelling structure, Cairns, Kelsey, Australia, 1996 6.3 Housing tenure, Cairns, Kelsey, Australia, 1996 6.4 Age profile, Kelsey, Cairns, Australia, 1996 6.5 Total weekly household income, Cairns, Kelsey and Australia, 1996 52 58 59 60 62 79 81 103 104 105 106 110 113 118 120 145 147 150 164 165 166 166 167 xii PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xii FIGURES AND TABLES 7.1 Comparison between static and dynamic accounts of the labour market, Australia, mid-1990s 7.2 Proportion of dual wage-earning households by wage levels, Australia 1988–89 7.3 Occupation of spouse for various categories of wage-earning household reference persons, Australia 1988–89 7.4 Occupational composition of households 7.5 Access to training for salesworkers, labourers and plant and machine operators, Australia 1993 7.6 Overview of low-wage firms in Australia, 1995–96 7.7 Characteristics of low-wage firms in Australia, 1995–96 205 210 211 212 218 218 219 xiii PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xiii Abbreviations ABBREVIATIONS ABC ABR ABS ACA ACIRRT ACOSS ACTU ADAM AFR ALP ATSIC AWIRS AWOTE BBC BCA BFS CDC CDEP CNN DEETYA EITC ESCAP FNQ GDP Australian Broadcasting Commission Aboriginals Benefit Reserve Australian Bureau of Statistics ‘A Current Affair’ Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training Australian Council of Social Service Australian Council of Trade Unions Agreements Database and Monitor Australian Financial Review Australian Labor Party Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings British Broadcasting Corporation Business Council of Australia Business Funding Scheme Commercial Development Corporation Community Development Employment Projects Cable News Network Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs earned income tax credit Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Far North Queensland Gross Domestic Product xiv PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xiv ABBREVIATIONS HDI HDIPC IBIP ILC IMF LIS MIRE NATSIS OECD PPPs PR RMI SMH UN UNICEF Human Development Index Household Disposable Income Per Capita Indigenous Business Incentives Program Indigenous Land Corporation International Monetary Fund Luxembourg Income Study Mission Recherche National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Purchasing Power Parties public relations Revenu minimum d’insertion Sydney Morning Herald United Nations United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund xv PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xv This page intentionally left blank PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\PRELIMS p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 6232 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 xvi 1 The complex contexts of Australian inequality Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders CREATING UNEQUAL FUTURES THE COMPLEX CONTEXTS OF AUSTRALIAN INEQUALITY The eminent economist and commentator, John Kenneth Galbraith, recently identified persistent inequality in the distribution of income (and urban poverty in particular) as a major piece of ‘unfinished business’ at the end of the twentieth century (Galbraith 1999).

The extent to which this is an accurate picture of comparative distributional trends is addressed in detail in Whiteford (1998). In brief, in that paper, I argue that the new view that Australia is one of the most unequal of developed countries is incorrect. Indeed, if a fully comprehensive framework for measuring income inequality were used, I argue that Australia is likely to remain among the group of developed countries with relatively lower income inequality, although probably not as equal as the Scandinavian countries. In reaching this conclusion, I emphasise the consistent finding that Australia continues to have a relatively compressed earnings distribution, that the Australian taxation system has had one of the most progressive structures of all OECD countries, and that the social security system is probably the most progressive of all OECD countries.1 Moreover, different comparative studies continue to show differing trends.


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

While nearly all research on inequality focuses on market or disposable income and increasingly wealth inequality, what matters most to individuals’ sense of welfare is discretionary income, after accounting for the positive direct effects of access to credit. Simply put, financialization and the data revolution combined have increased discretionary income inequality, even if disposable income inequality is held constant. And those excluded from credit markets will not enjoy the benefits of income smoothing or homeownership in the first place. There is now a large literature showing that the brunt of unemployment and other labor market risks are borne by those with lower incomes (Häusermann, Kurer, and Schwander 2015; Rehm, Hacker, and Schlesinger 2012; Rueda 2007).

While nearly all research on inequality focuses on market or disposable income and increasingly wealth inequality, what matters most to individuals’ sense of welfare is discretionary income, after accounting for the positive direct effects of access to credit. Simply put, financialization and the data revolution combined have increased discretionary income inequality, even if disposable income inequality is held constant. And those excluded from credit markets will not enjoy the benefits of income smoothing or homeownership in the first place. There is now a large literature showing that the brunt of unemployment and other labor market risks are borne by those with lower incomes (Häusermann, Kurer, and Schwander 2015; Rehm, Hacker, and Schlesinger 2012; Rueda 2007).

While nearly all research on inequality focuses on market or disposable income and increasingly wealth inequality, what matters most to individuals’ sense of welfare is discretionary income, after accounting for the positive direct effects of access to credit. Simply put, financialization and the data revolution combined have increased discretionary income inequality, even if disposable income inequality is held constant. And those excluded from credit markets will not enjoy the benefits of income smoothing or homeownership in the first place. There is now a large literature showing that the brunt of unemployment and other labor market risks are borne by those with lower incomes (Häusermann, Kurer, and Schwander 2015; Rehm, Hacker, and Schlesinger 2012; Rueda 2007).


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

As with India, so with the world, inequities in power, money and resources are working against action to promote health equity. As one example, a 2014 report from the OECD, the rich country club, shows that income inequality increased in almost all OECD countries – Figure 11.1. The most unequal of the rich countries is Mexico, followed by Turkey and the US.6 For all the reasons reviewed earlier, and reprised by Drèze and Sen (although they think that this Gini measure doesn’t adequately capture the ill-effects on the poor), increases in income inequality will have an adverse effect on living standards, and hence on the health of those lower down the social scale. But won’t redistribution of income harm economic growth?

., here Gandhi, Mahatma, here, here gangs, here, here Gawande, Atul, here GDP, measurement of, here gender equity, move to, here General Motors, here Georgia, here Gershwin, George, here Glasgow, here, here, here, here, here, here, here combating gang violence, here life expectancy, here, here, here mortality rates, here Glass, Norman, here Gleneagles Summit, here Global Burden of Disease, here global warming, see climate change global wealth, increasing, here Gnarr, Jon, here Goldblatt, Peter, here golf, here Gordon, David, here, here, here, here Gornall, Jonathan, here Göteborg, here Great Gatsby Curve, here Greece, here, here financial crisis and austerity, here, here, here, here green space, here grooming, in apes, here, here Guardian, here Guinea-Bissau, here, here Gunbalanya, here, here, here Hacker, Jacob, here, here Haiti earthquake, here Hampshire, Stuart, here, here HAPIEE studies, here ul Haq, Mahbub, here Hayek, Friedrich von, here health advice, here health and safety regulations, here, here health and well-being boards, here health care systems, here health inequities (definition), here heart disease, here, here, here, here, here, here, here abolition of, here and adverse childhood experience, here, here in Australian aboriginals, here and civil servants, here, here, here and exercise, here and high status, here, here and Japanese migrants, here and job strain, here Hertzman, Clyde, here, here Heymann, Jody, here high blood pressure, here, here, here HIV/AIDS, here, here, here, here homicide, here, here, here Hong Kong, here, here HPA axis, here Human Development Index (HDI), here, here, here, here Hungary, here, here, here Hutton, Will, here Huxley, Aldous, here Hyder, Shaina, here Iceland, here, here, here, here, here ideology, here, here income inequalities, here, here, here, here, here, here India, here, here, here, here average BMI, here caste system and education, here child mortality, here, here, here cotton farmers, here distrust of education system, here income inequalities, here life expectancy, here, here, here, here, here literacy, here scavengers, here, here, here, here see also Kerala infant mortality, here inherited wealth, here Institute of Economic Affairs, here intergenerational earnings elasticity, here International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations, here International Labour Office (ILO), here, here, here, here International Monetary Fund (IMF), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and impact of structural adjustments, here Ireland, here, here, here, here Israel, here Italy, here, here fertility rate, here maternal mortality, here Jakab, Zsuzsana, here Japan, here, here, here, here life expectancy, here, here, here and team commitment, here, here Japanese-Americans, here, here Jordan, here Judt, Tony, here, here, here Kahneman, Danny, here Kalache, Alex, here, here Karasek, Robert, here Kelly, Yvonne, here Kennedy, Robert, here, here, here Kenya, here, here Kerala, here, here Keynes, John Maynard, here Keynesian economics, here, here, here, here Kibera slum, here King’s Fund, here Kivimaki, Mika, here Kokiri Marae, here, here Krueger, Alan, here Krugman, Paul, here, here Kuznets, Simon, here Labonté, Ron, here labour market flexibility, here Lalonde, Christopher, here Laos, here latency effect, here Lativa, here Lee, J.

When Harry Burns was appointed Chief Medical Officer of Scotland he brought these insights with him – a force for good. Harry Burns and his colleagues from Glasgow compared mortality rates in Glasgow with rates in Manchester and Liverpool in England.27 All three cities are post-industrial, in the sense of having lost their heavy industry, and have similar levels of poverty and of income inequality. The causes of death with the biggest relative excess in Glasgow were: drug-related poisonings, deaths associated with alcohol, suicide and ‘external’ causes, i.e. accidents and violence apart from suicide. The causes that show the biggest relative excess in Glasgow are all psychosocial. Harry Burns says that to understand Scottish, and in particular Glaswegian, health disadvantage, you have to understand that people feel they have little control over their lives – they are disempowered.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

., 276, 381 and election (2000), 387 on health care, 47 as movement conservative, 299, 301 and national security, 306 and taxes, 215–16, 229, 299 Bush, Jeb, 60, 381 Bush (W.) administration: authoritarianism of, 301 bait-and-switch tactics of, 378–79, 387 compared to that of Trump, 9, 13 corruption of, 343 disdain for rule of law, 301 dishonesty of, 9, 25, 26–27, 93, 343, 377–78, 389 functions outsourced by, 299–300 general incompetence of, 300 and income distribution, 271 and Iraq war, 13, 26, 27, 299, 343, 381 reliance on elite consensus, 14 on Social Security privatization, 14–15, 22–24, 25–27, 28–29, 32, 302, 306, 361, 377, 378 tax cuts by, 16–17, 20, 26, 50 torture authorized by, 300 voting rights curtailed by, 300 business decisions, 227–28 California: health care in, 77 housing bubble in, 84 taxes in, 216, 229 Canada: health care in, 36, 45, 47, 48–49 imports from, 253, 255 unions in, 290 Cantor, Eric, 302–4, 386 cap-and-trade system, 339 Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), 135–36 capital gains: on houses, 87, 274 and income inequality, 273–74 inflation component of, 273 capitalism, voter confusion about, 320 capital market, 228 Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op, 137–38 carbon emissions, tax on, 339 Carter, Jimmy, 276 Cato Institute, 22, 23, 317, 320 caution, risk of, 104, 106, 107, 116–17 Cavuto, Neil, 44 Census data, 262–65, 263 capital gains omitted from, 264 Current Population Survey, 263, 264 and income distribution, 265–66, 266 top-coding, 264, 265 Center for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), 193 central banks, 103–4, 124, 128, 133, 181, 182, 409–10 centrists, 308 belief in symmetry between left and right, 28, 29, 309 double standards of, 208–9 influence of, 28 and public opinion, 298, 306 Century Foundation, 22 CEOs, compensation for, 259, 262, 265 Chandler, Raymond, The Simple Art of Murder, 327 Charity Watch, 388 Chávez, Hugo, 324 Cheney, Dick, 300, 381 Chicago School, 131, 143–44 child care, proposals on, 210, 211, 212 Chile, retirement system in, 22, 23 China: economy of, 324 U.S. trade with, 252, 254, 255 cholera, 81 Civil Rights Act (1964), 53 civil rights movement, 346 classless society, myth of, 285 climate change, 327–28 and alternative energies, 340 and corruption, 337 deniers of, 329–31, 332–34, 335–37, 365 and fossil fuels, 333, 336 global temperatures in, 330 greenhouse gases as a cause of, 330, 335, 339–40 and Green New Deal, 328, 338–40 “hockey stick” graph on, 328, 336 politicization of, 4 positive incentives in, 340 transition industries in, 340 and tropical storms, 330 Climategate, 336 Clinton, Bill: Gingrich’s attacks on, 362 and health care (1993), 35, 37, 50, 378 and income inequality, 271 smear tactics against, 380 and taxes, 7, 215 Clinton, Hillary: and election (2016), 376, 388–89 and health care, 50, 51–52 and income inequality, 291 smear tactics against, 380 Trump vs., 336, 343 Clinton Foundation, 388 “Closing the Skills Gap” (Dimon and Seltzer), 166–68 Coal and Steel Community (1952), 175 coal-fired power plants, 331 coal mining, 289, 340 Cochrane, John H., 131, 138, 143 cockroach ideas, 329 Cohen, Michael, 359 Cohn, Jonathan, 300 coins: gold and silver, 411, 412 college graduates, earnings of, 282, 283 Collins, Susan, 360 Comey, James, 336, 343 Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Murray), 285–86 Commission on Economic Security (1934), 26 Common Market (1959), 175 Commonwealth Fund, 48 competition: imperfect, 400 perfect, 402 “confidence fairy,” belief in, 158, 160, 161 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 19, 29, 54, 59, 195–96 budget and economic outlook of, 115–16 Green Book of, 265 and income inequality, 265–66, 266, 272–74, 285 and Ryan plan, 201, 202 Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), 300 conservatism: ambition of practitioners, 151 bad faith of, 7, 8, 10, 75, 149–51, 332–33 and bipartisanship, 198 compassionate conservatism, 378 confusion about socialism in, 323 democracy rejected by, 369 disinterest in good government, 300 and income inequality, 261–62, 266, 271–75 and Keynesian economics, 124 moral and intellectual decline of, 262 movement conservatism, 8, 297–98, 299–301, 302–4, 307, 343, 368 Orwellian instincts in, 281 permanent rule by, 13 Republican, see Republican Party taking credit for growth, 275–76 uses and abuses of statistics by, 262 wing-nut welfare as safety net for, 303 conservative professional economists, 149–51 conspiracy theories, 150, 337, 343, 345–46, 365 Constitution, U.S., 301 containerization, 289 Cornyn, John, 346 corporate profits, 228, 232–33 corporate taxes: avoidance vs. evasion of, 349 cuts in, 201, 202, 218, 221, 222, 227, 229, 230, 231–33, 232, 351 and stock buybacks, 227, 230 corporations: “bringing money home,” 230 cooking their books, 228, 230–31, 231 global, 231–32 profits to foreign nationals, 232–33 and trade war, 371 unrestricted power for, 318 corruption: and Bush administration, 343 and climate change, 337 in Europe, 358 in financial services, 92, 93 in highly unequal societies, 283, 324, 349–50, 358 and Republican Party, 335–37, 338, 343, 358 in trade policy, 246, 247, 254, 255 of Trump administration, 70, 246, 331, 338, 343, 349, 350 “Cost of Bad Ideas, The” (Krugman), 123–25 Council of Economic Advisers, and CEA calculation, 271–72 Cox, Christopher, 93 credit, 89, 90, 104 “Cruelty Caucus, The” (Krugman), 65–66 Cruz, Ted, 57, 225 Cruz amendment, 69 cryptocurrencies, 411–14 Crystal, Graef, 265 In Search of Excess, 262 Cuccinelli, Ken, 336 currency, 412–14 fiat, 412, 414 optimum currency areas, 177 Customs and Border Protection, 371 debt: and austerity policies, 97–99, 163–65, 203–4, 207–8 fear of, 107, 116 and G.D.P., 154, 204–5, 205 interest rates on, 204, 211 magic threshold of, 158, 385 overrated as issue, 194, 206, 208 problematic, 153 and sustainable growth rate, 153–54, 204 and taxes, 154, 222–23, 224–26 tipping point of, 165 and total wealth, 154 Trump’s SOTU on, 207–9 winter of, 203–6 “debt scolds,” 204, 205, 206 “deficit scolds,” 194, 207, 209 deficit spending, 153, 218 deleveraging, 97 DeLong, Brad, 131, 143–44, 270, 316, 407 democracy: threats in Europe to, 188, 189, 344, 346, 358, 359 threats in U.S. to, 366, 367–69 Democratic Party: basic values of, 366 center-left position of, 28, 306, 310 and civil rights, 310 future plans for, 338 and Green New Deal, 338–40 and health care, 36, 55, 77, 78 House majority of, 338 impact in state governments, 77, 78 as loose coalition of interest groups, 297, 368 and midterm elections, 76, 194, 338, 344, 367 policy analysis by, 73 social democratic aspect of, 313–14, 321 and Social Security, 29, 30 subpoena power of, 338 De-Moralization of Society (Himmelfarb), 285–86 Denmark, economy of, 184, 239, 313, 317, 319–21, 323 deregulation, 370, 371, 409 derivatives, 135 “Developing a Positive Agenda” (Krugman), 35–37 Dew-Becker, Ian, 283 Diamond, Peter, 234–35, 236 diminishing marginal utility, 235 Dimon, Jamie, 166 dishonesty, power of, 324 “Dismal Science, The” (Krugman), 393–94 Dixit, Avinash K., 396–98, 405 dollar, international value of, 228 Donors Trust, 333 “Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages” (Krugman), 260, 288–90 dot-com bubble, 90 double talk, political, 222, 225–26 Dow 36,000 (Gleason and Hassett), 84, 86 Draghi, Mario, 181–83 dumping, and tariffs, 252 Duncan, Greg, 277 economic analysis, importance of, 383–84, 386, 400 economic freedom, 317–18, 317 economic geography, 398–99, 400, 403 economic growth: (1982–1984), 215 long-term, 275–76 post–World War II, 219, 234 so-so, 315 taking credit for, 275–76 and taxes, 236–37, 236 economic models: Arrow-Debreu model, 402 CAPM, 135–36 Heckscher-Ohlin, 400–401, 403 importance of, 400 as metaphors, 400, 402 minimalist, 403 monopolistic competition models, 396–98 and neoclassical theory, 140 purposes of, 112 economic policy, failure of, 407 economics: behavioral, 146 easy questions in, 6 golden era of, 130–31 Keynesian, see Keynesian economics mathematics in, 131 monetary, 176 “neoclassical,” 132, 133, 139–40, 147 and politics, 149–51 “positive” vs.

., 131, 138, 143 cockroach ideas, 329 Cohen, Michael, 359 Cohn, Jonathan, 300 coins: gold and silver, 411, 412 college graduates, earnings of, 282, 283 Collins, Susan, 360 Comey, James, 336, 343 Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Murray), 285–86 Commission on Economic Security (1934), 26 Common Market (1959), 175 Commonwealth Fund, 48 competition: imperfect, 400 perfect, 402 “confidence fairy,” belief in, 158, 160, 161 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 19, 29, 54, 59, 195–96 budget and economic outlook of, 115–16 Green Book of, 265 and income inequality, 265–66, 266, 272–74, 285 and Ryan plan, 201, 202 Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), 300 conservatism: ambition of practitioners, 151 bad faith of, 7, 8, 10, 75, 149–51, 332–33 and bipartisanship, 198 compassionate conservatism, 378 confusion about socialism in, 323 democracy rejected by, 369 disinterest in good government, 300 and income inequality, 261–62, 266, 271–75 and Keynesian economics, 124 moral and intellectual decline of, 262 movement conservatism, 8, 297–98, 299–301, 302–4, 307, 343, 368 Orwellian instincts in, 281 permanent rule by, 13 Republican, see Republican Party taking credit for growth, 275–76 uses and abuses of statistics by, 262 wing-nut welfare as safety net for, 303 conservative professional economists, 149–51 conspiracy theories, 150, 337, 343, 345–46, 365 Constitution, U.S., 301 containerization, 289 Cornyn, John, 346 corporate profits, 228, 232–33 corporate taxes: avoidance vs. evasion of, 349 cuts in, 201, 202, 218, 221, 222, 227, 229, 230, 231–33, 232, 351 and stock buybacks, 227, 230 corporations: “bringing money home,” 230 cooking their books, 228, 230–31, 231 global, 231–32 profits to foreign nationals, 232–33 and trade war, 371 unrestricted power for, 318 corruption: and Bush administration, 343 and climate change, 337 in Europe, 358 in financial services, 92, 93 in highly unequal societies, 283, 324, 349–50, 358 and Republican Party, 335–37, 338, 343, 358 in trade policy, 246, 247, 254, 255 of Trump administration, 70, 246, 331, 338, 343, 349, 350 “Cost of Bad Ideas, The” (Krugman), 123–25 Council of Economic Advisers, and CEA calculation, 271–72 Cox, Christopher, 93 credit, 89, 90, 104 “Cruelty Caucus, The” (Krugman), 65–66 Cruz, Ted, 57, 225 Cruz amendment, 69 cryptocurrencies, 411–14 Crystal, Graef, 265 In Search of Excess, 262 Cuccinelli, Ken, 336 currency, 412–14 fiat, 412, 414 optimum currency areas, 177 Customs and Border Protection, 371 debt: and austerity policies, 97–99, 163–65, 203–4, 207–8 fear of, 107, 116 and G.D.P., 154, 204–5, 205 interest rates on, 204, 211 magic threshold of, 158, 385 overrated as issue, 194, 206, 208 problematic, 153 and sustainable growth rate, 153–54, 204 and taxes, 154, 222–23, 224–26 tipping point of, 165 and total wealth, 154 Trump’s SOTU on, 207–9 winter of, 203–6 “debt scolds,” 204, 205, 206 “deficit scolds,” 194, 207, 209 deficit spending, 153, 218 deleveraging, 97 DeLong, Brad, 131, 143–44, 270, 316, 407 democracy: threats in Europe to, 188, 189, 344, 346, 358, 359 threats in U.S. to, 366, 367–69 Democratic Party: basic values of, 366 center-left position of, 28, 306, 310 and civil rights, 310 future plans for, 338 and Green New Deal, 338–40 and health care, 36, 55, 77, 78 House majority of, 338 impact in state governments, 77, 78 as loose coalition of interest groups, 297, 368 and midterm elections, 76, 194, 338, 344, 367 policy analysis by, 73 social democratic aspect of, 313–14, 321 and Social Security, 29, 30 subpoena power of, 338 De-Moralization of Society (Himmelfarb), 285–86 Denmark, economy of, 184, 239, 313, 317, 319–21, 323 deregulation, 370, 371, 409 derivatives, 135 “Developing a Positive Agenda” (Krugman), 35–37 Dew-Becker, Ian, 283 Diamond, Peter, 234–35, 236 diminishing marginal utility, 235 Dimon, Jamie, 166 dishonesty, power of, 324 “Dismal Science, The” (Krugman), 393–94 Dixit, Avinash K., 396–98, 405 dollar, international value of, 228 Donors Trust, 333 “Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages” (Krugman), 260, 288–90 dot-com bubble, 90 double talk, political, 222, 225–26 Dow 36,000 (Gleason and Hassett), 84, 86 Draghi, Mario, 181–83 dumping, and tariffs, 252 Duncan, Greg, 277 economic analysis, importance of, 383–84, 386, 400 economic freedom, 317–18, 317 economic geography, 398–99, 400, 403 economic growth: (1982–1984), 215 long-term, 275–76 post–World War II, 219, 234 so-so, 315 taking credit for, 275–76 and taxes, 236–37, 236 economic models: Arrow-Debreu model, 402 CAPM, 135–36 Heckscher-Ohlin, 400–401, 403 importance of, 400 as metaphors, 400, 402 minimalist, 403 monopolistic competition models, 396–98 and neoclassical theory, 140 purposes of, 112 economic policy, failure of, 407 economics: behavioral, 146 easy questions in, 6 golden era of, 130–31 Keynesian, see Keynesian economics mathematics in, 131 monetary, 176 “neoclassical,” 132, 133, 139–40, 147 and politics, 149–51 “positive” vs.

.), lean and efficient system of, 40, 41–43 Victorian Era, virtues of, 286 Vishny, Robert, 146 Voltaire, on the best of all possible worlds, 135 Voting Rights Act, 300 wage gap, 286 wage-price spiral, 126, 127 wage stagnation, 92, 168, 288, 289 Wallace, George, 310 Wall Street Journal, The, 271, 273, 279–80 Warren, Elizabeth, 210, 211–12, 238–40, 309 Washington Post, The, 303 wealth distribution: historical estimates of, 270 and income inequality, 274–75, 282, 284 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 132 wealthy: and capital gains, 273 concentration of, 238, 349 conservatives, 149 cutting taxes on, 4, 7, 20, 30, 51, 69, 196, 199, 200, 201, 215–17, 218–20, 221–23, 224, 227, 229, 236–37, 308, 309, 351, 355, 370, 371 donors to Republican Party, 370 exploding incomes of, 92, 283 health coverage for, 36, 39 idolizing of, 94 incentive effects on, 235 and income distribution, 265–66, 266, 267, 269–70, 273; see also income inequality income from assets, 221, 233 income from earnings, 349 increasing taxes on, 66, 211–12, 220, 238–40, 307, 309, 310, 324, 380 as Masters of the Universe, 270 and monopoly power, 236 optimal tax rates on, 235–37, 236 “stealth politics” of, 240 tax avoidance vs. evasion by, 349–50 as too rich, 274–75 and Trumpism, 343 Weigel, Dave, 28 welfare, 126 West Virginia, Republican Party in, 359 What’s the Matter with Kansas?


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

, an indicator of income inequality of several countries as a proportion of the indicator of income inequality in the United States. Table 4.2 indicates the very high inequality in the major Latin American countries and the much lesser inequality that prevails in Japan and South Korea, in both cases also as compared to the United States. Just as the gap in economic growth between Latin America and the United States has been relatively constant over time, so too has income inequality in Latin America as compared to the United States. For example, in 1956–1957, income inequality in Mexico was 136 percent that of the United States, almost identical to what it would be more than 40 years later.

For example, Mexico’s inequality index (Gini coefficient) was 54.0 in the mid-1950s and 54.6 in 2000.3 According to Werner Baer, the inequality index in Brazil in 1981—the last year of its economic “miracle”—was 57.9; then, as a result of the economic crisis that erupted in 1982–1983, it rose to 59.7, only slightly dropping down to 59.1 in 1998.4 In other words, income distribution, both within countries over time and as compared to the United States, has been relatively steady despite economic crises, changes in macroeconomic models, and the resulting adjustments in economic policy. table 4.2 Income Inequality in Some Countries as a Percentage of Income Inequality in the United States, c. 2000 Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Japan Mexico South Korea 145 140 141 61 134 77 128 Notes: Measurement by the indicator of income inequality known as the Gini coefficient. United States = 100. Source: Calculations based on data from World Bank, World Development Indicators 2004 ( Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), table 2.7. 74 The Historical Context Both gaps with the United States originated before the period covered in this chapter, i.e., they appeared long before 1950.

See Latin America, economic growth obstacles to, 125 political instability effects on, 123 poverty reduction through, 283 reforms for, 147 setbacks in, 92 304 Index social inequality effects on, 281 Economic inequality, 115, 118, 124 Economic institutions description of, 166, 174 land access by, 182 in Spanish colonies, 180 Economic policies, 283–284 Ecuador, 108t Education spending, 289 Educational reform, 287–288, 290 Effectiveness, 225 El Salvador, 108t, 185 Elections, 119–120 Electoral democracy, 262–263 Electoral systems description of, 201–203 reform of, 210–211, 285–286 Elite pacts, 144–145 Equilibrium outcome, 183 Ethnic discrimination, 82–83 Europe hierarchical society in, 21 industrial development in, 80 institutions in, 188 European colonization, 162 European settler mortality rates, 176–177 Evolution theories, 24 Exchange rate populism, 261 Exchange rates, 92 Executive turnovers, 121, 123–124 Facundo, 20 Family farms, 116, 117f Federalism, 51, 203–204, 211–212, 216, 285 Federalist Papers, The, 228–230 Ffrench-Davis, Ricardo, 79 Fiscal citizenship, 223–224, 279 Fiscal coercion, 224 Fiscal policies, 284–285 Fiscal regimes, 228–233 Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2000, 205–206 Fiscal systems, 261–262 Formal institutions, 197–199, 214–215, 217 Fox, Vicente, 63–64, 208 France, 21, 24–25 Free Trade Area of the Americas, 283 Fuentes, Carlos, 67 Furtado, Celso, 37 Galíndez, Francisco, 238 Gamboa, Federico, 57 García Calderón, Francisco, 26, 28 García Márquez, Gabriel, 61 Geddes, Barbara, 208, 216 General Santa Anna, 53 Gentry, 188 Geography hypothesis, 166 Germany, 260 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 33 Gil, Anacleto, 236 Gini coefficient, 280 Global competitiveness index, 151 Global Competitiveness Report, The, 151 Gold, 19 Good Neighbor policy, 59, 61 Government indirect taxes and, 229–231 rotation of, 87 Government spending in Argentina, 249t–250t, 251 overview of, 245–246 in United States, 251, 252t–253t, 254, 256, 258 Great Britain Bolívar’s writings about, 16 as political model, 18–19 Great Depression, 31–32, 136 Gross domestic product, per capita from 1870 to 1950, 72–73 from 1973 to 2000, 91 of Argentina, 73, 78, 164t, 256 of Brazil, 73, 77–78, 164 of Chile, 73, 78, 164t of Colombia, 73, 85, 164t of Cuba, 164t labor effects on, 137 of Mexico, 73–74, 77, 164t of Peru, 164t of South Korea, 73–74, 77–78 of Taiwan, 73–74, 77 of Venezuela, 164t Guatemala, 108t, 162, 163f Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 61 Gutiérrez Eskildsen, Rosario María, 61 Haber, Stephen, 100 Haiti, 31, 87 Hamilton, Alexander, 228–229, 231–232 Hay, John, 55, 60 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 56 Hidalgo, Miguel, 50 High-stakes politics, 135–140, 155 Hirschman, Albert, 35–36 Home, Henry, 232 Honduras, 89, 108t Household income distribution, 118 Huerta, Victoriano, 58 Human capital development, 83 Human resources, 84, 95 Huntington, Samuel, 198, 207 Hyperinflation, 139 Import substitution industrialization, 78–79, 146, 273 Income inequality description of, 74, 140 economic elites affected by, 141 poverty secondary to, 149–150 racial or ethnic discrimination as cause of, 82–83 Income tax in Argentina, 236–238 in United States, 235 Independence description of, 100 per capita income levels affected by, 106–110 Indirect taxes in Argentina, 239, 243 description of, 229–231 Industrial economies, 37 Industrialization, 39–40 Inequality development affected by, 115, 118 income. See Income inequality measurement methods, 280–281 methods of reducing, 154–155 social, 150–151, 280–282 Inflation, 92, 138, 139f, 256 Informal institutions, 197–198 Institutional economics, 197 Institutions definition of, 166, 197, 275 development gaps caused by, 275–280 economic, 166, 174 economic inequality and, 115 elements of, 167 in Europe, 188 exclusionary nature of, 100 formal, 197–199, 214–215, 217 importance of, 148, 196–199 inequality, 119 informal, 197–198 Index 305 Institutions (continued) investment incentives created by, 184 in Latin America vs.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

The evidence is reviewed by Elhanan Helpman, “Globalisation and Wage Inequality,” Journal of the British Academy 5 (July 2017): 125–62, https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/005.125. See also Philipp Heimberger, “Does Economic Globalisation Affect Income Inequality? A Meta-analysis” (Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies Working Paper 165, October 2019), https://wiiw.ac.at/does-economic-globalisation-affect-income-inequality-a-meta-analysis-p-5044.html. This metastudy summarises 123 peer-reviewed articles on globalisation’s effect on income inequality. It finds a small positive relationship—smaller with trade integration than with financial globalisation—in both poor and rich countries, which suggests that any inequality effect of trade integration is similar to that caused by technological advances pushing up the need for skilled labour. 15.

But the politically most explosive part of the graph is the low base of the trunk. It shows that those around the eightieth to ninetieth percentile of the world income distribution—roughly, the bottom half of the old industrialised West—saw the fruits of globalisation pass them by.3 Three main facts lay behind this stagnation. One was a steep increase in income inequality in Western countries in the 1980s. This was not reversed in the decades that followed, and in some places it got worse. A second phenomenon (and part of the reason for the first) was that midrange labour incomes fell behind the growth in labour productivity.4 In other words, the gains from higher productivity disproportionately flowed to the owners of capital or to the very high paid.5 And third, labour productivity growth itself slowed down sharply.

Together these constituted the new welfare states. (In the United States, the government stayed out of health care provision for able-bodied adults—partly as a result of the unions’ desire to keep it within the purview of collective bargaining—but treated employer-paid health insurance favourably in the tax code.) FIGURE 4.1. Income inequality in four major economies over time. The charts show Gini coefficients of overall inequality of equivalised disposable household income (US: gross household income; UK: after-tax income of tax units) and shares of the top 1 per cent of tax units (individuals in France and post-1991 UK) in gross income excluding capital gains.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

But those in despair are in despair because of what is happening to their own lives and to the communities in which they live, not because the top 1 percent got richer. Income inequality is different in different places—cities and states—across the country. At times in the past, mortality rates were higher and life expectancy lower in states with higher income inequality. But the relationship is much weaker today. Historically, the states in the South with high mortality—West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee—had higher levels of income inequality than the majority of states, in most cases because they had large African American populations, who were relatively poor, which drove up overall income inequality, and who had relatively high mortality, which drove up overall mortality.

Historically, the states in the South with high mortality—West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee—had higher levels of income inequality than the majority of states, in most cases because they had large African American populations, who were relatively poor, which drove up overall income inequality, and who had relatively high mortality, which drove up overall mortality. States in the central plains and in most of the West had more homogeneous populations and lower mortality rates. Today, however, New York and California are two of the most unequal states; they have a high degree of heterogeneity, with large Hispanic and Asian populations, but have among the lowest mortality rates. To search for a simple and direct relationship from income inequality to mortality is to follow another false trail. Many people feel that income inequality is less of a problem if it is easy for people to move from poverty to riches, or at least for children to do better than their parents.

We have much to say about inequality in this book, especially in the chapters to come. We will argue that deaths of despair and income inequality are indeed closely linked, but not, as is often argued, with a simple causal arrow running from inequality to death. Instead, it is the deeper forces of power, politics, and social change that are causing both the epidemic and the extreme inequality. Inequality and death are joint consequences of the forces that are destroying the white working class. We resist the notion that income inequality is like pollution in the air, or deadly radiation, so that living in a more unequal society is something that sickens everyone, rich and poor alike.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See their “Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data since 1937,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1 (2010): 91–128. To the extent that consumption inequality may have been less than income inequality before the crisis, and that it grew more slowly than did income inequality, it was partly because of unbridled borrowing. With the collapse of the housing market, the ability to consume beyond one’s income has been reduced. This provides an important critique of earlier analyses of consumption inequality, e.g., Dirk Krueger and Fabrizio Perri, “Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory,” Review of Economic Studies 73 (January 2006): 163–92. 103.

Cole, and B. T. Hein, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data.” See also comments by C. Rampell, “The Top 1%: Executives, Doctors and Bankers” New York Times, October 17, 2011, available at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/the-top-1-executives-doctors-and-bankers/; and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, “Tackling Income Inequality,” New York Times, November 18, 2011, available at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/tackling-income-inequality/. 20. See Forbes World’s Billionaires list at http://www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires /; ranking is from 2011. 21.

Additionally, 11.1 million, or 22.8 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage in the United States were underwater (had negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2011); see “Negative Equity Report,” Corelogic (Q4, 2011), available at http://www.corelogic.com/about-us/researchtrends/asset_upload_file360_14435.pdf (accessed March 28, 2012). 2. The exact amount varies from year to year. For data on income inequality, I rely heavily on the work of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. The important initial work is T. Piketty and E. Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39. A longer and updated version is published in A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty, eds., Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Figure 7.11 vividly demonstrates this, illustrating income inequality in terms of the ratio of household incomes at the ninety-fifth and fifth percentiles of the distribution. But it also shows the more significant fact: that income inequality after housing costs – which is to say real income inequality – has increased consistently over the past four decades. The ‘before housing costs’ line shows the standard account of income inequality, based on household survey data, and as circulated by most commentators in the media, which is that UK income inequality essentially plateaued from around 1990. The much more meaningful ‘after housing costs’ line shows that, during the 1980s, inequality had already risen more than the conventional measure Land rentierism, specifically indicated.

Bregman, ‘No, Wealth Isn’t Created at the Top. It Is Merely Devoured There’, Guardian, 30 March 2017. 5. As I noted in the Introduction, different measures of income inequality show different trends. But all – whether based on household survey data, tax return data, or both – show a marked increase in income inequality in the UK since the end of the 1970s. See, for comparison, R. V. Burkhauser, N. Hérault, S. P. Jenkins and R. Wilkins, ‘What Has Been Happening to UK Income Inequality since the mid-1990s? Answers from Reconciled and Combined Household Survey and Tax Return Data’, NBER Working Paper 21991, February 2016, p. 25 (Figure 1) – pdf available at nber.org. 6.

Figure 0.7 Investment income by UK household income decile, 1980–2016/17 Households sorted by equivalized overall disposable income For all these reasons, income inequality in the UK has surged as rentierism has tightened its grip. Such inequality is a veritable minefield of conflicting narratives that rely on different data sources. In a recent paper, Richard Burkhauser and his colleagues have helped clear the weeds somewhat.72 As they say, whatever data one uses, it is clear that income inequality in the UK increased dramatically in the 1980s. The controversy concerns what happened next. Based on household survey data, inequality appears to plateau from around 1990 onwards, albeit at a much higher level than prior to the 1980s.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Congressional Budget Office (CBO): income inequality estimate of, 76–77 real GDP estimates of, 13–14 Conservative Party, U.K., 200 conservatives: anti-government ideology of, 66 anti-Keynesianism of, 93–96, 106–8, 110–11 Big Lie of 2008 financial crisis espoused by, 64–66, 100 free market ideology of, 66 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 84 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 156–57, 159, 160 consumer spending, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33, 39, 41, 113, 136 effect of government spending on, 39 household debt and, 45, 47, 126, 146 income inequality and, 83 in 2008 financial crisis, 117 conventional wisdom, lessons of Great Depression ignored in, xi corporations, 30 see also business investment, slump in; executive compensation correlation, causation vs., 83, 198, 232–33, 237 Cowen, Brian, 88 credit booms, 65 credit crunches: of 2008, 41, 110, 113, 117 Great Depression and, 110 credit default swaps, 54, 55 credit expansion, 154 currency, manipulation of, 221 currency, national: devaluation of, 169 disadvantages of, 168–69, 170–71 flexibility of, 169–73, 179 optimum currency area and, 171–72 see also euro Dakotas, high employment in, 37 debt, 4, 34, 131 deregulation and, 50 high levels of, 34, 45, 46, 49–50, 51 self-reinforcing downward spiral in, 46, 48, 49–50 usefulness of, 43 see also deficits; government debt; household debt; private debt “Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, The” (Fisher), 45 debt relief, 147 defense industry, 236 defense spending, 35, 38–39, 148, 234–35, 235, 236 deficits, 130–49, 151, 202, 238 Alesina/Ardagna study of, 196–99 depressions and, 135–36, 137 exaggerated fear of, 131–32, 212 job creation vs., 131, 143, 149, 206–7, 238 monetary policy and, 135 see also debt deflation, 152, 188 debt and, 45, 49, 163 De Grauwe, Paul, 182–83 deleveraging, 41, 147 paradox of, 45–46, 52 demand, 24–34 in babysitting co-op example, 29–30 inadequate levels of, 25, 29–30, 34, 38, 47, 93, 101–2, 118, 136, 148 spending and, 24–26, 29, 47, 118 unemployment and, 33, 47 see also supply and demand Democracy Corps, 8 Democrats, Democratic Party, 2012 election and, 226, 227–28 Denmark, 184 EEC joined by, 167 depression of 2008–, ix–xii, 209–11 business investment and, 16, 33 debt levels and, 4, 34, 47 democratic values at risk in, 19 economists’ role in, 100–101, 108 education and, 16 in Europe, see Europe, debt crisis in housing sector and, 33, 47 income inequality and, 85, 89–90 inflation rate in, 151–52, 156–57, 159–61, 189, 227 infrastructure investment and, 16–17 lack of demand in, 47 liquidity trap in, 32–34, 38, 51, 136, 155, 163 long-term effects of, 15–17 manufacturing capacity loss in, 16 as morality play, 23, 207, 219 private sector spending and, 33, 47, 211–12 unemployment in, x, 5–12, 24, 110, 117, 119, 210, 212 see also financial crisis of 2008–09; recovery, from depression of 2008– depressions, 27 disproportion between cause and effect in, 22–23, 30–31 government spending and, 135–36, 137, 231 Keynes’s definition of, x Schumpeter on, 204–5 see also Great Depression; recessions deregulation, financial, 54, 56, 67, 85, 114 under Carter, 61 under Clinton, 62 income inequality and, 72–75, 74, 81, 82, 89 under Reagan, 50, 60–61, 62, 67–68 rightward political shift and, 83 supposed benefits of, 69–70, 72–73, 86 derivatives, 98 see also specific financial instruments devaluation, 169, 180–81 disinflation, 159 dot-com bubble, 14, 198 Draghi, Mario, 186 earned-income tax credit, 120 econometrics, 233 economic output, see gross domestic product Economics (Samuelson), 93 economics, economists: academic sociology and, 92, 96, 103 Austrian school of, 151 complacency of, 55 disproportion between cause and effect in, 22–23, 30–31 ignorance of, 106–8 influence of financial elite on, 96 Keynesian, see Keynesian economics laissez-faire, 94, 101 lessons of Great Depression ignored by, xi, 92, 108 liquidationist school of, 204–5 monetarist, 101 as morality play, 23, 207, 219 renewed appreciation of past thinking in, 42 research in, see research, economic Ricardian, 205–6 see also macroeconomics “Economics of Happiness, The” (Bernanke), 5 economy, U.S.: effect of austerity programs on, 51, 213 election outcomes and, 225–26 postwar boom in, 50, 70, 149 size of, 121, 122 supposed structural defects in, 35–36 see also global economy education: austerity policies and, 143, 213–14 depression of 2008– and, 16 income inequality and, 75–76, 89 inequality in, 84 teachers’ salaries in, 72, 76, 148 efficient-markets hypothesis, 97–99, 100, 101, 103–4 Eggertsson, Gauti, 52 Eichengreen, Barry, 236 elections, U.S.: economic growth and, 225–26 of 2012, 226 emergency aid, 119–20, 120, 144, 216 environmental regulation, 221 Essays in Positive Economics (Friedman), 170 euro, 166 benefits of, 168–69, 170–71 creation of, 174 economic flexibility constrained by, 18, 169–73, 179, 184 fixing problems of, 184–87 investor confidence and, 174 liquidity and, 182–84, 185 trade imbalances and, 175, 175 as vulnerable to panics, 182–84, 186 wages and, 174–75 Europe: capital flow in, 169, 174, 180 common currency of, see euro creditor nations of, 46 debtor nations of, 4, 45, 46, 139 democracy and unity in, 184–85 fiscal integration lacking in, 171, 172–73, 176, 179 GDP in, 17 health care in, 18 inflation and, 185, 186 labor mobility lacking in, 171–72, 173, 179 1930s arms race in, 236 social safety nets in, 18 unemployment in, 4, 17, 18, 176, 229, 236 Europe, debt crisis in, x, 4, 40, 45, 46, 138, 140–41, 166–87 austerity programs in, 46, 144, 185, 186, 188, 190 budget deficits and, 177 fiscal irresponsibility as supposed cause of (Big Delusion), 177–79, 187 housing bubbles and, 65, 169, 172, 174, 176 interest rates in, 174, 176, 182–84, 190 liquidity fears and, 182–84 recovery from, 184–87 unequal impact of, 17–18 wages in, 164–65, 169–70, 174–75 European Central Bank, 46, 183 Big Delusion and, 179 inflation and, 161, 180 interest rates and, 190, 202–3 monetary policy of, 180, 185, 186 European Coal and Steel Community, 167 European Economic Community (EEC), 167–68 European Union, 172 exchange rates, fixed vs. flexible, 169–73 executive compensation, 78–79 “outrage constraint” on, 81–82, 83 expansionary austerity, 144, 196–99 expenditure cascades, 84 Fama, Eugene, 69–70, 73, 97, 100, 106 Fannie Mae, 64, 65–66, 100, 172, 220–21 Farrell, Henry, 100, 192 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 59, 172 Federal Housing Finance Agency, 221 Federal Reserve, 42, 103 aggressive action needed from, 216–19 creation of, 59 foreign exchange intervention and, 217 inflation and, 161, 217, 219, 227 interest rates and, 33–34, 93, 105, 117, 134, 135, 143, 151, 189–90, 193, 215, 216–17 as lender of last resort, 59 LTCM crisis and, 69 money supply controlled by, 31, 32, 33, 105, 151, 153, 155, 157, 183 recessions and, 105 recovery and, 216–19 in 2008 financial crisis, 104, 106, 116 unconventional asset purchases by, 217 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 47–48 Feinberg, Larry, 72 Ferguson, Niall, 135–36, 139, 160 Fianna Fáil, 88 filibusters, 123 financial crisis of 2008–09, ix, x, 40, 41, 69, 72, 99, 104, 111–16 Bernanke on, 3–4 Big Lie of, 64–66, 100, 177 capital ratios and, 59 credit crunch in, 41, 110, 113, 117 deleveraging in, 147 Federal Reserve and, 104, 106 income inequality and, 82, 83 leverage in, 44–46, 63 panics in, 4, 63, 111, 155 real GDP in, 13 see also depression of 2008–; Europe, debt crisis in financial elite: political influence of, 63, 77–78, 85–90 Republican ideology and, 88–89 top 0.01 percent in, 75, 76 top 0.1 percent in, 75, 76, 77, 96 top 1 percent in, 74–75, 74, 76–77, 96 see also income inequality financial industry, see banks, banking industry financial instability hypothesis, 43–44 Financial Times, 95, 100, 203–4 Finland, 184 fiscal integration, 171, 172–73, 176 Fisher, Irving, 22, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 52, 163 flexibility: currency and, 18, 169–73 paradox of, 52–53 Flip This House (TV show), 112 Florida, 111 food stamps, 120, 144 Ford, John, 56 foreclosures, 45, 127–28 foreign exchange markets, 217 foreign trade, 221 Fox News, 134 Frank, Robert, 84 Freddie Mac, 64, 65–66, 100, 172, 220–21 free trade, 167 Friedman, Milton, 96, 101, 181, 205 on causes of Great Depression, 105–6 Gabriel, Peter, 20 Gagnon, Joseph, 219, 221 Gardiner, Chance (char.), 3 Garn–St.

.: economic growth and, 225–26 of 2012, 226 emergency aid, 119–20, 120, 144, 216 environmental regulation, 221 Essays in Positive Economics (Friedman), 170 euro, 166 benefits of, 168–69, 170–71 creation of, 174 economic flexibility constrained by, 18, 169–73, 179, 184 fixing problems of, 184–87 investor confidence and, 174 liquidity and, 182–84, 185 trade imbalances and, 175, 175 as vulnerable to panics, 182–84, 186 wages and, 174–75 Europe: capital flow in, 169, 174, 180 common currency of, see euro creditor nations of, 46 debtor nations of, 4, 45, 46, 139 democracy and unity in, 184–85 fiscal integration lacking in, 171, 172–73, 176, 179 GDP in, 17 health care in, 18 inflation and, 185, 186 labor mobility lacking in, 171–72, 173, 179 1930s arms race in, 236 social safety nets in, 18 unemployment in, 4, 17, 18, 176, 229, 236 Europe, debt crisis in, x, 4, 40, 45, 46, 138, 140–41, 166–87 austerity programs in, 46, 144, 185, 186, 188, 190 budget deficits and, 177 fiscal irresponsibility as supposed cause of (Big Delusion), 177–79, 187 housing bubbles and, 65, 169, 172, 174, 176 interest rates in, 174, 176, 182–84, 190 liquidity fears and, 182–84 recovery from, 184–87 unequal impact of, 17–18 wages in, 164–65, 169–70, 174–75 European Central Bank, 46, 183 Big Delusion and, 179 inflation and, 161, 180 interest rates and, 190, 202–3 monetary policy of, 180, 185, 186 European Coal and Steel Community, 167 European Economic Community (EEC), 167–68 European Union, 172 exchange rates, fixed vs. flexible, 169–73 executive compensation, 78–79 “outrage constraint” on, 81–82, 83 expansionary austerity, 144, 196–99 expenditure cascades, 84 Fama, Eugene, 69–70, 73, 97, 100, 106 Fannie Mae, 64, 65–66, 100, 172, 220–21 Farrell, Henry, 100, 192 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 59, 172 Federal Housing Finance Agency, 221 Federal Reserve, 42, 103 aggressive action needed from, 216–19 creation of, 59 foreign exchange intervention and, 217 inflation and, 161, 217, 219, 227 interest rates and, 33–34, 93, 105, 117, 134, 135, 143, 151, 189–90, 193, 215, 216–17 as lender of last resort, 59 LTCM crisis and, 69 money supply controlled by, 31, 32, 33, 105, 151, 153, 155, 157, 183 recessions and, 105 recovery and, 216–19 in 2008 financial crisis, 104, 106, 116 unconventional asset purchases by, 217 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 47–48 Feinberg, Larry, 72 Ferguson, Niall, 135–36, 139, 160 Fianna Fáil, 88 filibusters, 123 financial crisis of 2008–09, ix, x, 40, 41, 69, 72, 99, 104, 111–16 Bernanke on, 3–4 Big Lie of, 64–66, 100, 177 capital ratios and, 59 credit crunch in, 41, 110, 113, 117 deleveraging in, 147 Federal Reserve and, 104, 106 income inequality and, 82, 83 leverage in, 44–46, 63 panics in, 4, 63, 111, 155 real GDP in, 13 see also depression of 2008–; Europe, debt crisis in financial elite: political influence of, 63, 77–78, 85–90 Republican ideology and, 88–89 top 0.01 percent in, 75, 76 top 0.1 percent in, 75, 76, 77, 96 top 1 percent in, 74–75, 74, 76–77, 96 see also income inequality financial industry, see banks, banking industry financial instability hypothesis, 43–44 Financial Times, 95, 100, 203–4 Finland, 184 fiscal integration, 171, 172–73, 176 Fisher, Irving, 22, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 52, 163 flexibility: currency and, 18, 169–73 paradox of, 52–53 Flip This House (TV show), 112 Florida, 111 food stamps, 120, 144 Ford, John, 56 foreclosures, 45, 127–28 foreign exchange markets, 217 foreign trade, 221 Fox News, 134 Frank, Robert, 84 Freddie Mac, 64, 65–66, 100, 172, 220–21 free trade, 167 Friedman, Milton, 96, 101, 181, 205 on causes of Great Depression, 105–6 Gabriel, Peter, 20 Gagnon, Joseph, 219, 221 Gardiner, Chance (char.), 3 Garn–St.

For a small but influential minority, however, the era of financial deregulation and growing debt was indeed a time of extraordinary income growth. And that, surely, is an important reason so few were willing to listen to warnings about the path the economy was taking. To understand the deeper reasons for our current crisis, in short, we need to talk about income inequality and the coming of a second Gilded Age. CHAPTER FIVE THE SECOND GILDED AGE Owning and maintaining a house the size of the Taj Mahal is expensive. Kerry Delrose, director of interior design at Jones Footer Margeotes Partners in Greenwich, helpfully walked me through the cost of decorating a mansion appropriately.


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Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

If growing disparities in the distribution of income are indeed the primary explanation for the recent surge of spending on luxury goods, those who would forecast how spending patterns will evolve must look to the forces that have been driving the recent growth in income inequality. What are these forces, and are they likely to continue? Or will we revert to earlier patterns, in which income grew at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder? Although much has been written about the recent growth in income inequality, there remains considerable disagreement about its causes. Some commentators, for example, mention changes in public policy, citing tax cuts for the wealthy and program cuts for the poor.

There is some evidence that the rate of return to education has risen during the last 15 years, but that cannot explain why income inequality has also grown sharply even among college graduates. Growing social tolerance of acquisitiveness and greed may be a contributing factor, but similar attitudes prevailed in the 1920s and 1950s, and a much smaller share of our national income went to top performers during those periods. And if any one thing is certain, it is that growing income inequality has not resulted from any weakening of market forces. On the contrary, global and domestic competition has never been more intense than now.

What is more, failure at any stage can result, as in sports, from even the slimmest performance deficit. The upshot is that although two people start out in life equally well positioned to succeed, their careers may end up following dramatically different trajectories. Small initial increases in income inequality need not generate large deficits in education, health, or other capabilities to have large and widespread depressing effects on productivity. To the extent that greater income inequality makes it more difficult for some people to capitalize on legitimate career opportunities, it also increases the attractiveness of pursuing options beyond the law. Or at any rate, such is the prediction of any theory in which incentives matter.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Increased trade liberalization and increased foreign investment – or at least the threat of them – have also put downward pressure on wages. As a result, income inequality has increased in most rich countries. For example, according to the ILO (International Labour Organization) report The World of Work 2008, of the twenty advanced economies for which data was available, between 1990 and 2000 income inequality rose in sixteen countries, with only Switzerland among the remaining four experiencing a significant fall.1 During this period, income inequality in the US, already by far the highest in the rich world, rose to a level comparable to that of some Latin American countries such as Uruguay and Venezuela.

THING 12 1 For a user-friendly explanation and criticism of the theory of comparative advantage, see ‘My six-year-old son should get a job’, ch. 3 of my Bad Samaritans (Random House, London, 2007, and Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2008). 2 Further details can be found from my earlier books, Kicking Away the Ladder (Anthem Press, London, 2002) and Bad Samaritans. THING 13 1 The sixteen countries where inequality increased are, in descending order of income inequality as of 2000, the US, South Korea, the UK, Israel, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Finland, Luxemburg and Austria. The four countries where income inequality fell were Germany, Switzerland, France and Denmark. 2 L. Mishel, J. Bernstein and H. Shierholz, The State of Working America, 2008/9 (Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC, 2009), p. 26, table 3. 3 According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation), before taxes and transfers, the US, as of mid 2000s, had a Gini coefficient (the measure of income inequality, with 0 as absolute equality and 1 as absolute inequality) of 0.46.

Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4


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Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

According to this theory, White Americans without college degrees were increasingly unhappy and struggling economically, while those with a college education were enjoying more happiness and prosperity. There are two parts to this idea of a class divide: economic income inequality and happiness inequality. The economic piece is relatively straightforward to document—for example, by graphing the percent of income earned by the top 10%, as a UC Berkeley economist did recently; this shows the “rich get richer” aspect of income inequality (see Figure 3.38). After a period of high income inequality in the 1920s, it declined in the postwar era—the golden time for the middle class. Beginning around 1980, income inequality began to increase, and around the mid-2010s it reached all-time highs.

In this environment, the risk of death is lower, but the danger of falling behind economically is higher in an age of income inequality, so parents choose to have fewer children and nurture them more extensively. As an academic paper put it, “When competition for resources is high in stable environments, selection favors greater parental investment and a reduced number of offspring.” This is a good description of the U.S. in the 21st century: It is a stable (low-death-rate) environment, but also one with considerable competition for resources due to income inequality and other factors. Figure 1.5: Life expectancy in years, U.S., 1900–2021 Source: National Center for Health Statistics The result is a slow-life strategy, with lower birth rates, slower development, and more resources and care put into each child.

Still, the growing instability in relationships during Boomers’ young adulthood was not a good formula for mental health. That’s especially true for Boomer men, fewer of whom are married in middle age than were in previous generations. There’s also another worm at the core of the Boomer apple: income inequality. The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Poorer Trait: Casualties of Income Inequality After Donald Trump’s surprise win in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, many people went searching for answers. One key narrative was that there was a growing class divide in the country, especially among Whites. According to this theory, White Americans without college degrees were increasingly unhappy and struggling economically, while those with a college education were enjoying more happiness and prosperity.


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Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In an analysis published in September 2013, economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, found that an astonishing 95 percent of total income gains during the years 2009 to 2012 were hoovered up by the wealthiest 1 percent.37 Even as the Occupy Wall Street movement has faded from the scene, the evidence shows pretty clearly that income inequality in the United States is not just high—it may well be accelerating. While inequality has been increasing in nearly all industrialized countries, the United States remains a clear outlier. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s analysis, income inequality in America is roughly on a par with that of the Philippines and significantly exceeds that of Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia.38 Studies have also found that economic mobility, a measure of the likelihood that the children of the poor will succeed in moving up the income scale, is significantly lower in the United States than in nearly all European nations.

Eric, 241–242, 243, 244–245, 246, 247 driverless cars, See autonomous cars drone-based delivery, 190n drug prices, 170–171 Drum, Kevin, 188 Dunning, David, 18–19 dystopian future, automation and predictions of, 31–32, 219–220 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 271, 277 eBay, 16, 76 economic argument for guaranteed income, 264–267 economic growth, 65, 212–215 economic mobility, decrease in, 46–47 economic policy, 57–58, 217–218 Economic Policy Institute, 127, 158 economic recoveries, jobs created during, 49–50 economics, mathematical models and, x, 205–206 economic trends bear market for labor/bull market for corporations, 38–41 declining incomes and underemployment for college graduates, 48–49 effect of information technology on, 58–61 income inequality, 46–48 job creation, jobless recoveries, and long-term unemployment, 43–46 labor force participation, 41–43 polarization and part-time jobs, 49–51 stagnant wages, 34–38 economists on impact of automation, 60 on income inequality, 202–206 economy complexity of, 211–212 defined, 266n effect of climate change on, 282–283 post-scarcity, 247 e-Discovery software, 124 Edison, Thomas, 234 education basic income guarantee and, 263 collaboration with machines and, 121–128 diminishing returns to, 250–253 effect on income, 48–49 nature of unemployment problem and, 249–250 See also higher education educational robots, 7 edX, 132, 133, 137 Egypt, 46 EITC.

Even the 1970s, a decade associated with stagflation and an energy crisis, generated a 27 percent increase in jobs.3 The lost decade of the 2000s is especially astonishing when you consider that the US economy needs to create roughly a million jobs per year just to keep up with growth in the size of the workforce. In other words, during those first ten years there were about 10 million missing jobs that should have been created—but never showed up. Income inequality has since soared to levels not seen since 1929, and it has become clear that the productivity increases that went into workers’ pockets back in the 1950s are now being retained almost entirely by business owners and investors. The share of overall national income going to labor, as opposed to capital, has fallen precipitously and appears to be in continuing free fall.


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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Debates over the likely path of income inequality raged on, but in 1955 the story took a crucial turn, quite literally. When Simon Kuznets – the brilliant inventor of national income accounting – gathered together long-run trend data on incomes in the US, UK and Germany, he was taken aback by what he found. In all three countries, income inequality measured before tax had been falling at least since the 1920s, and even possibly before the First World War. Contrary to Pareto’s static social pyramid, Kuznets believed he had uncovered a different law: a social rollercoaster ride on which income inequality first rose, then levelled out, and eventually fell again, all while the economy grew.

Those worker remittances constitute around 25% of GDP in countries like Nepal, Lesotho and Moldova, and are a vital source of resilience during domestic economic and humanitarian crises.87 That makes migration one of the most effective ways of reducing global income inequality. But its long-term success hinges on preventing wide income inequalities within the host countries themselves, and on building community connections and social capital. Without these, local communities that have been left behind economically often resort to blaming immigrants, instead of welcoming the diversity and dynamism that their presence can bring.

Persky, J. (1992) ‘Retrospectives: Pareto’s law’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 6: 2, pp. 181–192. 5. Kuznets, S. (1955) ‘Economic growth and income inequality’, American Economic Review, 45: 1, pp. 1–28. 6. Kuznets, S. (1954) Letter to Selma Goldsmith, US Office of Business Economics, 15 August 1954, Papers of Simon Kuznets, Harvard University Archives, HUGFP88.10 Misc. Correspondence, Box 4. http://asociologist.com/2013/03/21/on-the-origins-of-the-kuznets-curve/ 7. Kuznets, S. (1955) ‘Economic growth and income inequality’, American Economic Review, 45: 1, pp. 1–28. 8. Lewis, W. A. (1976) ‘Development and distribution’, in Cairncross, A. and Puri, M.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

One thing we know for sure that it means is soaring inequality. When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns. We know this, for starters, because this is exactly what has happened. Issues of income inequality have been recontextualized so thoroughly in our time that certain Democrats even have trouble understanding what their forebears of the 1930s and ’40s meant when they talked about the subject. For our modern liberals, it is obvious that careers should be open to talent and it is an outrage when barriers of any kind prevent the able from rising to the top.

Many individual Democrats get enthusiastic, five-star approval ratings from me; many more are completely without blame in the narrative that follows. And it is largely thanks to the Democrats that mainstream pundits now feel it’s OK to talk about inequality at all. But as things have grown worse, income inequality has become an increasingly awkward issue for them. It just doesn’t come naturally in the way that, say, talking about marriage equality now does. Looking back over their actual record, one starts to suspect that there’s a better chance the party will resolve to kick Wyoming out of the union than to do something meaningful to halt the country’s economic breakdown.

Consensus, bipartisanship, the “center”: those were the things this admirable and intelligent man was serious about—the kind of stale, empty verbiage favored by Beltway charlatans on the Sunday talk shows. The other things Obama used to say—like when he connected deregulation, corruption, and income inequality in his Cooper Union speech in 2008—those things were just to reel in the suckers. The suckers being the people who could hear the pillars of their middle-class world snapping. The suckers being the people who could see that the system was crumbling and thought maybe we ought to do something about it.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Ultimately, this has led to a position whereby today the key dividing line in many advanced economies is not earnings, but ownership of property. Firstly, however, we give an overview of recent empirical trends and examine competing and more traditional explanations for this growing inequality. 6.2 Trends in economic inequality Income inequality Income inequality refers to the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among a population. Over the past three decades income inequality has risen across much of the developed world, reaching record highs in some countries. One way of describing the distribution of income is to compare the ratio of the average income of the richest 10% to the average income of the poorest 10%.

As a result, the cost of housing has increased disproportionately for those in rented accommodation, which tend to be households on lower incomes.5 This has had the effect of exacerbating inequalities in ultimate spending power and living standards. Figure 6.8 shows the Gini coefficient for income inequality both before and after housing costs. It shows that income inequality was largely unaffected by housing costs during the 1960s and 1970s, but from 1979 onwards there has been a growing divergence between the two measures. This indicates that over the past thirty years housing costs have become a significant contributor towards widening gaps in ultimate spending power and, therefore, living standards.

Forging Mutual Futures – Co-operative, Mutual and Community Based Housing in Practice: History & Potential. Phase 1 Research Report to the Committee on Co-operative and Mutual Housing. Birmingham: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham. Rowlingson, Karen. 2011. Does Income Inequality Cause Health and Social Problems? York: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/does-income-inequality-cause-health-and-social-problems RTPI (Royal Town and Planning Institute). 2015. ‘Planning as “Market Maker”’. RTPI Research Report no. 11, November. http://www.rtpi.org.uk/knowledge/research/projects/small-project-impact-research-spire-scheme/planning-as-market-maker/ Ryan-Collins, Josh. 2016.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

labor income as share of total income, 39 and outsourcing, 163–71 polarization, 242–43, 252 premiums, 201 stagnation of, 161–63 uneven wage patterns, 248 of young people, 3 See also income inequality Wai, Jonathan, 188 Wall Street, 74 waste reduction, 248 Watson, 7, 12, 17, 157 We Have Met the Enemy (Akst), 202 wealth inequality, 233–34, 243–44, 252–53, 258. See also income inequality web companies, 25, 221 Weinberg, Bruce, 216 welfare benefits, 239 Western Europe, 167 Wikipedia, 7 Williams, Anson, 78, 86, 227 Winship, Scott, 53 workplace environment and capital investments in labor, 36 digital and physical environments, 113–19 effects of automation on, 111–13 and fears of standardization, 126–31 and human intuition, 109 and machine assessment, 119–25 worker evaluations, 120 xenophobia, 175 Yale University, 223 Yates, Frances, 153 Yglesias, Matthew, 240 YouTube, 197 Yudkowsky, Eliezer, 134 ZackS, 78 “zero marginal product” workers, 56–57 zoning issues, 240 Zuckerberg, Mark, 21, 25, 42, 188, 209–10 Zurich, Switzerland, 241 Zynga, 26

At some point it is hard to sell more physical stuff to high earners, yet there is usually just a bit more room to make them feel better. Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved. The growing importance of marketing integrates two seemingly unrelated features of the modern world: income inequality and increasing pressures on our attention. The more that earnings rise at the upper end of the distribution, the more competition there will be for the attention of the high earners and thus the greater the importance of marketing. If you imagine two wealthy billionaire peers sitting down for lunch, their demands for the attention of the other tend to be roughly equal.

The workers don’t have to be brilliant—they require only a minimum of training—and while conscientiousness plays a role, the monitoring and enforcement problems are relatively straightforward, as the workers either carry the bricks or they do not. To continue the contrast between two ways of organizing the world of work, I find it useful to go back in time to an era when income inequality was high and many individuals did not have adequate training for higher-wage jobs. From such a setting, I am struck by a passage by Henry Mayhew, who wrote about London labor markets in the mid-nineteenth century: Among the wares sold by the boys and girls of the streets are:—money-bags, lucifer-match-boxes, leather straps, belts, firewood . . . fly-papers, a variety of fruits, especially nuts, oranges, and apples; onions, radishes, water-cresses, cut flowers and lavender (mostly sold by girls), sweet-brier, India rubber, garters, and other little articles of the same material, including elastic rings to encircle rolls of paper-music, toys of the smaller kinds, cakes, steel pens, and penholders with glass handles, exhibition-medals and cards, gelatine cards, glass and other cheap seals, brass watch-guards, chains, and rings; small tin-ware, nutmeg-graters, and other articles of a similar description, such as are easily portable; iron skewers, fuzees [matches], shirt-buttons, boot and stay-laces, pins (and more rarely needles), cotton bobbins, Christmasing (holly and other evergreens at Christmas-tide), May-flowers, coat-studs, toy-pottery, blackberries, groundsel, and chickweed, and clothes’-pegs.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But the pattern of inequality is moderating. Income inequality reached a peak in 2008 and has since declined. Nonetheless, China, like other emerging nations, is a society that has become very unequal in many respects within a short period of time. Why has inequality risen over the past century? One of the reasons for high inequality in countries like China is that, as countries industrialize and urbanize, they grow more quickly. Those who move into industry and cities earn more than those who don’t, so income inequality tends to increase with economic development. But countries can reduce income inequality through redistributive policies.

Krugman also points out that this comparison is a static one: you can measure how two people with two different levels of income act at any given point in time, but it’s harder to predict how a person’s spending would change if incomes were raised. Stiglitz and Krugman may disagree over how much a role inequality plays in the slow recovery, but they agree that high levels of income inequality are a problem for economic as well as social reasons. Income inequality has been problematic for a long time. Inequality fell after the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, especially during the 1950s and 1960s when per capita GDP, which is a measure of average income, grew well during what’s called the Golden Age of economic growth.

higher education Holland Hong Kong Hoover, Herbert housing market Huawei human capital Hume, David hyperinflation hysteresis imports inclusive growth income inequality Index Number Institute (INI) Index Visible Company indexation schemes India individualism Indonesia industrialization and agriculture in China Industrial Revolution reindustrialization Second Industrial Revolution and the workers’ movement see also deindustrialization inequality and capitalism in China drivers of and globalization growing Hayek and global inequality income inequality and Marshall reasons for rising inequality over past century and skill-biased technical change in South Africa and tax and technological change US and welfare systems inflation and central bank regimes and debt indexation hyperinflation and savings stagflation and wages information and communications technology (ICT) smartphones and improvements in technology see also smartphones/mobile phones Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (US) infrastructure investment innovation and challenge of staying on top China’s challenge as engine of economic growth industry-specific Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ and Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) institutions and economic development Myanmar and North self-perpetuation of and technological progress Vietnam’s institutional challenge intangible investments interest rates and the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Depression investment and low rates negative and stocks International Labour Organization (ILO) International Monetary Fund (IMF) International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) internet investment and aggregate demand in economy capital investment with fixed returns foreign (direct) growth through in human capital infrastructure see infrastructure investment investment banks/banking Keynes’ view of investors and low interest rates low investment following financial crises private and productivity public see public investment R&D see research and development investment Robinson on capital accumulation from as share of GDP ‘socializing investment’ and tax UK foreign investment after Brexit Ireland UK exports to Israel iTunes Japan ‘Abenomics’ economic growth economic stagnation GDP ‘lost decades’ manufacturing national debt productivity real estate crash in 1990s robotics as second largest economy stagnant median wages temporary workers wage growth Jevons, W.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

I wrote about this in the context of the East Asian crisis in my Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Jason Furman (later one of my successors as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers) and I showed that there was a regular pattern to this, in our 1998 paper “Economic Consequences of Income Inequality,” in Income Inequality: Issues and Policy Options (Proceedings of a Symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming) (Kansas City, MO: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 1998), pp. 221–63. THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR. BUSH* WHEN WE LOOK BACK SOMEDAY AT THE CATASTROPHE that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties.

On the one hand, widening income and wealth inequality in America is part of a trend seen across the Western world. A 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. With a few exceptions—France, Japan, Spain—the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.

It would analyze the extent to which disparities in income are a result of differences in productivities, with differences in productivity in turn partly explained by disparities in access to quality education; the extent to which disparities in income are related to rent seeking; and the extent to which such disparities can be accounted for by inheritances. 25. Alex Cobham and Andy Sumner, “Is It All About the Tails? The Palma Measure of Income Inequality,” Center for Global Development, Working Paper 343, September 2013, www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/it-all-about-tails-palma-measure-income-inequality.pdf. 26. See the letter to Dr. Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution from 90 economists, academics, and development experts supporting the use of the Palma ratio as a measure of inequality at www.post2015hlp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Dr-Homi-Kharas.pdf. 27.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

If society collectively wants more of one good (greater income equality) it must give up some other good (the size of the ‘economic pie’).13 The research we’ve described suggests that the real equity–efficiency trade-off may look something like Figure 9.4. Over a wide range of income inequality, there is essentially no relationship between equity and efficiency, as reflected by the growth rate. Beyond that range, for degrees of equality or inequality not actually observed, the empirical evidence doesn’t say anything directly. So is the trade-off featured in the textbooks really a myth? Perhaps it’s about Observed income inequality somewhere within this range ? ? Index of income inequality declines in this direction figure 9.4 The equity–growth trade-off 212 Equity Questions for your professor: What is the evidence for a significant equity–efficiency trade-off?

If household incomes were equally distributed, those households would have 50 per cent of total income, the amount shown on the 45-degree line. The gap between the points showing actual household incomes (called the Lorenz curve) and this reference line indicates the nature and extent of income inequality. Income inequality is usually summarized in a single number to aid in comparing inequality over time and across countries. One simple way is to calculate the ratio of the shares of total income held by the top 10 or 20 per cent of 198 Country Top 10% to bottom 10% Top 20% to bottom 20% Gini coefficient 8.1 4.5 6.2 6.1 5.6 5.5 6.9 6.9 9.2 7.8 9.4 9.1 8.2 9.4 8.8 10.3 12.5 11.6 13.8 12.5 15 15.9 24.6 4.3 3.4 4 3.9 3.8 3.8 4.3 4.4 5.1 4.7 5.5 5.6 4.9 5.6 5.6 6 7 6.5 7.2 6.8 8 8.4 12.8 0.247 0.249 0.250 0.258 0.269 0.269 0.283 0.291 0.309 0.316 0.326 0.327 0.330 0.343 0.345 0.347 0.352 0.360 0.360 0.362 0.385 0.408 0.461 8.6 12.7 17.8 21.6 48.3 33 51.3 33.1 63.8 5.6 7.6 9.7 12.2 16 15.7 21.8 17.9 25.3 0.368 0.399 0.437 0.469 0.482 0.549 0.570 0.578 0.586 Some OECD countries Denmark Japan Sweden Norway Finland Hungary Germany Austria Netherlands Korea, South Canada France Belgium Ireland Poland Spain Australia Italy United Kingdom New Zealand Portugal United States Mexico Some non-OECD countries India Russia Nigeria China (excluding Hong Kong) Venezuela Chile Brazil South Africa Colombia Note: Values are for income or expenditure shares.

This is the ratio of the area between the Lorenz curve and the 199 9  |  Government, taxation table 9.2 Measures of income inequality 45-degree line (marked ‘A’ in Figure 9.1) and the entire area under the 45-degree line (A + B in the figure). So the Gini coefficient = A/(A + B). It’s zero if income is equally distributed; it’s 1 if one household has everything. Table 9.2 also shows estimates of the Gini coefficient for a selection of countries. With the exception of India, the developing countries shown have much higher income inequality than the developed countries. Among the OECD countries, there is considerable variation in inequality, with the United States being the most unequal.


pages: 459 words: 123,220

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

This up-close-and-personal focus runs the risk that we miss the deeper connection between the opportunity gap and growing income inequality. From Port Clinton to Philadelphia, and from Bend to Atlanta to Orange County, economic disparities among the families have been an important part of each story. In every movement of this composition the deep, throbbing, ominous bass line has been the steady deterioration of the economic circumstances of lower-class families, especially compared to the expanding resources available to upper-class parents. To be sure, the link from income inequality to opportunity inequality is not simple and instantaneous. As our cases illustrate, it took several decades for economic malaise to undermine family structures and community support; it took several decades for gaps in parenting and schooling to develop; and it will take decades more for the full impact of those divergent childhood influences to manifest themselves in adult lives.

The factors for which we have found growing class gaps are precisely the same factors that the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found to be associated with socioeconomic mobility across America today—family stability, residential segregation, school quality, community cohesion, and income inequality. That fact suggests (as this book argues) that those factors are leading indicators of trends in mobility. Chetty himself believes that the early returns from his research show no decline in socioeconomic mobility, but others (including me) are more doubtful that those early results will hold up when the full returns from the younger generation begin to arrive, about a decade from now.1 All sides in this debate agree on one thing, however: as income inequality expands, kids from more privileged backgrounds start and probably finish further and further ahead of their less privileged peers, even if the rate of socioeconomic mobility is unchanged.

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Decreasing (and then Increasing) Inequality in America: A Tale of Two Half-Centuries,” in The Causes and Consequences of Increasing Income Inequality, ed. Finis Welch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 37–82. 30. Massey, Categorically Unequal, 5. 31. This general pattern applies both to personal income and to family income and to income before and after taxes. The growth in income inequality reflected not simply that some people had good years, and others bad years, but the emergence of the stably rich at the top and the stably poor at the bottom. Inequality in wealth was even greater in absolute terms than inequality in income, but the increase in inequality after the great reversal of the 1970s was greater for income than for wealth.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Older people today recall the years between the end of the Second World War and the start of income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a period of rapid economic growth, partly in recovery from the world war, and with a growing middle class. People living then thought of these years as normal, but Piketty asserted that these years were highly unusual in the history of the past two centuries—and even beyond. While there is no inevitable winner in the race between the interest rate and the growth rate, the interest rate normally wins. I used the Lewis model and Piketty’s data as frameworks for the analysis of income inequality in this book. Piketty appealed to “fundamental laws of economics” to structure the data in his book, and I compare the models of inequality used by Piketty and in this book to clarify my arguments.

Lewis and Solow were working within a Keynesian framework in which capital referred to the means of production: factories and machines are the prime examples. Simon Kuznets, a third Nobel Laureate in economics, also was focused on economic growth in the 1950s. Using the data available to him, he formulated what came to be called the Kuznets Curve that asserted that income inequality would first rise and then fall during economic growth. He was reacting to the declining income inequality he observed around him and a political-economic view that richer countries would choose policies that increased equality. Piketty argued that Kuznets was living in a very unusual economic period during the years after the Second World War.

I argued on different grounds that the “golden age of economic growth” was unusual, that it was a protracted recovery from the preceding thirty years of war and depression. Either way, the rapid growth of income inequality in the United States since the 1970s contradicted Kuznets’ optimistic view.4 Piketty and I defined capital in very different ways. Piketty equated capital and wealth, including the value of both public and private financial assets in his definition of capital. He was interested in gathering data on income inequality over several centuries, and he restricted his data on wealth to assets traded on markets. He then could sum varied forms of capital at market prices to get national capital stocks by adding their prices.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

.], “David Stockman Explains the Keynesian State-Wreck Ahead—Sundown In America,” Zero Hedge (blog), October 5, 2013, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-05/david-stockman-explains-keynesian-state-wreck-ahead-sundown-america; Hibah Yousuf, “Obama Admits 95% of Income Gains Gone to Top 1%,” CNN Money, September 15, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama; Alexander Eichler, “Consumption Inequality Keeping Up With Rising Income Inequality: Study,” Huffington Post, April 10, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/consumption-inequality-income_n_1413454.html; Alexander Eichler, “Income Inequality Worse under Obama than George W. Bush,” Huffington Post, April 11, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/income-inequality-obama-bush_n_1419008.html; Richard Fry and Paul Taylor, “A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%,” report, Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, April 23, 2013, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/wealth_recovery_final.pdf. 17.

New York’s middle class has been in decline for decades, and as early as 1989 its economy was declared to be “hollow in the middle.”22 The most profound level of inequality and bifurcated class structure is found in the densest and most influential urban environment in North America—Manhattan. In 1980, Manhattan ranked seventeenth among the nation’s more than 3,000 counties in income inequality; by 2007 it ranked first, with the top fifth of all households earning 52 times that of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.23 Manhattan’s GINI index now stands higher than that of South Africa before the apartheid-ending 1994 election. If Manhattan were a country, it would rank sixth highest in income inequality in the world out of more than 130 for which the World Bank reports data.24 Amid the upper-tier affluence, in part due to the impact of bailouts of the great financial institutions concentrated in the city, New York’s wealthiest one percent earn a third of the entire city’s personal income—almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.25 This makes all the more understandable how, despite the city’s relatively strong recovery from both 9/11 and the recession, the strident populist campaign of Mayor Bill de Blasio was so strongly supported.26 The same patterns can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, in other major cities, notes a recent analysis of 2010 Census data by the Brookings Institution.

Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, California Lutheran University, “The United States and California Economic Forecast,” September 2009, http://www.clucerf.org/forecasts/2009/09; Brad Plumer, “Watch the Growth of U.S. Income Inequality with This Animated Map,” Wonkblog (blog), Washington Post, September 19, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/19/watch-the-growth-of-u-s-income-inequality-with-this-animated-map; Sarah Bohn and Eric Schiff, “The Great Recession and Distribution of Income in California,” report, Public Policy Institute of California, December 2011, http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_1211SBR.pdf. 58.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

According to the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), the wealth Gini coefficient for the fifteen countries studied, including poor countries like India and Indonesia as well as rich countries like the US and Norway, ranged between 0.5 and 0.8.12 The gap between a country’s income inequality and wealth inequality was particularly large for European countries with low income inequality, such as Norway and Germany.13 Income inequality has risen in the majority of countries since the 1980s Since the 1980s, income inequality has risen in the majority of countries.14 The most marked increase was seen in the UK and especially the US, which led the world in pro-rich policies. In the US, the share of income for the top 1 per cent used to be around 10 per cent between the 1940s and the 1970s, but rose to 23 per cent by 2007.15 The top 0.1 per cent increased its share from 3–4 per cent to over 12 per cent during the same period.16 The trend of rising inequality has slowed down somewhat since around 2000.

Some animals are more equal than others: too much equality is bad too Of course, all of this evidence does not mean that the lower the inequality the better it is. If there is too little income inequality, it can discourage people from working hard or creating new things to earn money, as used to be the case in the socialist countries – most notoriously in the agricultural communes in Mao’s China. What made things worse was that the low degrees of income inequality were often seen as charades. Low income inequality in these countries co-existed with high inequality in other dimensions (e.g., access to higher-quality foreign goods, opportunities to travel abroad), based upon ideological conformity or even personal networks.

Countries like Uganda, Poland, New Zealand and Italy are at the other end of that range (around 0.3). Roughly speaking, Gini of 0.35 is the dividing line between relatively equal countries and ones that are not.11 Wealth inequality is much higher than income inequality The data on wealth inequality are much less readily available and less reliable than those on income inequality. But it is clear that wealth inequality is much higher than income inequality in all countries for the main reason that accumulating wealth is much more difficult than earning income. According to the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), the wealth Gini coefficient for the fifteen countries studied, including poor countries like India and Indonesia as well as rich countries like the US and Norway, ranged between 0.5 and 0.8.12 The gap between a country’s income inequality and wealth inequality was particularly large for European countries with low income inequality, such as Norway and Germany.13 Income inequality has risen in the majority of countries since the 1980s Since the 1980s, income inequality has risen in the majority of countries.14 The most marked increase was seen in the UK and especially the US, which led the world in pro-rich policies.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But the pattern of inequality is moderating. Income inequality reached a peak in 2008 and has since declined. Nonetheless, China, like other emerging nations, is a society that has become very unequal in many respects within a short period of time. Why has inequality risen over the past century? One of the reasons for high inequality in countries like China is that, as countries industrialize and urbanize, they grow more quickly. Those who move into industry and cities earn more than those who don’t, so income inequality tends to increase with economic development. But countries can reduce income inequality through redistributive policies.

Krugman also points out that this comparison is a static one: you can measure how two people with two different levels of income act at any given point in time, but it’s harder to predict how a person’s spending would change if incomes were raised. Stiglitz and Krugman may disagree over how much a role inequality plays in the slow recovery, but they agree that high levels of income inequality are a problem for economic as well as social reasons. Income inequality has been problematic for a long time. Inequality fell after the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, especially during the 1950s and 1960s when per capita GDP, which is a measure of average income, grew well during what’s called the Golden Age of economic growth.

Its popularity reflects a widespread concern that inequality is as high now in America as the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. A recent economics Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, has even pointed to inequality as one of the causes of the slow recovery after the Great Recession. So, how would Marshall view the worsening of income inequality which is often perceived as an indictment of capitalism? Are capitalist economies inevitably unequal? Concerns over economic growth have certainly heated up since the 2008 global financial crisis, which was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. America was the epicentre, and Britain was deeply affected.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

A relatively stagnant minimum wage has certainly allowed the lowest real wages to fall (thereby also ensuring that some people who would otherwise be unemployed do have a job), though only a small percentage of American workers are paid the minimum wage. Finally, the entry of women into the workforce has also affected inequality. Because the well-connected and the highly educated tend to mate more often with each other, “assortative” mating has also helped increase household income inequality. The reasons for growing income inequality are, undoubtedly, a matter of heated debate. To my mind, the evidence is most persuasive that the growing inequality I think the most worrisome, the increasing 90/10 differential, stems primarily from the gap between the demand for the highly educated and their supply. Progressives, no doubt, attribute substantial weight to the antilabor policies followed by Republican governments since Ronald Reagan, whereas conservatives attribute much of the earlier wage compression to anticompetitive policies followed since Franklin Roosevelt.

Census Bureau, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2008,” www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/education/cps2008.html, accessed March 5, 2010. 5 Brink Lindsey, “Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics: Economic Policies, Social Norms, and Income Inequality,” Cato Institute working paper, Washington, DC, 2009. 6 Author’s calculations based on Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, 52. 7 U.S. Census Bureau, “Educational Attainment: People 25 Years Old and Over, by Total Money Earnings in 2008,” www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/perinc/ new03_001.htm, accessed March 5, 2010. 8 See Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, 327. 9 Ibid., 249–50. 10 Ibid., 326–28. 11 T. Piketty and E. Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” NBER Working Paper 8467, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2001. 12 Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 55. 13 See Lindsey, “Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics.” 14 See P.

See Housing and Urban Development, Department of human capital: access to components of definition of improving noncognitive skills training value of, See also education IMF. See International Monetary Fund immigration: effects on income inequality illegal imports: of India of United States See also trade incentives: in bureaucracies effects of unemployment benefits, in financial firms in governments reforms of for risk-taking income inequality: attitudes toward causes of increases in credit expansion and economic benefits of increases in policy responses to political pressure for easy credit and political pressure for economic stimulus and reducing incomes: college premium financial institution compensation of hedge fund managers from investments in Kenya opportunities for increasing of physicians, See also economic growth; poverty; wages India: British rule of central bank of conglomerates in economic growth of economic policies of energy consumption in exchange-rate policies of exports of financial crisis in government intervention in credit markets in health care costs inphysical capital in reforms in trade policies of Indonesia: economic crisis in IMF loans to industrial development: early developers in India late developers in Taiwan inequality.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Those in the lowest quintile of income earned have an effective tax rate of 27 percent; those in the highest quintile have an effective tax rate of 9 percent.5 Figure I.1 Effective Tax Rate from all Sources (Percent), 2012. (Computed from Bret N. Bogenschneider, “Income Inequality and Regressive Taxation in the United States,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics and Business Law vol. 4 no. 3 (2015): 8–28, at 12.) Poor Americans’ chances for economic mobility are lower than those of the poor in many other countries, America’s reputation as a “land of opportunity” to the contrary.6 Why should we care? Social science research reveals that income inequality correlates with a host of social problems: “Higher crime rates, lower life expectancy, less charitable giving, worse school performance, greater incidence of obesity, and slower economic growth.”7 Moreover, a republic depends on the participation of citizens who are independent enough to achieve a certain level of political knowledge and to assert their own opinions.

Erik Sherman, “America Is the Richest, and Most Unequal, Country,” Fortune, September 30, 2015, available online at http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/america-wealth-inequality/, accessed April 2, 2016. 19. Shammas, “A New Look,” 420. 20. Williamson and Lindert, “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” 11, 15, 20. 21. Mark W. Frank, “Inequality and Growth in the United States: Evidence from a New State-Level Panel of Income Inequality Measures,” Economic Inquiry vol. 47 no. 1 (2009): 55–68. 22. Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review vol. 45 no. 1 (1955): 1–30. 23. Milanovic, Haves and Have-Nots, 91. 24. Williamson and Lindert, “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” 56, 59; Jeffrey Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 258. 25.

William and Mary Quarterly 28, no. 3 (July 1971): 375–412. Kumhof, Michael, Romain Ranciere, and Pablo Winant. “Inequality, Leverage, and Crises.” American Economic Review 105, no. 3 (2015): 1217–1245. Kuznets, Simon. “Economic Growth and Income Inequality.” American Economic Review 45, no. 1 (1955): 1–30. Kwon, Ray. “Does Radical Partisan Politics Affect National Income Distributions? Congressional Polarization and Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–2008.” Social Science Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2015): 49–64. Levitan, Sar A. “How the Welfare System Promotes Economic Security.” Political Science Quarterly 100, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 447–459.


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Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

See International Monetary Fund (IMF) imports, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2n28 income, 2.1 passim; as class distinguishing, 1.1; EU, 2.2n83, 3.1; Greece, 2.3n83, 2.4n85, 3.2n27; losses, 1.2, 1.3, 2.5, 3.3; negotiated; per capita, 2.6, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7; supplemental; upper-class, 2.7, 2.8n66, 3.8. See also pay income inequality, 2.1 passim, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, 3.2 passim, 3.3; comparative figures; United States, 1.2n13, 1.3, 2.6 ‘incomes policy’, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3n59, 4.1 income tax, 2.1, 2.2n37, 2.3, 2.4n53, 2.5n83, 3.1 indignados industry, German, 1.1n13, 3.1, 3.2 inequality, 1.1n47, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2 passim, 4.1; EU, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.2; Germany, 3.5 passim; Italy, 3.6 passim, 3.7; United States, 3.8. See also income inequality inflation, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 passim, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 4.1; comparative figures; effect on state revenue; EU, 3.1, 4.2; Germany, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9; Sweden, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12; United States, 1.13, 1.14, 1.15, 2.3.

See rationality and irrationality Italy, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 4.1n3; under Bretton Woods; Communist Party; ECB subsidization; employment/unemployment; German relations, 2.1, 3.9n81, 3.10, 3.11; government bonds, 3.12, 3.13; income inequality, 1.2, 2.2, 3.14; inflation; internal diversity; private debt; public debt, 1.5, 1.6, 2.3, 3.15, 3.16, 3.17, 4.5n18; regional development, 3.18 passim; strikes, 1.7n63; tax revenue; unionization rates, 1.8. See also Mezzogiorno Japan: employment/unemployment, 1.1; income inequality; inflation; public debt, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2n65; strikes; tax revenue, 2.3, 2.4n31; unionization rates, 1.6 justice. See market justice; social justice Kalecki, Michal, 1.1n40, 1.2 Keynes, John Maynard, 1.1n50, 1.2, 4.1, 4.2 Keynesianism, 1.1, 1.2 passim, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2; Europe, 3.1, 3.2.

Context and sequence occupy centre stage, with individual events more to the side; rough commonalities overshadow subtle distinctions; particular cases receive less attention than the links between them; synthesis trumps analysis; and boundaries between disciplines are continually disregarded. The argument spans wide arcs: from the strike wave in the late 1960s to the introduction of the euro, from the end of inflation in the early 1980s to the rapid growth of income inequality around the end of the century, from ‘containment policy’ in the age of Eurocommunism to the present fiscal crises of the Mediterranean countries, and much more besides. Probably not everything will stand up to more specialized research; that is the risk I run, a risk that affects any synoptic treatment of current events.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

In their paper ‘The Great Divide’; ‘Regional Inequality and Fiscal Policy’, the authors, Gbohoui et al., state that: Redistributive fiscal policies have helped reduce, but not fully offset, rising nationwide income inequality (IMF 2017; Immervoll and Richardson 2011). For advanced OECD countries, the average redistributive effect of fiscal policy—measured by the difference in Gini coefficients on household income before and after taxes and transfers—is about one-third (from 0.49 Gini points from market income inequality to 0.31 Gini points for disposable income inequality in 2015) (Figure 6 top left panel). About three-quarters of the fiscal redistribution was achieved on the transfer side, while progressive taxation contributed the remaining one quarter.

Diagram 1.5Long-term government bond yields: 10-year maturity (Source Federal Reserve Economic Database – FRED hereafter) 1.1.5 Social Effects: Winners, Losers and Inequality The gainers from all this have been those with capital, both embodied and human in the advanced countries, and workers in China and Eastern Europe. Thus, the ratio of the wages of an American worker to a Chinese worker, and of a French to a Polish worker, have been narrowing sharply, as shown in Table 1.4. There are many more Chinese than Americans, so, just as income inequality within particularly the advanced countries has tended to worsen, income inequality between countries and in the world as a whole has been improving. Inequality, as measured by the ratio of the income of the top 10% to the bottom 90%, has tended to worsen within most countries, as has wealth inequality. This is recorded in much more detail in Chapter 7.Table 1.4Ratio of the wages of workers: USA/China; France/Poland USA/China France/Poland 2000 34.6 3.9 2001 30.6 3.3 2002 27.4 3.5 2003 25.0 4.0 2004 22.9 4.2 2005 20.4 3.8 2006 18.1 3.7 2007 15.2 3.5 2008 12.2 3.0 2009 10.8 3.7 2010 9.7 3.3 2011 8.4 3.3 2012 7.5 3.4 2013 6.7 3.4 2014 6.3 3.3 2015 6.0 3.4 2016 5.9 3.4 2017 5.6 3.2 2018 5.1 2.9 Source National Sources The rise in income and wealth inequality, and the slow rate of growth of real wages among the less skilled, had led an increasing proportion of voters in many advanced countries to lose faith in their political institutions, and to believe that the elite has ceased to care about them.

Diagram 7.1 Gini coefficient of disposable household income across the OECD (Source Rachel and Summers (2019)) Table 7.1Top 10% income share 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 USA 0.39 0.41 0.44 0.45 0.46 China 0.30 0.34 0.36 0.42 0.43 0.41 Germany 0.32 0.39 0.40 UK 0.37 0.39 0.41 0.42 0.38 France 0.32 0.32 0.33 0.33 0.33 Japan 0.39 0.36 0.38 0.42 0.42 Sweden 0.22 0.26 0.26 0.27 0.27 0.28 Brazil 0.55 0.55 0.56 India 0.33 0.38 0.40 0.45 0.52 0.56 Egypt 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.49 0.46 0.49 Italy 0.26 0.28 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 Source World Inequality Database Table 7.2Top 1% income share 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 USA 0.15 0.15 0.18 0.19 0.20 China 0.08 0.09 0.10 0.14 0.15 0.14 Germany 0.08 0.13 0.13 UK 0.10 0.11 0.14 0.14 0.13 France 0.09 0.09 0.11 0.11 0.11 Japan 0.13 0.09 0.09 0.11 0.10 Sweden 0.05 0.08 0.07 0.08 0.08 0.09 Brazil 0.28 0.28 0.28 India 0.10 0.13 0.15 0.19 0.21 0.21 Egypt 0.19 0.19 0.19 0.18 0.17 0.19 Italy 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.08 0.07 0.07 Source World Inequality Database Table 7.3Top 10% wealth share 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 USA 0.64 0.66 0.69 0.67 0.73 China 0.41 0.41 0.48 0.52 0.63 0.67 UK 0.46 0.47 0.51 0.51 France 0.50 0.51 0.57 0.52 0.56 Source World Inequality Database These tables show that among these countries income inequality was least marked, at the end of our period, in Sweden and Italy, but most extreme in Brazil and India. By the same token, such income inequality appears to have increased most in China, Germany and India, and least in Japan. A saving grace to this dismal outcome is that the post-tax and transfer incomes of the poorest two deciles of the populations (households) in most countries continue to be protected, largely by policy measures, such as welfare benefits, minimum wage laws and medical support.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Thierry Verdier also contend that there are two varieties of capitalism, but in their view one does tend to perform better than the other.31 They hypothesize the following: • Countries choose between two types of capitalism. “Cutthroat” capitalism provides large financial rewards to successful entrepreneurship. This yields high income inequality, but it stimulates entrepreneurial effort and hence is conducive to innovation. “Cuddly” capitalism features less financial payoff to entrepreneurs and more generous cushions against risk. This yields modest income inequality but less innovation. • Because of the difference in innovation, economic growth is initially faster in cutthroat-capitalism nations. But technological advance spills over from cutthroat nations to cuddly ones, so growth rates then equalize.

But given the large increases in inequality of test scores and college completion between children from low-income families and those from high-income families, it is very likely that the same will be true, and perhaps already is true, for their earnings and incomes when they reach adulthood. Slow Income Growth As a society gets richer, the living standards of its households should rise.55 The poorest needn’t benefit the most; equal rates of improvement may be good enough. We might not even mind if the wealthiest benefit a bit more than others; a little increase in income inequality is hardly catastrophic. But in a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everyone should prosper. In the period between World War II and the mid-to-late 1970s, economic growth was good for Americans in the middle and below.

Individuals unable to function effectively or continuously in the labor market, whether working age or elderly, will have a higher income. No one will have to fear lack of access to medical care, and fewer will face a massive out-of-pocket expense resulting from such care. Expanded provision of public goods and services will enhance economic security and take the edge off rising income inequality for those at the low end of the scale. A steady rise in the EITC will ensure that more of our economic growth reaches households in the middle and below. How much will all this cost? That depends on the structure and generosity of the policies, and it isn’t my aim to offer recommendations at that level of specificity.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

These developments are likely to usher in a new age of unprecedented prosperity and leisure, but the transition may be protracted and brutal. Without adjustments to our economic system and regulatory policies, we may be in for an extended period of social turmoil. The warning signs are everywhere. The two great scourges of the modern developed world—persistent unemployment and increasing income inequality—plague our society even as our economy continues to grow. If these are left unchecked, we may witness the spectacle of widespread poverty against a backdrop of escalating comfort and wealth. My goal is to give you a personal tour of the breakthroughs fueling this transition and the challenges it poses for society.

You won’t be committed in advance to accepting a particular position if someone else makes you a better offer, but at least you have the comfort of knowing that you are acquiring the skills valued by the marketplace. In effect, this scheme introduces a new form of feedback and liquidity into labor markets, enforced through the discipline of the free market. But our greatest societal challenge will be to rein in growing income inequality. I will propose an objective, government-certified measure of corporate ownership, which I will call the public benefit index, or PBI, which can serve as the foundation for a variety of programs to keep society on a more even keel. By scaling corporate taxes based on how many stockholders benefit from a company’s success, we can tilt the scales in favor of broad public participation in an asset-based economy.

The rise in life expectancy is due to many factors but is largely the result of improvements in medical sanitation, the development of vaccines, public efforts to separate water and sewer systems, government initiatives such as the creation of the Centers for Disease Control, and public health education campaigns (smoking cessation, for example). So the time has arrived for us to establish sensible policies to reduce income inequality. Our initial instinct may be to tackle this challenge by first determining its root cause(s) and addressing each in turn, most notably unemployment. But I suspect that would simply embroil us in endless debates, pitting those who blame the poor for their own failure to thrive against those who blame needless government spending and regulatory interference against those who see those same regulations as hopelessly biased toward the rich against those who believe your income is a numerical measure of how pleased God is with you.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Frank, “Why 2 Paychecks Are Barely Enough,” The New York Times, Sunday Business, January 1, 2012. 28 “Income inequality is real” Abramowitz and Montgomery, “Bush Addresses Income Inequality.” 29 America is now the most unequal Will Hutton, “Log Cabin to White House? Not Any More,” The Observer, April 28, 2002, http://​www.​observer.​co.​uk/​comment/​story/​0,6903,706484,00.​html; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” An Overview of Growing Income Inequalities in OECD Countries: Main Findings, accessed December 6, 2011, http://​www.​oecd.​org/​dataoecd/​40/​12/​49170449.​pdf. 30 “Those at the top” Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 34–40. 31 The degree is not what explains that Ibid., 35–38. 32 “The most telling fact” Larry Mishel, interview, July 10, 2010. 33 “The U.S. tax code” David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else (New York: Penguin Group, 2003), 11. 34 As the tax code has been written Thomas L.

., quoted in Charles Elson, moderator, “What’s Wrong with Executive Compensation?” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 1 (2003): 69–77. 39 Ranked the United States thirty-first Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “An Overview of Growing Income Inequalities in OECD Countries: Main Findings,” in “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” An Overview of Growing Income Inequalities in OECD Countries: Main Findings, accessed December 6, 2011, http://​www.​oecd.​org/​dataoecd/​40/​12/​49170449.​pdf. 40 With rare exceptions, such as Jessica Silver Greenberg and Nelson D. Schwartz, “Citigroup’s Chief Rebuffed on Pay by Shareholders,” The New York Times, April 18, 2012. 41 The number of illegally fired workers Edsall, New Politics of Inequality, 151–54. 42 Increasingly sided with business Jeffrey Rosen, “Supreme Court, Inc.,” The New York Times Magazine, March 16, 2008; Adam Liptak, “Justices Offer Receptive Ear to Business Interests,” The New York Times, December 19, 2010. 43 “Terrors” of the corporate boardroom “The Scariest S.O.B. on Wall Street,” Fortune 4, no. 11 (December 9, 1996). 44 Close-up photo of Price Ibid. 45 “The power of the financial markets” Roach, interview, transcript, Surviving the Bottom Line.

Several recent studies have shown that America’s wealth gap is a drag on today’s economy. Harvard economist Philippe Aghion cites an accumulation of “impressively unambiguous” evidence from multiple economic studies documenting that “greater inequality reduces the rate of growth.” A recent International Monetary Fund study came to a similar conclusion—that a high level of income inequality can be “destructive” to sustained growth and that the best condition for long-term growth is “more equality in the income distribution.” The Unraveling The opposite has happened in America since the late 1970s. The soaring wealth of the super-rich has brought the unraveling of the American Dream for the middle class—the dream of a steady job with decent pay and health benefits, rising living standards, a home of your own, a secure retirement, and the hope that your children would enjoy a better future.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Yet, although they confront increasing income concentration, the impact to date appears to be significantly milder than what we are experiencing in the United States. The United States is clearly an outlier among the global trading partners, and that calls for a broader explanation of the causes of U.S. income inequality. Part of the explanation is the more elaborate welfare systems, especially in Europe, that are engaged in far more extensive programs to redistribute income than has been deemed acceptable in the United States. But this is not new. Such disparities existed well before 1980, when income inequality began to become a global problem. A very likely significant part of the explanation for recent developments appears to be the dysfunction of elementary and secondary education in the United States.

Real wages of the lesser skilled also rose, in part as a result of effective high school education and the many skills learned during *Ironically, many educators in Singapore marvel at the entrepreneurial skills of American youth. 400 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. EDUCATION AND INCOME INEQUALITY the war. In short, technical proficiencies across all job levels appeared to rise about in line with the needs of our ever-more-complex infrastructure, stabilizing the income distribution in the United States for three decades. While the GI Bill and on-the-job training in the World War II military were not, of course, initially market-driven, they helped to meet the needs of a changing labor market. By 1980, however, a persistent rise in income inequality began to take hold.* High-wage, middle-class factory jobs in the United States have been under pressure from technology and imports since they peaked at nearly twenty million in mid-1979.

THE CHOICES THAT A W A I T C H I N A 294 15. T H E TIGERS A N D THE E L E P H A N T 311 16. RUSSIA'S SHARP ELBOWS 323 17. LATIN AMERICA A N D POPULISM 334 18. CURRENT ACCOUNTS A N D DEBT 346 19. GLOBALIZATION A N D REGULATION 363 20. T H E " C O N U N D R U M " 377 21. 392 EDUCATION A N D INCOME INEQUALITY 22. T H E W O R L D R E T I R E S . B U T C A N I T A F F O R D T O ? 409 23. 423 CORPORATE G O V E R N A N C E 24. T H E L O N G - T E R M E N E R G Y S Q U E E Z E 437 25. 464 THE D E L P H I C FUTURE Acknowledgments 506 A Note on Sources 508 Index 513 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

(A previous well-known 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton demonstrated that, for Americans, higher salaries were associated with increases in day-to-day satisfaction, with well-being tapering off at an income of about $75,000.) In another article, “Income Inequality and Depression,” the authors, led by Vikram Patel of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, conclude that “nearly two-thirds of all studies and five out of six longitudinal studies reported a statistically significant positive relationship between income inequality and risk of depression.” I was also struck by some of the research I uncovered about how some therapists treated patients who were financially stressed.

Cooper, “The Expanding Class Divide in Happiness in the United States, 1972–2016,” Emotion (2020, advance online publication), https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000774. “statistically significant positive relationship between income inequality and risk of depression”: Vikram Patel, Jonathan K. Burns, Monisha Dhingra, Leslie Tarver, Brandon A. Kohrt, and Crick Lund, “Income Inequality and Depression: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Association and a Scoping Review of Mechanisms,” World Psychiatry, February 17, 2018: 76–89, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5775138/. as if they were already in some way suspect: Thomas E.

Others lecture the economically unstable for putatively wallowing in their condition. It was not happenstance that I was the recipient: I was getting this stream of invective from news consumers because I run a journalism nonprofit called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which is devoted to covering income inequality and poverty, and I have also spent much of the last eight years reporting on these matters. Some of my organization’s writers have experienced homelessness or eviction or they have had to watch family pets die because they couldn’t afford vet bills; some of my sources have experienced similar setbacks.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Driven by dynamic markets, not stodgy old welfare states, it has reportedly given us the toppling of old hierarchies, the erosion of inherited privileges, and the democratization of wealth. In fact, the distribution of income in the U.S. in the early 2000s is about the most unequal it's ever been—and the same can be said of the distribution of world income. Not, of course, that many people care, or even notice. Back in the 1980s, income inequality used to be a hot political issue. Liberals worried about it, and the idea that the rich were getting richer and the poor getting poorer suffused the popular culture. Conservatives often denied statistical reaUty—a right-wing media critic told me in the late 1980s that we must "live on different planets" if I thought U.S. incomes were polarizing.

In 1955, Simon Kuznets pubHshed his famous "inverted U" theory of capitalist evolution: that income inequaHty rises in the early stages of development and faUs as economies mature. Economists came to believe this as a fact of their After the New Economy .525 .500 .475 .450 .425 .4001-.375 income inequality (Cini index) U.S., 1913-2001 "science," and you still hear it from development specialists at the World Bank and in academia to excuse the vast increase in inequaUty in the Third World over the last fifteen years. Recent U.S. experience suggests that Kuznets s U may have another tail to tell.

So, not only did less-educated workers see their wages fall relative to those of more educated workers—they became a lot more likely to have a bad year. But the increase in instability aflected white male workers in all age, education, and income categories. And both the volatility of weekly wages and the number of weeks worked per year increased. It's a constant of this field that income inequality has increased no matter how you sHce it; as Lawrence Katz put it in a comment on the Gottschalk/ Moffitt paper, "Inequality has increased between skill groups and within them, between sectors and within them, between estabhshments and within them, and along both permanent and transitory dimensions."


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The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

While most wealthy Americans found loopholes to shrink their effective tax rates, the basic structure worked well: it paid for social welfare programs and ambitious infrastructure projects, such as the interstate highway system, while lessening income inequality in what was then the greatest economic expansion in world history. The top marginal tax rate didn’t fall below 50 percent until the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan slashed it to 28 percent. But thanks to deregulation and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, income inequality today is back where it was before the Great Depression. According to historian Jill Lepore, in 1928 the top 1 percent of American families earned 24 percent of all income, but income inequality shrank significantly in the 1940s—by 1944, the middle class had grown and the top 1 percent earned only about 11 percent of the total.

The popular kids had flat-ironed hair and wore polo shirts from Abercrombie & Fitch, sometimes two at the same time, pink over green or green over pink. Sometimes Alexandria would go with her mother to clean rich people’s houses that were bigger and nicer, with more expensive furniture and fancier decorations. Once, her mom cleaned a woman’s home in exchange for SAT lessons for Alexandria. “I saw and interpreted a lot subconsciously about income inequality,” she said later. “We were an economic underclass. We were part of the service class.” Gabriel had once gone on a job with their mom and realized halfway through that he was cleaning the home of one of his classmates. “That was one of the first moments that I felt shame,” he remembered. Another time, Blanca was cleaning the house of an older man whose wife was in the hospital.

After a decade of economic malaise in the 1970s, boomers largely embraced the exuberant materialism and cynical individualism that characterized much of the late twentieth century. They voted for Ronald Reagan (especially in 1984) and supported the tax cuts and financial deregulation that laid the groundwork for soaring income inequality. The two decades spanning the Reagan and Clinton presidencies amounted to a lurch to the right in American politics. Reagan oversaw a radical reduction in government investment, and Clinton’s “Third Way” attempted to triangulate a path forward for Democrats that prioritized market solutions over government programs and ended up boosting corporate profit more than middle-class wealth.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

In fact, it is probably a futile exercise to ask how much tax policy drove the development of computers, how much computers drive income inequality, and how much income inequality drives commuting distances. Better to take a deep breath and unfocus the eyes to try to take in the entire mosaic that makes up the social landscape today. If our new economy was indeed born out of the paradoxes of the last one, then the technological seeds were planted—ironically—back in the halcyon days of the 1950s. I say “ironically” since it is the idealized version of the fifties that forms the backdrop against which we measure the so-called inadequacies of today. Ah, what a time. Liberals pine for those days when income inequality was at its lowest point of the century and the top marginal tax rates exceeded the now unimaginable level of 90 percent.42 And that with a Republican in the White House.

Computers and telecommunications technologies have allowed for private equity managers to make tens of millions of dollars through international arbitrage while sitting in their pajamas in Westport, Connecticut (also known as “Northern Hedg-istan” to financial industry insiders). As much as the left likes to blame Ronald Reagan (and the two Bushes) for the steady rise in income inequality, much of it had to do with computer technology. And then there are the second-order effects of rising inequality on the economy. Paradoxically, the fastest-growing number of jobs in the first decade of the third millennium is projected to be in food preparation and service.38 Computers were supposed to eliminate low-skilled jobs and create high-skilled ones.

Add in the fact that her job involves interacting with people all day long in a highly constrained way—acting pleasantly subservient is the nature of the game in the lower-wage service sector—and you start to comprehend the social nature of poverty in the post-material age. Some on the left wonder why there is not more of a backlash against the high (and rising) degree of income inequality in the United States. But it’s really not too bewildering. It’s because we are all implicated in the greatest Ponzi scheme history has ever witnessed. We all have to buy into this economic pyramid to keep it running. And since many of us enjoy decent, long-run returns on our 401(k)s and home values—while simultaneously afflicted by fraud anxiety—we tend to go along with the program and hope it all works out in the end.


pages: 352 words: 107,280

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

It matters more in the UK (and the US) to choose the right parents The strong association between parental incomes or earnings and sons’ earnings is not only seen in the UK – it is also strong in Italy and in the US, despite the rhetoric of the US being a ‘land of opportunity’. These three countries have had high levels of income inequality. By contrast, the links between fathers and sons’ earnings are weaker in Scandinavian countries, which have had lower income inequality. Looking internationally at the countries for which comparable analysis can be made, Miles Corak and colleagues have shown that there is a general association between high income inequality and low intergenerational mobility in earnings, as shown in Figure 7.11. In the countries where income inequality was relatively low when those born in the 1960s entered the labour market, parental earnings (family income in the UK case) were half as important in explaining sons’ earnings as in the countries with high-income inequality.52 This relationship is so striking that Alan Krueger, Chairman of US President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed it the ‘Great Gatsby curve’.

In the countries where income inequality was relatively low when those born in the 1960s entered the labour market, parental earnings (family income in the UK case) were half as important in explaining sons’ earnings as in the countries with high-income inequality.52 This relationship is so striking that Alan Krueger, Chairman of US President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has dubbed it the ‘Great Gatsby curve’. It may be that the ‘rich are different from you and me’, as the original book’s author, F. Scott Fitzgerald once (almost) wrote, and not just in that ‘they have more money’ (as Ernest Hemmingway is said to have riposted). But in an unequal society the life chances of the children of the rich are also very different. Figure 7.11: The Great Gatsby curve Source: M. Corak (2013) ‘Income inequality, equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 27, no 3, Figure 1 One of the reasons for this lies in the combination of two factors.

Figure 2.8: Inequality of market incomes in industrialised countries, 2013 (Gini coefficients, %) The difference between inequality in market incomes and in disposable incomes gives one measure of how much redistribution the direct tax and benefit systems achieve. In these terms the UK does quite a lot. The difference in inequality between the indexes shown in Figures 2.8 and 2.6 was greater in the UK than the average for the 35 countries shown, with only 15 of them doing more.34 Taxes and benefits narrowed income inequality in the UK more than in archetypal egalitarian countries such as Sweden and Norway. As Figure 2.9 comparing the UK and Sweden shows, inequality ends up much higher in the UK than in Sweden, because it starts so much higher, despite the UK’s somewhat greater redistributive effort. Figure 2.9: Inequality before and after redistribution in the UK and Sweden, 2013 (Gini coefficients, %) Our problem as a country is that, if we want to achieve a relatively equal result, the inequality in market incomes means that so much redistribution is needed.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

A big house with a big back yard, twins, maternity leave, those forms you have to fill out every April 15th, two tonsillectomies, a long-overdue vacation, a raise, a higher tax bracket, another bouncing baby, an even bigger house, fluctuating interest rates, an inheritance from a long-lost aunt, grad school, pre-med school, med school, investing your profit sharing, your only daughter’s 300-plate wedding reception, money to start your own business, a new couch because Uncle Marvin forgot where he left his cigar, a summer house on a small lake with large fish, changes in the tax law, lawyers for everything, lots and lots of grandchildren, and a cruise around the world. So get ready. Call Dean Witter. But something else was going on, too. Income inequality, which had shrunk dramatically in the United States during the period following World War II, began to open up again in the inflationary environment of the 1970s. About 60 percent of the gains in income between 1979 and the 2000s went to the top 1 percent of earners. As for the rest of us: median household income, when adjusted for inflation, fell by 7 percent between 1999 and 2010.

Instead, I simply want to help people realize that, just because they’re not millionaires, doesn’t mean they’re failures. Pound Foolish will tell the story of how we were sold on a dream—a dream that personal finance had almost magical abilities, that it could compensate for stagnant salaries, income inequality, and a society that offered a shorter and thinner safety net with each passing year. The book will tell the tale of how that fantasy was sold to us by people, organizations, and businesses that had a vested monetary interest in selling it to us. Finally, it will tell the story of how we allowed ourselves to be convinced that the personal finance and investment industrial complex would save our collective financial souls—and what comes next, now that it is clear it never could

In a USA Today interview in 1991, for example, she opines “You can no longer count on your real estate to make you rich,” a statement that was objectively untrue, at least at that time. (Believe me, you only wish you had had the foresight to buy some New York City or San Francisco Bay Area real estate in 1991 and just hold onto it.) But in the same article she exhibits an awareness of income inequality and the increasing precariousness of American life. “You can’t count on your salary going up the way it used to,” she says, adding, “Good health insurance does not exist at a bargain price…someday the tragedy of the uninsured and the underinsured will surely spark a political revolt.” Quinn’s forthrightness continues today.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Could the rise of intangible investment provide part of the answer? Let’s look at the possible ways in which an intangible economy might result in more of the kinds of inequality that people have been observing. Intangibles, Firms, and Income Inequality First of all, let’s consider the ways in which the rise of intangible investment could have driven the increase in income inequality that has arisen from differences between firms. As we have seen in chapter 4, some of the key characteristics of intangibles are scalability and spillovers. So in a world where intangible investment is very important, we would expect to see the best firms, firms that own valuable, scalable intangibles and that are good at exacting the spillovers from other businesses, being highly productive and profitable, and their competitors losing out.

The annual return on wealth is around 6–8 percent, so total wealth is about 400 percent of GDP/total income. How can wealth be so much larger than GDP? Wealth is a stock and is accumulated over potentially many years of building assets. GDP/income is an annual flow. Finally, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes, wealth inequality is much higher than income inequality. The wealthiest 10 percent of households hold 50 percent of the wealth. The least wealthy 25 percent of households hold almost no wealth at all. The Gini coefficient, which is a summary measure for how unequal a distribution is, ranges from 0 to 1, where a measure of 0 is equality and 1 is where only one person accounts for the entire measure.

Inequality in median annual earnings between high school and college graduates, United States (in constant 2012 dollars). Source: Autor (2014). But this is not just a case of graduates doing well. The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan “the One Per Cent” was that it crystallized in people’s minds that income inequality today seems to be fractal. The incomes of the richest 1 percent, the richest 0.1 percent, and the richest 0.01 percent have risen by even more dizzying levels (see below). And as development economist Branko Milanović pointed out, this is part of a global phenomenon: over the past two decades, incomes have risen sharply for most people in the world, in particular people in big, once-poor countries like China (Milanović 2005).


Basic Income And The Left by henningmeyer

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, eurozone crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, land value tax, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, precariat, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, the market place, Tobin tax, universal basic income

A final observation: the growing weakness of labour The most important variables in the reduction of explains the large deterioration of the labour income inequalities are political and are based, market, with a third of the labour force (almost half again, on the status of capital-labour relations in in Southern Europe) in precarious work, one of the each country. In countries where labour is weak, major reasons for the growth of poverty and of inequalities are large. This is the reason why income income inequalities. To believe that UBI is the solu‐ inequalities have been growing as dramatically in tion (or part of the solution) to what has been called many countries, on both sides of the northern the ‘precariat’ is to ignore the active causes of the Atlantic (North America and Europe): labour has deterioration of the labour market, causes that been increasingly weak.

Basic Income And Social Democracy 4. Why Basic Income Can Never Be A Progressive Solution - A Response To Van Parijs 5. The Euro-Dividend 6. Basic Income Pilots: A Better Option Than Quantitative Easing 7. Why The Universal Basic Income Is Not The Best Public Intervention To Reduce Poverty Or Income Inequality 8. The Worldwide March To Basic Income: Thank You Switzerland! 9. Universal Basic Income: A Disarmingly Simple Idea – And Fad 10. Unconditional Basic Income Is A Dead End 11. Basic Income Is A Tonic Catalyser: A Response To Anke Hassel 12. Basic Income And Institutional Transformation 13. No Need For Basic Income: Five Policies To Deal With The Threat Of Technological Unemployment 14.

policy, ameliorating the conditions that induce impoverished Romanians and Bulgarians to try to go to countries where anti-migration sentiment is dragging governments towards illiberal posturing and policy. Similarly, had the UK’s QE been diverted to pay every British resident a basic income, everybody could have received about £50 a week for two years. Income inequality would have been reduced, economic security improved, domestic growth boosted. Instead, asset bubbles have grown, notably in the property market, along with personal debt, homelessness and resort to food banks. As cuts to 42 43 social spending mount, the politicians and financial establishment should not be surprised if the anger turns on them.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

page_id=6678 or https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/07/peak-inequality 22 Hazeldine, T. and Rashbrooke, M. (2017) ‘The New Zealand rich list twenty years on’, New Zealand Economic Papers, doi: 10.1080/00779954.2017.1354907, https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EjSVceMfvCAqq2p8ZWMY/full 23 Byrne, L. (2018) ‘Inclusive Growth’, 4 April, London: House of Commons Library Research, https://www.inclusivegrowth.co.uk/house-commons-library-research/ 24 Dorling, D. (2018) Do We Need Income Inequality?, Cambridge: Polity Press. 25 Byrne, L. (2018) ‘Inclusive Growth’, op. cit. 26 OECD (2018) ‘Income inequality’, doi: 10.1787/459aa7f1-en. At that point the only OECD country with rising inequality reported from 2016 onwards was Sweden (with an income inequality Gini of 0.282 which is still very low). Iceland, Israel, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Switzerland peaked in 2014. Most other OECD countries peaked before then, except for the UK in 2015 and the USA in 2013. The statistics showing income inequality now falling in most non-OECD countries are given in Dorling, D. (2017) The Equality Effect, op. cit. 27 Jones, R. (2018) ‘Au pair shortage sparks childcare crisis for families’, The Guardian, 9 June, https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jun/09/au-pair-shortage-prompts-crisis-for-families?

In short – just how stupid are we? But we don’t just have to rely on the collective intelligence of the 99 per cent to hope things can get better. In recent years, income inequalities have fallen in both a majority of OECD countries and a majority of countries worldwide.26 Wealth inequalities tend to lag behind income inequalities, so that, although wealth inequalities will continue to rise for a few years to come, unless the current trend for falling income inequality is reversed, we should expect wealth inequalities in future to fall too. The introduction of more wealth taxes would greatly speed up that process, however.

Despite not being so continuously competitive, these other countries have recently made greater social and economic progress, seen life expectancy rise faster, and their people fare better overall than the citizens of the four countries of the UK.4 When Britain joined the European Community in the early 1970s, Sweden was the only large European country to have lower income inequality than the UK. By the time the British chose to leave the European Union, they had the highest income inequality of any country in Europe. That was not because of the EU; the British did that to themselves, largely by themselves. American bankers and Australian-born newspaper tycoons played a part, but essentially the British engineered this unwelcome change themselves.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Whatever the political color of the revolts, Western politics has expanded from redistribution to retribution, and those supporting that shift typically blame foreigners, multinationals, politicians, or simply “the establishment,” for having changed society beyond recognition. Poor economic expectations have fueled the suspicion that the “elite” has prospered at the expense of workers, and – unfortunately – there is some truth in that view. Periods of falling economic dynamism tend to raise income inequality, and the past decades are no exception. The economy that has evolved over that time has gradually depressed the economic and life opportunities for many people, and it is their political reaction that is now all too visible in Western politics. There is a larger drama behind that change. The Western economic principle is no longer capitalism – at least, not in the way we used to think about it.

All things taken together, the gap between productivity and compensation growth between 1970 and 2000 generally does support the thesis of a dramatic decoupling. There is a decoupling but, unsurprisingly, it emerged recently and is concentrated in the 2000s, and especially the post-2008 period.60 That result confirms what previous research has shown. Similarly, other approaches to income inequality, such as household income structured on age and cohort, show that household income followed the expected track up to the 2000s but then deteriorated.61 A different version of the argument suggests that labor’s share of total income has fallen, and, as a consequence, labor compensation has not kept pace with productivity, however muted the latter has been.

As in the US, there are observations about falling hourly pay for some workers, but ever since the early 1970s, shows a study by economists João Paolo Pessoa and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics, there has been no decoupling.70 Like Robert Lawrence’s study on decoupling in the United States, Pessoa and Van Reenen use the same deflator for both productivity and wages, and give due attention to the difference that exists between gross and net results. Furthermore, they also take account of employer compensation in order to get a more realistic picture of the relation between labor and capital. Income inequality has gone up, with the average wage growing faster than the median wage as various forms of labor have changed their relative prices over the past 40 years. Accommodating for the full effect of the dispersed and unequal compensation growth is necessary in order to understand whether compensation generally follows the growth of productivity.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

In most instances, as one well-known research paper by World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay was entitled, growth is good for the poor.20 INCOME INEQUALITY: KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES, THE CHANGS, THE GARCIAS, AND THE SISAYS We have seen that average incomes are rising in the majority of developing countries. How widely shared are the benefits from growth? The massive decline in extreme poverty that we saw in chapter 2 gives us a big hint that the benefits from growth are not accruing just to the rich, but this is not the full story. Is income inequality getting worse, better, or remaining about the same? This seemingly straightforward question is tricky to answer because there are several different ways to think about and measure inequality.

This seemingly straightforward question is tricky to answer because there are several different ways to think about and measure inequality. Income inequality is a relative concept, comparing one person’s (or a group of people’s) income with someone else’s, so the answer depends on which people or groups of people you compare. Are we comparing the incomes of rich and poor individuals, or rich and poor countries? If individuals, are we looking within one country, or around the world? If countries, do we weigh them all the same or count large countries more than small ones? Because of these variables, it is not unusual to hear contrasting claims about income inequality. One person claims it is getting better, while another claims it is getting worse, but the difference comes down to how he or she defines inequality.

That the dominant trend across developing countries has been little change in inequality will come as a surprise to those who have been following the big debates about growing income inequality in rich countries. Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century sparked widespread debate on the nature of economic growth and income distribution in the world’s richest countries, especially the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The debates start with the fact—and it is a well-documented fact—that income inequality improved between the end of World War II and the late 1970s but has worsened in many rich countries since then. In the United States, median household income has barely increased since the late 1970s, while the incomes of the richest 10 percent have risen by one-third.


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The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In a world of globalized media and international markets for executive jobs, the creeping social acceptability of huge pay packets for some executives and professions has crossed borders. Does it matter? CONSEQUENCES OF INEQUALITY FOR GROWTH There is some controversy about whether income inequality inhibits economic performance. Poor countries are more unequal than rich ones but it is not clear whether the inequality is a cause or a consequence of their failure to grow. Among the rich countries, there is no obvious relationship between level of income inequality and growth rates. The United States, the most unequal, has experienced the fastest productivity growth in recent decades. There are some reasons to think that in theory greater inequality will boost growth—first because rich people save more than poor people, and thus build a pool of savings that can finance investment and growth; second because inequality is often addressed with progressive income taxes, which have an adverse effect on work effort and so might reduce growth.

But national averages, which look only at inequality between countries are not fully adequate measures given that there is great inequality within many countries—and especially in the rapidly growing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (called the BRICs), which have made such a big difference in the middle parts of the global income distribution.15 Branko Milanovic reports that about two-thirds of global inequality currently is due to differences in income levels between countries, a big shift from the nineteenth-century pattern, when only 15 percent of measured inequality was due to national differences, and 85 percent due to income inequality within countries.16 Another way of assessing inequality suggested by this pattern is to look at what has happened to individual incomes across the world.17 The incomes of the Forbes Rich List have soared massively ahead of those of people living in the poorest African countries whose economies have been shrinking.

So I will discuss here a much simpler measure, the ratio of incomes of the top and bottom tenth in the income distribution. In the rich countries, most of the action has been at the two extremes, so this will not misrepresent the trends in inequality.22 The OECD nations differ from each other a great deal in the extent of income inequality using this measure. Japan and the Scandinavian countries stand out as the most equal. The best-off tenth of households have earnings from work just two or three times those of the worst off. For most other European countries this ratio is in the range of three to four—Austria, Belgium, and Germany are just below the bottom of this, and the United Kingdom, along with Australia, Spain, and Portugal at the top.


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Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Kaiser, pledge letter, Giving Pledge, July 26, 2010, https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=220. 3. “Income Inequality in the United States,” Inequality.org, accessed September 6, 2022, https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/. 4. Chad Stone, Danilo Trisi, Arloc Sherman, and Jennifer Beltrán, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 13, 2020, https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. 5. Jeff Cox, “CEOs See Pay Grow 1,000% in the Last 40 Years, Now Make 278 Times the Average Worker,” CNBC, August 16, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/16/ceos-see-pay-grow-1000percent-and-now-make-278-times-the-average-worker.html. 6.

The widening distribution of incomes, which has become a gaping chasm over the past few decades. But a focus on income inequality largely misses the point. Wealth, not income, seems to be a much better predictor of life chances and mobility. While few studies to date have explored the relative impact of income and wealth on long-term life outcomes, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that children born into wealthy families are six times as likely to be wealthy as adults, a disparity that is far greater than the impact of the income divide.13 In America, wealth inequality is more extreme than income inequality. While America’s top 1 percent capture 19 percent of income, they hold 32 percent of the wealth—about $40 trillion.14 When the World Economic Forum surveyed 103 countries in 2018, it found that the United States had the sixth-highest wealth inequality.15 That level of inequality is on par with Russia—infamous for its oligarchs—and South Africa, which has struggled to dismantle its apartheid legacy.16 Among “developed” countries, American wealth inequality is unique.

Since 1989,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, June 21, 2022, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/#quarter:129;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:all;units:shares; Robert Frank, “Soaring Markets Helped the Richest 1% Gain $6.5 Trillion in Wealth Last Year, According to the Fed,” CNBC, April 1, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/richest-one-percent-gained-trillions-in-wealth-2021.html. 15. Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global Wealth Report 2019, October 2019, https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html. 16. “Report: America’s Income Inequality Is on Par with Russia’s,” CBS News, December 15, 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-americas-income-inequality-is-on-par-with-russias/; Enuga S. Reddy, “The Struggle against Apartheid: Lessons for Today’s World,” UN Chronicle, September 2007, https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/struggle-against-apartheid-lessons-todays-world. 17. Alexandre Tanzi and Mike Dorning, “Top 1% of U.S.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Viewed from the longer perspective of debt expansion since the 1990s, the financial collapse in 2008 was symptomatic of a more malign condition. Public policy used credit expansion and asset bubbles to substitute for sustainable growth. Workers did not share in the higher returns to capital from globalization. The resulting income inequality is more than a moral issue. Income inequality hurts consumption, and by extension investment, leaving net exports (and associated currency wars) and government spending (and associated debt) as the only growth engines. Deflation is the elite’s deepest secret fear. Alan Greenspan’s much-criticized too-low-for-too-long interest rate policy from 2002 to 2005 was an effort to fend off deflation that appeared in 2001.

In the United States, median household income: Justin Fox, “Where Median Incomes Have Fallen the Most,” Bloomberg, August 19, 2016, accessed August 25, 2016, www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-19/where-median-incomes-have-fallen-the-most. A McKinsey Global Institute study: Richard Dobbs, Anu Madgavkar, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, Eric Labaye, and Pranav Kashyap, “Poorer Than Their Parents? A New Perspective on Income Inequality,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2016, accessed August 9, 2016, www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/poorer-than-their-parents-a-new-perspective-on-income-inequality, Preface, viii. The McKinsey study highlights: Ibid. “Success in conducting a business enterprise”: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 388. And Schumpeter perfectly anticipated: Ibid., 386.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there have been violent protests in Greece, Spain, and Cyprus that have resulted in a few deaths. Surveys show Americans are far less trusting of government, banks, and media than they have ever been. Political polarization in America has grown to extreme levels. Income inequality has reached levels not seen since 1929. A sense of shared purpose in presidential leadership is gone. In the next crisis, as confiscatory solutions are employed, the popular response is less likely to be passive acceptance and more likely to involve resistance. Elites are prepared for this also.


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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

., the gains of growth have gone mainly to those at the top. Although the U.S. remains a much wealthier country per capita than China, today’s generation of Chinese young people is richer than their parents’ generation. 41 More surprising is the fact that, according to the World Bank, levels of income inequality in China are about the same as in the U.S. Moreover, China now has greater intergenerational mobility than the U.S. This means that in the U.S., the land of opportunity, how much you make is more closely tied to where you started out than it is in China. 42 When my students encounter these findings, they are disquieted.

., the land of opportunity, how much you make is more closely tied to where you started out than it is in China. 42 When my students encounter these findings, they are disquieted. Most have an instinctive faith in American exceptionalism, in the idea that America is a place where those who work hard can get ahead. This belief in upward mobility is America’s traditional answer to inequality. Yes, America may have greater income inequality than other democracies, they reason. But here, unlike the more rigid, class-bound societies of Europe, inequality matters less, because no one is consigned to the class of his or her birth. But once they learn that the U.S. has more inequality and less mobility than many other countries, they are troubled and perplexed.

Christopher Hayes, an author and host of an MSNBC television program, observed that in recent years the left had had its greatest successes on issues that involved “making the meritocracy more meritocratic,” such as combating racial discrimination, including women in higher education, and advancing gay rights. But it had failed in areas “that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview,” such as “mitigating rising income inequality.” 16 Within the framework of a system that seeks equal opportunity rather than any semblance of equality in outcomes, it is inevitable that the education system will be asked to do the heavy lifting … And as inequality steadily increases, we ask more and more of the educational system, looking for it to expiate the society’s other sins. 17 Thomas Frank, an author with populist sensibilities, criticized liberals’ focus on education as the remedy for inequality: “To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.”


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The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Graham, “The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History,’” Atlantic, December 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/obama-right-side-of-history/420462/. 10 OECD, “Governments must act to help struggling middle class,” October 4, 2019, https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/governments-must-act-to-help-struggling-middle-class.htm. 11 Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The new gilded age: Income inequality in the U.S. by state, metropolitan area, and county,” Economic Policy Institute, Table 10, July 19, 2018, https://www.epi.org/publication/the-new-gilded-age-income-inequality-in-the-u-s-by-state-metropolitan-area-and-county/#epi-toc-14. 12 David DeGraw, “We’re living in a system of new feudalism. Here’s how to change it,” New Statesman, October 31, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/were-living-system-new-feudalism-heres-how-change-it. 13 Shannon Tiezzi, “Report: China’s 1 Percent Owns 1/3 of Wealth,” Diplomat, January 15, 2016, https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/report-chinas-1-percent-owns-13-of-wealth/; Jonathan Kaiman, “China gets richer but more unequal,” Guardian, July 28, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/28/china-more-unequal-richer; David S.G.

Review of Finance, vol. 23:4 (July 2019), 697–743, https://academic.oup.com/rof/article/23/4/697/5477414; Mike Konczal, “There Are Too Few Companies and Their Profits Are Too High,” Nation, August 5, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/industry-concentration-score/. 3 Taichi Sakaiya, The Knowledge Value Revolution, trans. George Fields and William Marsh (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 152. 4 Danny Yadron, “Silicon Valley tech firms exacerbating income inequality, World Bank warns,” Guardian, January 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/14/silicon-valley-tech-irms-income-inequality-world-bank; Gemma Tetlow, “Blame Technology not Globalization for Rising Inequality, Says IMF,” Financial Times, April 11, 2017, https://www.t.com/content/cfbd0af6-1e0b-11e7-b7d3163-f5a7f229c. 5 Michael Anton, “The Frivolous Valley and Its Dreadful Conformity,” Law & Liberty, September 4, 2018, https://www.lawliberty.org/liberty-forum/the-frivolous-valley-and-its-dreadful-conformity/. 6 Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 261–67; Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 42–43; Gary Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 98–99, 322–23; Leslie Berlin, “Tracing Silicon Valley’s Roots,” SFGate, September 30, 2007, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tracing-Silicon-Valley-s-roots-2520298.php. 7 Ruchir Sharma, “When Will the Tech Bubble Burst?”

emc=rss&partner=rss. 7 James Galbraith, “Inequality and the 2016 Election Outcome: A Dirty Secret and a Dilemma,” New Geography, July 5, 2017, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005678-inequality-and-2016-election-outcome-a-dirty-secret-and-a-dilemma. 8 Jonathan Lansner, “California has No. 1 wage gap between middle-income pay and what wealthy earn,” Orange County Register, April 25, 2019, https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/23/california-has-no-1-wage-gap-between-middle-income-pay-and-what-wealthy-earn/. 9 Spencer P. Morrison, “California’s Income Inequality Now Worse Than Mexico’s, Poverty Level Highest in America,” National Economics Editorial, January 17, 2018, https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2018/01/17/californian-income-inequality-tops-mexico/. 10 Liana Fox, “The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2017,” U.S. Census Bureau, September 12, 2018, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60–265.html. 11 “Is California the Welfare Capital?”


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Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

,” FT Alphaville, March 28, 2018, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/03/29/2199403/marcel-fratzscher-on-the-dark-side-of-the-german-economy-now-with-transcript/; Cathrin Schaer, “Germany’s Convoluted Property Tax Could Be Illegal,” Handelsblatt, January 16, 2018; Alena Bachleitner, “Abolishing the Wealth Tax—A Case Study of Germany” (M.Sc. thesis, University of Vienna, 2017); Dan Andrews and Aida Caldera Sánchez, “The Evolution of Homeownership Rates in Selected OECD Countries: Demographic and Public Policy Influences,” OECD Journal: Economic Studies 2011, no. 1 (2011): 8; Christian Dustmann, Bernd Fitzenberger, and Markus Zimmerman, “Housing Expenditures and Income Inequality: Shifts in Housing Costs Exacerbated the Rise in Income Inequality,” VoxEU, October 22, 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/housing-expenditures-and-income-inequality. 39. Odendahl, “Hartz Myth”; Destatis, “Collective Bargaining Coverage,” https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/NationalEconomyEnvironment/EarningsLabourCosts/AgreedEarnings/Tables_CollectiveBargainingCoverage/CollectiveBargainingCoverage.html; Christian Dustmann et al., “From Sick Man of Europe to Economic ­Superstar: Germany’s Resurgent Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 167–88; Charlotte Bartels, “Top Incomes in Germany, 1871–2013,” World Income Database Working Paper Series, December 2017. 40.

European Commission, “VAT Rates Applied in the Member States of the European Union: Situation at 1st January 2018,” https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/rates/vat_rates_en.pdf; Zsolt Darvas, “EU Income Inequality Decline: Views from an Income Shares Perspective,” Bruegel, July 5, 2018, http://bruegel.org/2018/07/eu-income-inequality-decline-views-from-an-income-shares-perspective/. 66. Matthew C. Klein, “European Leaders Seem Determined to Remake the ‘Global Savings Glut’ on a Massive Scale,” FT Alphaville, November 8, 2017, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/11/08/2195596/european-leaders-seem-to-determined-to-remake-the-global-savings-glut-on-a-massive-scale/.

Before the Civil War, the South used an exceptionally cruel form of agrarian feudalism to produce copious volumes of cotton, tobacco, and other cash crops. Southern agricultural output was an essential input for British manufacturers and generated the bulk of America’s export earnings. The South’s social system—extreme wealth and income inequality reinforced by the brutal subjugation of the enslaved labor force—also crushed consumption. Despite generating high saving rates, the planters had little interest in economic development. Instead of buying capital goods, they spent their surpluses buying additional enslaved workers and land.


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Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Notes: Intergenerational income mobility is one minus Corak’s (2013b) estimates of the elasticity between paternal earnings and a son’s adult earnings, using data on a cohort of children born during the early to mid-1960s and measuring their adult outcomes in the mid-to late 1990s. Income inequality is the Gini of disposable household income for about 1985. Sources: Intergenerational mobility is from Corak (2013b); disposable income inequality is from OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD): Gini, poverty, income. Data extracted on December 31, 2017, 13:11 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat. Data for Singapore is from 2000 and comes from Ministry of Finance (2015), “Income Growth, Inequality, and Mobility Trends in Singapore.”

Dunford, Michael, and Diane Perrons. 1994. “Regional inequality, regimes of accumulation and economic development in contemporary Europe.” Transactions of the Institute of British geographers: 163–82. Durlauf, Steven. 1996a. “A Theory of Persistent Income Inequality.” Journal of Economic Growth 1: 75–93. ———. 1996b. “Neighborhood Feedbacks, Endogenous Stratification, and Income Inequality.” In Dynamic Disequilibrium Modelling, eds. W. Barnett, G. Gandolfo, and C. Hillinger, 505–34. New York: Cambridge University Press. Durlauf, Steven, and Ananth Seshadri. 2017. “Understanding the Great Gatsby Curve.” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 32: 1–94.

Even in this case, however, it is notable that average real incomes rose by thirty-five percent in the same period, so the middle class was much better off in 2010 than in 1985. The Gini of disposable household income in this period rose by twenty percent, according to data from Solt (2016). This highlights the general fact that while income inequality has been rising fast, the relative position of the median has been fairly stable, even in an “outlier” like New Zealand. This is also true in the case of the other negative “outlier”: Germany. Here the relative income of the median declined from .93 to .90, or about four percent from 1985 to 2010 (undoubtedly in large part because of unification); yet the mean income rose by more than fifty percent.


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The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

See Piketty, Yang, and Zucman, “Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Inequality in China, 1978–2015.” 17. World Bank, Visualize Inequality, http://www1.worldbank.org/poverty/visualizeinequality/; OECD Data, Income Inequality, https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm; Milanovic, Global Inequality. 18. E. Sommellier and M. Price, “The New Gilded Age—Income Inequality in the USA by State, Metropolitan Area and County,” Economic Policy Institute, July 19, 2018, www.epi.org/publication/the-new-gilded-age-income-inequality-in-the-u-s-by-state-metropolitan-area-and-county/. 19. World Bank Group, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality, World Bank, October 2, 2016, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25078. 20.

If these aspirations are checked, as has happened in Mexico and Brazil, then other emerging countries may witness the same political volatility seen in the developed world. Wealth of Nations However, income inequality is only half the picture. Wealth is a more important metric, because it is the key factor that motivates people’s large-scale purchasing decisions. When someone wants to buy a new car, she doesn’t necessarily think of the expected GDP growth of her country; she tends to think in terms of the stock of their wealth. Wealth inequality, compared to income inequality, is important because shifts in wealth are typically slower moving but longer lasting in their effects on consumption behavior. Arguably, income inequality can be fairly easily affected by tax policy and redistribution by governments, but wealth inequality is harder to tackle across the board.

Arguably, income inequality can be fairly easily affected by tax policy and redistribution by governments, but wealth inequality is harder to tackle across the board. Though the likes of Piketty and Milanovic have grabbed headlines for their work on income inequality, the internationally recognized experts on wealth are Professors Tony Shorrocks and Jim Davies, who have worked at institutions such as the United Nations and the London School of Economics.20 Their research is noteworthy because, unlike the study of income inequality, the examination of wealth, and by extension wealth inequality, is hampered by the lack of detailed data across countries. However, Shorrocks and Davies have compiled the most comprehensive data set available.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

By the end of the century, their portion had more than doubled.6 In Great Britain as well, the average working family lost buying power between 1974 and 1979. Income inequality did not increase at first—but only because the Labour Party government’s anti-inflation program clamped down tightly on pay raises for highly paid workers. Workers earning above certain limits had their pay capped, and at some points the top earners were barred from receiving any raises at all. Incomes inevitably became more equal, until the strictures came off. When they did, in 1977, the pay of managers and professionals surged, and income inequality started to increase. Even though higher pensions and other government benefits boosted the incomes of some population groups, especially retirees and single parents, income distribution grew far more skewed in the 1980s, and would continue to grow increasingly unequal for decades beyond.7 The disparities in other wealthy countries were less stark, in most cases because government stepped in to reduce the effects of less equal wages.

ungovernability, 155–160, 161–162, 175, 178, 267; economic stagnation and, 158; labor/trade unions and, 160; late capitalism and, 160; political paralysis and, 157; small vs. large organizations and, 158–160; welfare state and, 157–158 United Kingdom, 185–186, 194, 195; privatization and, 193; welfare state in, 17 United States, 219–238; anti-inflation policy in, 53; anti-tax campaigns in, 151; automobile industry and bailouts in, 127–128; baby boom in, 22; bank failures of 1980s and 1990s in, 270; bank loans to Third World and, 241–242; banks/banking system in, 88, 94, 97 (see also banks/banking systems; Federal Reserve; Franklin National Bank and other specific US banks); budget deficits in, 47, 150, 226, 230, 234; Cold War and, 41; debt crisis in, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 253–254; deindustrialization in, 124; economic crisis of 1970s in, 172–176; economic forecasts in 1973 and, 65–66; economic growth in (1873–1897), 7; economic planning in, 25–26; economy at close of World War II in, 17, 18, 19; environmental protection in, 259; environmentalism in, 62; financial crisis of 2008 in, 270; Full Employment Act in, 25–26; full-employment budget in, 26; government deregulation/regulation in, 99–114; Great Depression of 1930s in, 7; income distribution in, 136, 137; income inequality in, 135; income per person in, 160, 240; income tax in, 146–147; increasing income inequality in, in mid-1970s, 139; inflation in, 52, 163, 173, 174–175, 176; labor share in, 141; manufacturing and trade with Japan in, 11, 124–127, 127–129 (see also trade below); manufacturing in, 11, 144, 157, 163, 233, 237; multifactor productivity in, 258; nuts and bolts industry in, 125–126; oil crisis of 1973 in, 1, 2, 3, 67, 68–79, 99–100, 240; oil crisis of 1979s in, 173, 174; oil prices in, 163; pollution and, 60; postwar economic boom in, 20, 21, 268–269; postwar productivity in, 22; Prebisch and, 38; productivity bust in, 258–259; productivity growth in, 264; recession following oil crisis in, 125, 133; social security in, 143–144; textile/apparel sector in, 119–120, 131; trade in, 51–52, 233 (see also manufacturing and trade above); trade sanctions against Japan by, 128–129; trade with Japan and, 119–120; ungovernability in, 155–156, 156–160; welfare state in, 18, 143–144, 144–145, 148.

Urban-born workers, likely to have attended school and to have acquired skills needed in a modern economy, supplanted the semi-literate migrants who had populated industrial cities in their parents’ generation. They were better able to exert political influence as well, winning legislation to establish social programs that supported households toward the bottom of the income scale. Hence, Kuznets theorized, when economies reached a certain stage of development, income inequality began to recede. This had been going on in England since the late nineteenth century, and in the United States and Germany since World War I. It seemed to be happening on an even larger scale after World War II.2 The notion that inequality followed a U-curve, first widening greatly but eventually becoming less extreme, was comforting to the men who set economic policy during the Golden Age.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

They found that while trade liberalization and export growth are associated with income inequality, increased financial openness was associated with higher inequality. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *(An economic hypothesis which states that as an economy develops, market forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality, following a bell curve trajectory.) However, the main finding of this line of research has been that the combined contribution of these factors towards income inequality was much lower than that of technological change, both in developed and developing countries.

It also investigates if these changes could offer sovereign states a new way to produce money and looks at alternatives other than inflation and interest rates to govern monetary policy. Finally, it reviews different scenarios of how this new structure can be used to implement innovative policies, such as overt money finance and universal basic income, which could help address issues such as income inequality and technological unemployment that currently threaten most economies. While the purpose of the book it to shed more light on the implications of the widespread use of Blockchain technology, the growing diversity within the currency space cannot be fully excluded from the discussion. As the blockchain gains more traction in formal financial circles, its first manifestation in the form of Bitcoin is increasingly being excluded from the dialogue.

When seen in conjunction with the previous statements and the topics described in Chapter 1, the net result has been the omnipresence of financialization in every fiber of industrialized societies. As per Thomas I. Palley of the Levy Economics Institute, the impacts of this change have been: 1.the elevation of the significance of the financial sector relative to the real sector 3; 2.the transfer of income from the real sector to the financial sector; 3.the increase of income inequality and contribution to wage stagnation. While it can be extrapolated that these behaviors could increasingly threaten social cohesion, it must be remembered that the cultural infringement of finance is only part of the reason behind the growth of financialization. Finance, after all, is to be looked at as a catalyst that allows for the efficient production and distribution of goods and services.


pages: 98 words: 27,609

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

The CBO uses the three household income measures described above and computes a “Gini coefficient” for each. This is a standard inequality statistic that summarizes income dispersion between households for the entire distribution of income. The CBO found that income inequality between 1979 and 2006 increased by between 24 and 27 percent, depending on the definition of income. But things look very different between 2007 and 2016. Using market income, inequality has only grown by 2 percent. Using income after taxes and transfers, inequality has actually decreased by 7 percent (figure 12). FIGURE 12. GINI COEFFICIENTS. Looking at the usual weekly earnings of workers tells a similar story.

Between 2007 and 2019, the ratio of the 90th percentile of weekly earnings to the 10th percentile—a more conceptually straightforward measure of the rich-poor gap—increased by only 1 percent. So even if you believe that income inequality is one of the most serious challenges facing the United States, at least over the past decade or so, there seems to be a lot more heat than light. Very recently, the public debate has become interested in wealth inequality, in addition to income inequality. I focus on inequality of income here for a few reasons. It has received the most attention during the post-Great Recession period—much more than wealth inequality.

For households in the middle and those nearer the bottom, income growth over the past three decades can’t be reasonably described as stagnant. Instead, solid annual increases have accumulated to produce meaningful growth in the flow of resources generated by market activities that typical households can use for spending and saving. WHAT ABOUT INEQUALITY? Something interesting has been happening with income inequality—the gap between the rich and the poor—that is worth mentioning: it has stopped growing and might even be declining. There are many ways to measure inequality, of course. You have to define income, decide on adjustments that need to be made to the data, and pick a statistic to measure inequality.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

As the politicians they elected predict a doomed “entitlement nation” and boast of shredding the poor’s safety nets, the former middle class tries to reconcile these contradictions by clinging to the belief that this is a temporary destination, that somehow “they” are still better than “those people.” How do we get folk to understand that there is no “they,” there is no “them”? Too many Americans are falling through gaping holes scissored out of America’s safety net. Income inequality is real. There is an institutionalized divide between the wealthy and the poor, so that what we now have are the rich and the rest of us. We are at a critical turning point in America, and we are obsessed with the ambitious goal of changing how we think about, talk about, and act on the issue of poverty and the poor.

Stern, who wrote “Poverty in Twentieth-Century America,” provide an extensive history of poverty in America.7 They introduce social reformer Robert Hunter’s 1904 study, Poverty, that “estimated that half the population of New York City lived in absolute poverty—a number that seems neither an exaggeration nor unrepresentative of other large cities.”8 In the early 1900s, “new immigrants and African-Americans” disproportionately represented the masses of “the poor.” Still, because of “intermittent participation in the workforce,” Katz and Stern noted that about four out of every ten American workers earned poverty wages. Income inequality and poverty worsened between 1896 and 1914 due to cost-of-living increases and declines in the wages of the working poor. Malnourishment and diseases were common. The “real story of widespread, grinding rural poverty,” Katz and Stern noted, “began in the 1920s and continued through the Great Depression.”9 Between the years 1900 and 1920, public opinion about the poor began an incremental shift.

Then, King said, came the buildup in Vietnam: “I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”66 Anytime you seriously dissect the issue of poverty, you have to talk about wealth and income inequality. A productive discussion about poverty must lead to common-sense conversations about wise investments in education, housing, health care, job training, and other efforts that increase poor people’s access to resources of all kinds. We have no choice but to talk about the military industrial complex and its ties to huge private-sector monopolies and war barons who produce weaponry and employ privatized security personnel at salaries that far exceed what we pay government military personnel for the same services.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The Determinants of Health of Populations (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994). 40. D. Chon, “The Impact of Population Heterogeneity and Income Inequality on Homicide Rates: A Cross-National Assessment,” Int J Offender Therapy and Comp Criminology 56 (2012): 730; F. J. Elgar and N. Aitken, “Income Inequality, Trust and Homicide in 33 Countries,” Eur J Public Health 21 (2010): 241; C. Hsieh and M. Pugh, “Poverty, Income Inequality, and Violent Crime: A Meta-analysis of Recent Aggregate Data Studies,” Criminal Justice Rev 18 (1993): 182; M. Daly et al., “Income Inequality and Homicide Rates in Canada and the United States,” Canadian J Criminology 32 (2001): 219. 41.

People who feel helpless don’t join organizations. Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital.35 Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, to have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.) Almost by definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital. Or translated from social science–ese, marked inequality makes people crummier to one another.

Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.40 Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there’s the psychosocial angle—inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there’s the neomaterialist angle—inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

The article tells us the subway lines with the largest and the smallest income ranges, and the largest gap between any two stations, although quite why any of this information is useful is unclear. The blog post notes that income inequality in Manhattan is similar to inequality in Lesotho or Namibia. Is that bad? It sounds bad. If you happened to carry around a list of the income inequality recorded in every country on the planet, you’d realize that it was bad. But do you? The goal of the graphic is not to convey information but to stir feelings. If the article compared income inequality in New York with that in other global cities such as London and Tokyo, or other US cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, we might actually learn something worth knowing.

.), 267–68, 268n Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 41, 56, 61n, 121 Thomson Reuters, 231–32 Tierney, John, 121 Time, 217 Times (London), 213, 215, 220, 225 tobacco use, 3–6, 13–15, 35, 52, 241, 248, 279 Tooze, Adam, 202 Torricelli, Evangelista, 172, 173 totalitarian leadership, 190, 201–2 transparency of data, 127, 176, 181, 207 Transport for London (TfL), 49–50 trends in data, 16, 227 Trials (journal), 128 tribalism, 268 Trudeau, Justin, 197 Trump, Donald and border wall cost, 93–94 and Cambridge Analytica scandal, 158 and coronavirus pandemic, 7 debt anecdote, 79n dismissal of official statistics, 190–91, 196, 207 and early access to official statistics, 207–8, 210 and election polling, 147 and “fake news” claims, 13–14 and impact of fact-checking, 129 and social media use, 42 trust in data, 164–67, 179, 267 tuberculosis, 3–4, 4n, 240–41 Tufte, Edward, 217, 223, 229 Tversky, Amos, 97 Twitter, 149, 150, 208, 224, 277 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 153 Tyranny of Metrics, The (Muller), 57 Uganda, 141 understandability of data, 180 understanding statistical claims, 67–72 unemployment rates, 11, 189n, 207, 218n UNESCO, 203–4 unintended consequences, 58 United Kingdom death rate data, 236 demographic data, 94 early access to official statistics, 208 income inequality measures, 82–83, 92–93 reform of statistical system, 207 stroke incidence in, 98 Universal Credit program, 142 value of official statistics, 198 United Nations, 142–43, 185 UNESCO, 203–4 United States and demographic data, 94 and early access to official statistics, 207–11 and election predictions, 147 and income inequality measures, 92 and infant mortality measures, 66 See also entries beginning with US units of analysis, 141 Universal Credit, 142 unskilled workers, 71 US Air Force, 110 US Congress, 186–87, 204.

Very few people have enough wealth to fund their lifestyle purely out of interest payments, and so if we want to understand how inequality manifests itself in everyday life, it makes sense to look at income rather than wealth. The other advantage of looking at income is that we do not need to confront the absurdity of suggesting that an ordinary schoolboy and his piggy bank are richer than a billion people put together. If we look at inequality of income, inequality between whom? The obvious answer: between the rich and the poor. But there are other possibilities: one could look at inequality between countries, or between ethnic groups, or between men and women, or between the old and the young, or between different regions within a country. But even once we’ve settled on looking at inequality of income, and between high earners and low earners, the question remains: Measured how?


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Pacek and Benjamin Radcliff, “Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being,” Social Forces (June 2014). http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/4/1241 24. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee, “Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy,” Harvard Business Review (January 12, 2016). https://hbr.org/2016/01/income-inequality-makes-whole-countries-less-happy 25. See Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, and John 12:8. 26. Quoted in: Emily Badger, “Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty,” The Atlantic Cities (July 17, 2013). http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-andeconomy/2013/07/hunger-makes-people-work-harder-and-other-stupid-things-we-used-believe-about-poverty/6219/ 27.

I made these calculations using the tool on the website www.givingwhatwecan.org, where you see how your wealth compares to the world population. 29. Branko Milanovic, “Global income inequality: the past two centuries and implications for 21st century” (Fall 2011) http://www.cnpds.it/documenti/milanovic.pdf 30. “62 people own same as half world,” Oxfam (January 20, 2014). http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/62-people-own-same-as-half-world-says-oxfam-inequality-report-davos-world-economic-forum 31. Nicholas Hobbes, Essential Militaria: Facts, Legends, and Curiosities About Warfare Through the Ages (2004). 32. Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers.” 33. In 2015 the poverty threshold for a single-person household in the U.S. was about $980 a month.

Source: Wilkinson and Pickett “Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries,” concludes the British researcher Richard Wilkinson. “As you get more and more of anything, each addition […] contributes less and less to your wellbeing.”19 However, the graph changes dramatically if we replace income on the x-axis with income inequality. Suddenly, the picture crystallizes, with the U.S. and Portugal close together in the top right-hand corner. Inequality (here on the x-axis) represents that gap between the richest and the poorest 20% in a given country. Source: Wilkinson and Pickett Whether you look at the incidence of depression, burnout, drug abuse, high dropout rates, obesity, unhappy childhoods, low election turnout, or social and political distrust, the evidence points to the same culprit every time: inequality.20 But hold on.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

There is evidence that individuals in Europe have a lower tendency to report themselves as happy when inequality is high, but this is not the case in the United States.43 Another analysis was recently conducted at the zip-code, MSA, and state levels of the inequality well-being relationship using data from the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index and income inequality data from the American Community Survey.44 It found, in contrast, that the net relationship between income inequality and happiness in the United States is negative. A study that used the World Database of Happiness found a positive relationship in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia but a negative one in Western Europe.45 Another study looked at the relationship between economic mobility and inequality across advanced countries.46 It found clear evidence that as inequality rises, mobility declines.

First, he argues, he is examining consumption within very large sections of the income distribution and there may be specific groups (e.g., men with less than a high school education) for whom consumption is actually falling. Second, it’s possible, he argues, that the quality of some services such as public education or health care could be falling for some groups. Third, the rise in income inequality coupled with increased information flow about other people’s consumption may be making Americans feel worse off in a relative sense even if their material goods consumption is rising. Fourth, changes in family structure (e.g., the rise of single-parent households), increases in the prison population, or increases in substance addiction could make people worse off even in the face of rising material wealth.

Most of the self-proclaimed experts calling for public spending cuts missed the recession in the first place.”2 In a 2011 article I reasoned as follows: “Even though we have now moved from the acute phase of the Great Recession, which occurred in the fall of 2008, the long, dragging conditions of semi-slump and subnormal prosperity have arrived—and they aren’t going away any time soon, as Keynes warned. The whole idea of an expansionary fiscal contraction was always fanciful in the extreme; now, it’s time for a change of course—given that austerity has failed. Growth is going to be low for many years, living standards are not going to rise, and the high levels of income inequality are all likely to contribute to increasing levels of social unrest. Much, indeed, will need to be changed.”3 The Guardian editorial board in September 2009 even got in on the act but nobody much was listening. It argued that “a year on from the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers and the height of the banking crisis, it does look as if the economy has avoided a rerun of the Great Depression—but it does not follow that from here on the UK is in for either a constant or a strong recovery. . . .


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Someday a robot will be invented to do that, but Jerry will have retired by then. Who in the world could say Jerry is “unemployable”? He is powered by the most complex and versatile object in the known universe. 11 * * * The Big Questions Income Inequality What about income inequality? The future of income inequality is the same whether Possibility One, Two, or Three happens. Regardless of whether AI robots take all the jobs, some of the jobs, or none of the jobs, income inequality will be an ever-increasing problem. Let’s explore why. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is one of our oldest clichés. Yet the data seem to bear it out. Two Italian economists compared the Florentine tax rolls of 1427 to those of today and discovered that the richest families then are still the richest now.

There is undoubtedly some truth in this view of the world. Gains in productivity created by technology don’t necessarily make it into the pockets of the increasingly productive worker. Instead, they are often returned to shareholders. There are ways to mitigate this flow of capital, which we will address in the chapter about income inequality, but this should not be seen as a fatal flaw of technology or our economy, but rather something that needs addressing head-on by society at large. Further, Robotco’s immense profits probably don’t just sit in some Scrooge McDuck kind of vault in which the executives have pillow fights using pillows stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

How could you have started out with nothing a thousand years ago and then go on to create a billion dollars in value? But in the last decade or so, Google created seven billionaires and Facebook minted six. So in the modern age, old fortunes are preserved and new fortunes are created. That simple fact alone increases income inequality. But there is even more going on than this. It turns out that the economic benefits of new technology help the rich more than they help the poor. How? There are three different ways that economic gains from technology are distributed, and only one of them helps the poor. First, when technology is adopted by corporations, all the increases in productivity drive up the value of the company’s stock through lower costs and increased margins.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

See Fabrizio Perri and Joe Steinberg, ‘Inequality and redistribution during the great recession’, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Economic Policy Paper, Minneapolis, MN, 2012, at: www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4819 20. Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, Penguin/Allen Lane, London, 2012. 21. In the UK, the rise in income inequality was sharper than in any other comparable country over the last quarter of the twentieth century, irrespective of whether it is measured in proportional or absolute terms. See P. Gottschald and T. Smeeding, ‘Empirical evidence on income inequality in industrial countries’, in A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon (eds), Handbook of Income Distribution, vol. 1, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 261–307. 22. D. Dorling, ‘Fairness and the changing fortunes of people in Britain’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 176:1 (2013), pp. 97–128, at: www.dannydorling.org/?

This raised the safety net a touch, which – coupled with shrinking banks and a few tax rises that targeted the rich – duly ensured that the first bout of British pain was fairly shared, as is illustrated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies data that is charted below. During the first year when there was a serious squeeze on family incomes, then – believe it or not – the British rich took much of the pain, and income inequality actually declined. What about the reputedly harsher United States? Well there, too, the immediate response to recession was not in fact to cut benefits in the manner of 1930s Britain, but rather to provide a little relief by easing up the rules. One of the chief reasons why American welfare is less generous than Europe's is the strict time limits on payments, including unemployment compensation, which is typically available for only 26 weeks.

More specifically, among those who had fallen out of work by 2008, there was a 0.6 increase (on a seven-point scale) in support for redistribution, which was almost exactly matched in the opposing direction by a 0.55 decline in support among those who were fully and stably employed over the course of the subsequent two years.31 For a large part of the American population, then, economic anxiety has worked to engender progressive radicalism, in just the same way as it did during the Depression; however, there is another – larger – constituency that has leant the other way, and has responded by becoming more doubtful about Washington playing Robin Hood. The evidence is thus consistent with the idea that, as a society becomes more unequal, different dynamics of opinion kick in – with the logic of the veil of ignorance potentially being discarded in favour of the veil of complacency. The point here is subtle: there is no reason why rising income inequality should in itself undermine the argument for social insurance; it will only do so if the effect is to harden class lines, so that prosperous parts of the electorate believe they will never sink to the point where they would require a state safety net. Why might that happen? First, over time extra income at the higher end allows more people to build a personal safety net in the form of wealth; and with the average value of personal wealth having grown more rapidly than personal incomes for a third of a century, it is no longer just the rich, but also the moderately affluent who enjoy a substantial private cushion.32 Second, the flipside of the Anglo-American problem with social mobility (which we reviewed in Chapter 7) is that the well-to-do can be confident that their offspring will do sufficiently well to avoid falling back on the government.


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Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

., 13n Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics (Cartwright), 22n import quotas, 149 incentives, 7, 170, 172, 188–92 income: functional distribution of, 121 military service and, 108 personal distribution of, 121 income inequality, 117, 124–25, 138–44, 147–49 deregulation in, 143 factor endowments theory in, 139–40 Gini coefficient and, 138 globalization in, 139–41, 143 in manufacturing, 141 offshoring in, 141 skill premium in, 138–40, 142 skill upgrading in, 140, 141, 142 technological change in, 141–43 trade in, 139–40 India, 107, 154 Indonesia, 166 industrial organization, 201 industrial revolution, 115 industry: developing economies and policies on, 75–76, 87, 88 government intervention and, 34–35 inflation, 185 in business cycles, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 135, 137 public spending and, 114 infrastructure, 87, 91, 111, 163 Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), xii–xiii, xiv School of Social Science at, xii Institute for International Economics, 159 institutions: development economics and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 labor productivity and, 123 insurance, banking and, 155 interest rates, 39, 64, 110, 129–30, 156, 161 internal validity, 23–24 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2 see also World Bank international economics, 201–2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1n, 2 Washington Consensus and, 160, 165 Internet, big data and, 38 “Interview with Eugene Fama” (Cassidy), 157n investment: business cycles and, 129–30, 136 foreign markets and, 87, 89, 90, 92, 165–67 income inequality and, 141 savings and, 129–30, 165–67 Invisible Hand Theorem, 48–50, 51n, 182, 186 Israel, 103, 188 day care study in, 71, 190–91 Japan: city growth models and, 108 income inequality and, 139 Jenkins, Holman W., Jr., 135n Jevons, William Stanley, 119 Kahneman, Daniel, 203 Kenya, 106–7 Keynes, John Maynard, 1–2, 31, 46, 165 on business cycles, 127–37 on liquidity traps, 130 see also models, Keynesian types of Klemperer, Paul, 36n Klinger, Bailey, 111n Korea, South, 163, 164, 166 Kremer, Michael, 106–7 Krugman, Paul, 136, 148 Kuhn, Thomas, 64n Kupers, Roland, 85 Kydland, Finn E., 101n labor markets, 41, 52, 56, 57, 92, 102, 108, 111, 119, 163 labor productivity, 123–24, 141 labor theory of value, 117–19 Lancaster, Kelvin, 59 Latin America, Washington Consensus and, 159–63, 166 Leamer, Edward, 139 learning, rule-based vs. case-based forms of, 72 Leijonhufvud, Axel, 9–10 Lepenies, Philipp H., 211n leverage, 154 Levitt, Steven, 7 Levy, Santiago, 3–4, 105–6 Lewis, W.

“fox” approaches in, 175 ignorant vs. calculating peasant hypotheses in, 75 individual behavior in, 17, 33, 39, 42, 49, 101, 102, 131, 137, 181–82 marginalists and, 119–22 models in, see models outsider views in, 6 pluralism in, 196–208 points of consensus in, 147–52, 194–95 power and responsibility and, 174–75 predictability in, 6, 26–28, 38, 40–41, 85, 104, 105, 108, 115, 132, 133, 139–40, 157, 175, 184–85, 202 progressive modeling in, 63–72 psychology and sociology of, 167–74 self-interest in, 21, 104, 158, 186–88, 190 shocks in, 130–31, 132 social sciences and, xii–xiii, 45, 181–82, 202–7 strengths and weaknesses of, xi supply and demand in, 3, 13–14, 20, 99, 119, 122, 128–30, 136–37, 170 trade-offs in, 193–94 twenty commandments for, 213–15 values in, 186–96 see also markets; models Economics, Education and Unlearning: Economics Education at the University of Manchester (PCES), 197n education: antipoverty programs and, 4, 55, 105–6 field experiments and variable factors in, 24 markets and, 198 models in, 36–37, 173 efficient-markets hypothesis (EMH), 156–58 Einstein, Albert, 80, 81, 113, 179 El Salvador, 86, 92–93 Elster, Jon, 79n emissions quotas, 188–90, 191–92 empirical method, models and, xii, 7, 46, 65, 72–76, 77–78, 137, 173–74, 183, 199–206 employment: in business cycles, 125–37 labor productivity and, 123 minimum wages and, 17–18, 28n, 114, 115, 124, 143, 150, 151 social and cultural considerations in, 181 see also unemployment endogenous growth models, 88 England, comparative advantage principle and, 52–53 entrepreneurs: corruption and, 91 taxation and, 74 Ethiopia, 86, 123 Europe: Great Recession in, 153, 156 income inequality in, 125, 139 trade agreements between U.S. and, 41 European Common Market, 59 European Union (EU), 76 evolution, theory of, 113–14 exchange rates, 2, 100, 149 experiments: economic models compared with, 21–25 field types of, 23–24, 105–8, 173, 202–5 Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Elster), 79n external validity, 23–24, 112 fables, models and, 18–21 factor endowments theory, 139–40 Fama, Eugene, 157, 159 Fassin, Didier, xiv Federalists, 187 Federal Reserve, U.S., 134–35, 151n, 158 Feenstra, Rob, 141 field experiments, 23–24, 105–8, 173, 202–5 financial costs, 70 financial industry: globalization of, 164–67 in Great Recession, 152–59, 184 financial markets, deregulation and, 143, 155, 158–59, 162 “Fine Is a Price, A” (Gneezy and Rustichini), 71n fines, 71 First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics, 47–51, 54 fiscal policies, 75–76, 87, 88, 147–48, 149, 160–61, 171 Fischer, Stanley, 165–66 forward causation, 115 Foundations of Economic Analysis (Samuelson), 125 Fourcade, Marion, 79n, 200n France, comparative advantage principle and, 59–60 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 7 Free to Choose, 49 free trade, 11, 54, 141, 169, 170, 182–83, 194 Friedman, Milton: on assumptions in modeling, 25–26 on cigarette taxes, 27–28 on invisible hand theorem, 49 on liquidity and Great Depression, 134 on model complexity, 37 fuel subsidies, 193 functional distribution of income, 121 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 184 Galileo Galilei, 29 Gambetta, Diego, 34 game theory, 5, 14–15, 33, 36, 61–62, 103–4, 133 simultaneous vs. sequential moves in, 68 garment industry, general-equilibrium effects in, 57–58 Gelman, Andrew, 115 general-equilibrium interactions, 41, 56–58, 69n, 91, 120 General Theory of Second Best, 58–61 Germany, comparative advantage principle and, 59–60 Gibbard, Allan, 20 Gilboa, Itzhak, 72, 73 Gini coefficient, 138 globalization, 139–41, 143, 164–67, 184 Gneezy, Uri, 71n Gold Standard, 2, 127 goods and services, economic models and, 12 Gordon, Roger, 151n Grand Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The (Keynes), 128 greenback era, 127n Greenspan, Alan, 158, 159 gross domestic product (GDP), 151n labor productivity and, 123 growth diagnostics, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 Haldane, Andrew, 197 Hamilton, Alexander, 187 Hanna, Rema, 107 Hanson, Gordon, 141 Harvard University, xi, 111, 136, 149, 197, 198 Hausmann, Ricardo, 111 health care: in antipoverty programs, 4, 105–7 models and, 5, 36–37, 105–7 Heckscher, Eli, 139 Herndon, Thomas, 77 Hicks, John, 128, 133 Hiebert, Stephanie, xv Hirschman, Albert O., 144–45, 195, 210n–11n housing bubble, 153–54, 156 human capital, 87, 88, 92 Humphrey, Thomas M., 13n Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics (Cartwright), 22n import quotas, 149 incentives, 7, 170, 172, 188–92 income: functional distribution of, 121 military service and, 108 personal distribution of, 121 income inequality, 117, 124–25, 138–44, 147–49 deregulation in, 143 factor endowments theory in, 139–40 Gini coefficient and, 138 globalization in, 139–41, 143 in manufacturing, 141 offshoring in, 141 skill premium in, 138–40, 142 skill upgrading in, 140, 141, 142 technological change in, 141–43 trade in, 139–40 India, 107, 154 Indonesia, 166 industrial organization, 201 industrial revolution, 115 industry: developing economies and policies on, 75–76, 87, 88 government intervention and, 34–35 inflation, 185 in business cycles, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 135, 137 public spending and, 114 infrastructure, 87, 91, 111, 163 Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), xii–xiii, xiv School of Social Science at, xii Institute for International Economics, 159 institutions: development economics and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 labor productivity and, 123 insurance, banking and, 155 interest rates, 39, 64, 110, 129–30, 156, 161 internal validity, 23–24 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2 see also World Bank international economics, 201–2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1n, 2 Washington Consensus and, 160, 165 Internet, big data and, 38 “Interview with Eugene Fama” (Cassidy), 157n investment: business cycles and, 129–30, 136 foreign markets and, 87, 89, 90, 92, 165–67 income inequality and, 141 savings and, 129–30, 165–67 Invisible Hand Theorem, 48–50, 51n, 182, 186 Israel, 103, 188 day care study in, 71, 190–91 Japan: city growth models and, 108 income inequality and, 139 Jenkins, Holman W., Jr., 135n Jevons, William Stanley, 119 Kahneman, Daniel, 203 Kenya, 106–7 Keynes, John Maynard, 1–2, 31, 46, 165 on business cycles, 127–37 on liquidity traps, 130 see also models, Keynesian types of Klemperer, Paul, 36n Klinger, Bailey, 111n Korea, South, 163, 164, 166 Kremer, Michael, 106–7 Krugman, Paul, 136, 148 Kuhn, Thomas, 64n Kupers, Roland, 85 Kydland, Finn E., 101n labor markets, 41, 52, 56, 57, 92, 102, 108, 111, 119, 163 labor productivity, 123–24, 141 labor theory of value, 117–19 Lancaster, Kelvin, 59 Latin America, Washington Consensus and, 159–63, 166 Leamer, Edward, 139 learning, rule-based vs. case-based forms of, 72 Leijonhufvud, Axel, 9–10 Lepenies, Philipp H., 211n leverage, 154 Levitt, Steven, 7 Levy, Santiago, 3–4, 105–6 Lewis, W.

., 144–45, 195, 210n–11n housing bubble, 153–54, 156 human capital, 87, 88, 92 Humphrey, Thomas M., 13n Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics (Cartwright), 22n import quotas, 149 incentives, 7, 170, 172, 188–92 income: functional distribution of, 121 military service and, 108 personal distribution of, 121 income inequality, 117, 124–25, 138–44, 147–49 deregulation in, 143 factor endowments theory in, 139–40 Gini coefficient and, 138 globalization in, 139–41, 143 in manufacturing, 141 offshoring in, 141 skill premium in, 138–40, 142 skill upgrading in, 140, 141, 142 technological change in, 141–43 trade in, 139–40 India, 107, 154 Indonesia, 166 industrial organization, 201 industrial revolution, 115 industry: developing economies and policies on, 75–76, 87, 88 government intervention and, 34–35 inflation, 185 in business cycles, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 135, 137 public spending and, 114 infrastructure, 87, 91, 111, 163 Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), xii–xiii, xiv School of Social Science at, xii Institute for International Economics, 159 institutions: development economics and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 labor productivity and, 123 insurance, banking and, 155 interest rates, 39, 64, 110, 129–30, 156, 161 internal validity, 23–24 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2 see also World Bank international economics, 201–2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 1n, 2 Washington Consensus and, 160, 165 Internet, big data and, 38 “Interview with Eugene Fama” (Cassidy), 157n investment: business cycles and, 129–30, 136 foreign markets and, 87, 89, 90, 92, 165–67 income inequality and, 141 savings and, 129–30, 165–67 Invisible Hand Theorem, 48–50, 51n, 182, 186 Israel, 103, 188 day care study in, 71, 190–91 Japan: city growth models and, 108 income inequality and, 139 Jenkins, Holman W., Jr., 135n Jevons, William Stanley, 119 Kahneman, Daniel, 203 Kenya, 106–7 Keynes, John Maynard, 1–2, 31, 46, 165 on business cycles, 127–37 on liquidity traps, 130 see also models, Keynesian types of Klemperer, Paul, 36n Klinger, Bailey, 111n Korea, South, 163, 164, 166 Kremer, Michael, 106–7 Krugman, Paul, 136, 148 Kuhn, Thomas, 64n Kupers, Roland, 85 Kydland, Finn E., 101n labor markets, 41, 52, 56, 57, 92, 102, 108, 111, 119, 163 labor productivity, 123–24, 141 labor theory of value, 117–19 Lancaster, Kelvin, 59 Latin America, Washington Consensus and, 159–63, 166 Leamer, Edward, 139 learning, rule-based vs. case-based forms of, 72 Leijonhufvud, Axel, 9–10 Lepenies, Philipp H., 211n leverage, 154 Levitt, Steven, 7 Levy, Santiago, 3–4, 105–6 Lewis, W.


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A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Some prominent economists have asserted that a basic income would worsen rather than reduce inequality – witness these remarks by Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under US President Barack Obama: Replacing our current antipoverty programs with UBI would in any realistic design make the distribution of income worse, not better. Our tax and transfer system is largely targeted towards those in the lower half of the income distribution, which means that it works to reduce both poverty and income inequality. Replacing part or all of that system with a universal cash grant, which would go to all Americans regardless of income, would mean that relatively less of the system was targeted towards those at the bottom – increasing, not decreasing, income inequality.12 Furman’s statement is based on some tendentious assumptions. First, a basic income does not have to ‘replace’ anti-poverty programmes. Most proponents of basic income do not advocate the abolition of all or most anti-poverty schemes, particularly those that address special needs such as disability, illness and frailty.

Inequality has been growing in most countries in recent decades and, in many, inequality is greater than at any time since statistics began to be collected. There is also strong evidence that high and rising inequality impedes economic growth (which of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but which is conventionally treated as so) and impairs sustainable development. Would universal basic income tend to reduce income inequality? In one sense, it should do so. An equal amount given to everybody represents a higher proportion for those on low incomes. But a note of caution is in order here, because the impact on inequality would depend on how a basic income was introduced and funded. Some prominent economists have asserted that a basic income would worsen rather than reduce inequality – witness these remarks by Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under US President Barack Obama: Replacing our current antipoverty programs with UBI would in any realistic design make the distribution of income worse, not better.

It was an option proposed by various economists at the time.8 The $4.5 trillion in QE by the US Federal Reserve was enough to have given $56,000 to every household in the country. Similarly, had the UK’s £375 billion of QE been diverted to pay a basic income, everyone legally resident in Britain could have received £50 a week for two years. Instead, QE has enriched the financiers, worsened income inequality and hastened the alarming oncoming crisis of underfunded pension schemes.9 The idea of giving money directly to people to boost growth was put forward in a famous 1969 article by Milton Friedman, who used the parable of scattering dollar bills from a helicopter for the public to pick up.10 ‘Helicopter money’ – printing money to distribute to the public – has been proposed by American bond investor Bill Gross and by the economics journalist Martin Wolf, among others.


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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

This in turn propagates inequality across the generations, as the money and brains become clustered in high-powered, two-earner families, determined to do everything possible to advance the interests of their children and endowed with the skills to see that commitment through. One study showed that family-connected decisions, including marriage, choice of spouse, female labor supply, and lower divorce rates for wealthier couples, accounted for a third of the rise in income inequality from 1960 to 2005. In other words, if you wish to understand income inequality, or for that matter the American economy, don’t just study the New York Times business section; turn also to the Sunday marriage pages.10 The influence of matching spreads far and wide, so maybe sex is better too for many Americans. It’s certainly easier to find, and if you have unusual tastes, or maybe just religious- or culturally based tastes, you are no longer confined to the circle of people you know from ordinary daily life.

Still, for whatever cracks may be showing in the edifice, the complacent class defines our current day, even though we are starting to see parts of it crumble before our eyes. One of the great ironies of the situation is that those most likely to complain about the complacent class are themselves the prime and often most influential members of that class themselves, namely what I call the privileged class. When we hear Progressives criticizing high income inequality or conservatives bemoaning America’s fall in global stature, you might wonder, If they are complaining, what makes them so complacent? The defining feature of these groups of people is, most of all, the lack of a sense of urgency. Our current decade can be understood by comparing it to the 1960s and early 1970s.

In other words, the American response to economic adversity was to seek to restore comfort more than dynamism, and Americans pushed their culture in this direction all the more in the 1980s. President Reagan resurrected the rhetoric of dynamism, and Americans started to feel better again, but that was a time when dynamic economic growth was available only to a minority of Americans; in other words, it was the beginning of the age of income inequality. More successful Americans became determined to dig in and protect their privileged positions, and the rise of the complacent class as a phenomenon was under way. The beginning or intensifications of declines in residential mobility, job mobility, and integration cemented this dynamic all the more.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

Freedom’s Prospect Notes Bibliography Index Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 The economic crisis of the 1970s: inflation and unemployment in the US and Europe, 1960–1987 1.2 The wealth crash of the 1970s: share of assets held by the top 1% of the US population, 1922–1998 1.3 The restoration of class power: share in national income of the top 0.1% of the population, US, Britain, and France, 1913–1998 1.4 The concentration of wealth and earning power in the US: CEO remuneration in relation to average US salaries, 1970–2003, and wealth shares of the richest families, 1982–2002 1.5 The ‘Volcker shock’: movements in the real rate of interest, US and France, 1960–2001 1.6 The attack on labour: real wages and productivity in the US, 1960–2000 1.7 The tax revolt of the upper class: US tax rates for higher and lower brackets, 1913–2003 1.8 Extracting surpluses from abroad: rates of return on foreign and domestic investments in the US, 1960–2002 1.9 The flow of tribute into the US: profits and capital income from the rest of the world in relation to domestic profits 4.1 Global pattern of foreign direct investments, 2000 4.2 The international debt crisis of 1982–1985 4.3 Employment in the major maquila sectors in Mexico in 2000 4.4 South Korea goes abroad: foreign direct investment, 2000 5.1 The geography of China’s opening to foreign investment in the 1980s 5.2 Increasing income inequality in China: rural and urban, 1985–2000 6.1 Global growth rates, annually and by decade, 1960–2003 6.2 The hegemony of finance capital: net worth and rates of profit for financial and non-financial corporations in the US, 1960–2001 7.1 The deteriorating position of the US in global capital and ownership flows, 1960–2002: inflow and outflow of US investments and change in foreign ownership shares Tables 5.1 Measures of capital inflows: foreign loans, foreign direct investments, and contractual alliances, 1979–2002 5.2 Changing employment structure in China, 1980–2002 Acknowledgements Figures 4.1, 4.3, 4.4 and 5.1 are reproduced by kind permission of the Guilford Press from P.

Freedom’s Prospect Notes Bibliography Index Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 The economic crisis of the 1970s: inflation and unemployment in the US and Europe, 1960–1987 1.2 The wealth crash of the 1970s: share of assets held by the top 1% of the US population, 1922–1998 1.3 The restoration of class power: share in national income of the top 0.1% of the population, US, Britain, and France, 1913–1998 1.4 The concentration of wealth and earning power in the US: CEO remuneration in relation to average US salaries, 1970–2003, and wealth shares of the richest families, 1982–2002 1.5 The ‘Volcker shock’: movements in the real rate of interest, US and France, 1960–2001 1.6 The attack on labour: real wages and productivity in the US, 1960–2000 1.7 The tax revolt of the upper class: US tax rates for higher and lower brackets, 1913–2003 1.8 Extracting surpluses from abroad: rates of return on foreign and domestic investments in the US, 1960–2002 1.9 The flow of tribute into the US: profits and capital income from the rest of the world in relation to domestic profits 4.1 Global pattern of foreign direct investments, 2000 4.2 The international debt crisis of 1982–1985 4.3 Employment in the major maquila sectors in Mexico in 2000 4.4 South Korea goes abroad: foreign direct investment, 2000 5.1 The geography of China’s opening to foreign investment in the 1980s 5.2 Increasing income inequality in China: rural and urban, 1985–2000 6.1 Global growth rates, annually and by decade, 1960–2003 6.2 The hegemony of finance capital: net worth and rates of profit for financial and non-financial corporations in the US, 1960–2001 7.1 The deteriorating position of the US in global capital and ownership flows, 1960–2002: inflow and outflow of US investments and change in foreign ownership shares Tables 5.1 Measures of capital inflows: foreign loans, foreign direct investments, and contractual alliances, 1979–2002 5.2 Changing employment structure in China, 1980–2002 Acknowledgements Figures 4.1, 4.3, 4.4 and 5.1 are reproduced by kind permission of the Guilford Press from P. Dicken, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century. 4th Edition, 2003. Figure 1.3 is reproduced courtesy of MIT Press Journals from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1988,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118:1 (February, 2003). Figure 5.2 is reproduced courtesy of J. Perloff from Wu, X and Perloff, J, China’s Income Distribution over Time: Reasons for Rising Inequality. CUDARE Working Papers 977. Figure 1.6 is reproduced courtesy of Verso Press from R.

The US is not alone in this: the top 1 per cent of income earners in Britain have doubled their share of the national income from 6.5 per cent to 13 per cent since 1982. And when we look further afield we see extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power emerging all over the place. A small and powerful oligarchy arose in Russia after neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ had been administered there in the 1990s. Extraordinary surges in income inequalities and wealth have occurred in China as it has adopted free-market-oriented practices. The wave of privatization in Mexico after 1992 catapulted a few individuals (such as Carlos Slim) almost overnight into Fortune’s list of the world’s wealthiest people. Globally, ‘the countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS have registered some of the largest increases ever… in social inequality.


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The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

See Andrea Tan & Jesse Westbrook, ‘Brevan Howard Asked RBS to Change Libor, Lawsuit Says’, Bloomberg.com, 30 March 2012. ‌17 Jon Bakija, Adam Cole & Bradley Heim, ‘Jobs and Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from US Tax Return Data’, Working Paper, November 2012, table 1, p. 49. ‌18 John C. Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. xx (Introduction). ‌19 Final Report of the High Pay Commission, p. 8–11. ‌20 Quoted in Andrew Clark, ‘Top hedge funds boom despite recession’, The Guardian, 25 March 2009. ‌21 Mike Brewer, Luke Sibieta & Liam Wren-Lewis, ‘Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes’, Institute for Fiscal Studies (London: 2007), table 4, p. 34. 2 Why Pornography Is the Only True Free Market ‌1 John Arlidge, ‘I’m Doing “God’s Work”.

These benefits, themselves dubious, should be weighed against the well-documented negatives. In their highly acclaimed book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw on a vast body of social science evidence, as well as their own research, in revealing the long list of problems that large income inequalities exacerbate, including poor physical health, mental illness, drug use, violence, obesity, shorter life spans, diminished social relations and reduced prospects for upward social mobility. Accordingly, an appropriate response to threats of departure from the rich might be: have a safe trip. One might also point out the sheer selfishness involved in their decision to depart, considering all the privileges they have enjoyed and the huge extent to which society has helped them get to where they are.

But what exists today in the UK is a level of inequality that is extreme compared to most of the nations in the advanced, industrialized world. It’s also extreme by the recent historical experience of Britain itself. England has, of course, a long history as a plutocracy, in which a small propertied elite has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on wealth and power. But there was remarkable progress towards reducing income inequality in Britain, starting in the 1940s. The notion that ‘the rich always get richer’ was shown to be quite untrue in the decades that followed the crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s. The great banking barons who had ruled the City in the 1920s found their wings clipped in the new era of financial regulation and progressive taxation.


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Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

As a result, the middle class itself is shrinking—from 61 percent of Americans in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015, according to Pew. It took the election of Donald Trump to really wake people up. In January 2017, a few months after the election but before Trump actually took office, elites at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos were all talking about income inequality. The WEF itself cited widening income inequality as a threat to the global economy. Some saw the election of Trump as a warning that the victims of the Information Age were lashing out. “People around the world have become aware they are part of the bottom class, and they’re angry. Trump could be just the beginning,” British economist Guy Standing declared.

“Amazon Staff ‘Chewed Up and Spat Out by a Brutal Culture.’” Times (London), August 18, 2015. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/amazon-staff-chewed-up-and-spat-out-by-a-brutal-culture-c3zxz2dhbmj. DeSilver, Drew. “U.S. Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, Is Now Highest Since 1928.” Pew Research Center Fact Tank, December 5, 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928. Elliott, Larry. “Rising Inequality Threatens World Economy, Says WEF.” The Guardian, January 11, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/11/inequality-world-economy-wef-brexit-donald-trump-world-economic-forum-risk-report.

I wrote this book because I believe we have reached an important turning point, one where we must make an important decision. We need to decide what the future will look like. Do we want the world to be tech-centric, or human-centric? If we stick with the tech-centric path that Silicon Valley proposes, we will end up with more of what we have now—more misery, ever-worsening income inequality, and potentially catastrophic outcomes. Or we can turn back and embrace a new kind of capitalism. We can create a human-centric future, where employees are treated with dignity and respect, and workers get a fair share of the wealth that their labor is creating. Obviously I’m rooting for the latter.


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What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I didn’t grow up seeing the American Dream as some modern-day Garden of Eden, from which we’ve now been cast; we built it. That makes me think we can do it again. The fact is, on the eve of the Great Depression, we had historic income inequality (which was matched only in 2007, on the eve of the Wall Street crash), and for a long time people drew the conclusion that such radical economic disparities were dangerous, for everyone. From 1947 through 1973, we had tax policies that flattened income inequality. It was a political decision. The earnings of people at the bottom and in the middle grew faster than those at the top. That progressive tax policy brought in the public resources to pay for the scaffolding of the American Dream that helped my family and created the middle class.

Preface A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the world’s financial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to find. During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national conversation. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” did what years of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused attention on staggering income inequality and “the top 1 percent” who’d enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty years. “I am so scared of this anti–Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Frank Luntz, the GOP’s master of spin, told a private meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011. “They’re having an impact on the way Americans think about capitalism.”

The civil rights movement likewise involved strife and turmoil and jail time for its leaders. I was thrilled to see the new activism. Maybe we were finally realizing we’re all in this together. Maybe. But the old ways take time to be unlearned. Though the Occupy movement transformed the political debate, emblazoning the issue of income inequality high on the national agenda, many of its local satellites fell back into ’60s style infighting—over property destruction and violence, relations with police, and race and gender. Too many Democrats judged the new activism only on the grounds of whether it was good or bad for President Obama and the party’s congressional leadership.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Fifty millennia of catastrophic extinctions after human contact. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 395–401. Burns, J. 2009. Goddess of the market: Ayn Rand and the American right. New York: Oxford University Press. Burtless, G. 2014. Income growth and income inequality: The facts may surprise you. Brookings Blog. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/income-growth-and-income-inequality-the-facts-may-surprise-you/. Buturovic, Z., & Klein, D. B. 2010. Economic enlightenment in relation to college-going, ideology, and other variables: A Zogby survey of Americans. Economic Journal Watch, 7, 174–96. Calic, R., ed. 1971.

Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index/. Roser, M. 2016i. Human rights. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/. Roser, M. 2016j. Hunger and undernourishment. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/. Roser, M. 2016k. Income inequality. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/. Roser, M. 2016l. Indoor air pollution. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/indoor-air-pollution/. Roser, M. 2016m. Land use in agriculture. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-in-agriculture/. Roser, M. 2016n. Life expectancy.

A person whose wallet contains the cash equivalent of a hundred 2011 international dollars today is fantastically richer than her ancestor with the equivalent wallet’s worth two hundred years ago. As we’ll see, this also affects our assessment of prosperity in the developing world (this chapter), of income inequality in the developed world (next chapter), and of the future of economic growth (chapter 20). * * * What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls “the enlightened economy.”8 The machines and factories of the Industrial Revolution, the productive farms of the Agricultural Revolution, and the water pipes of the Public Health Revolution could deliver more clothes, tools, vehicles, books, furniture, calories, clean water, and other things that people want than the craftsmen and farmers of a century before.


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Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

As for Markovits’s more surprising point—that the change in rules that increasingly enable “merit” to outrank old-school ties and other connections has produced a more entrenched aristocracy that has led to more overall income inequality—there is compelling data that the playing field has, indeed, tilted generally across the population. Much of it is by now familiar because growing income inequality has become a popular political issue. Still, the specifics are stark. The year 1970 ended a streak of forty-one years (stretching back to 1929, the year of the stock market crash) when middle-class family incomes grew faster than upper-class incomes in the U.S. In other words, it was an era in which income inequality was steadily reduced. In 1971, the trend started going the other way and has accelerated (except for a slight pause in 2015).

Kennedy’s New Frontier was about seizing the future, not trying to survive the present. The celebrated American economic mobility engine is sputtering. A child’s chance of earning more than his or her parents has dropped from 90 percent to 50 percent in the last fifty years. The American middle class, once the inspiration of the world, is no longer the world’s richest. Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008—which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings, and jobs—was reserved almost exclusively for the top one percent.

The story is not about villains, although there are some. It is not about a conspiracy to bring the country down. It is not about one particular event or trend, and it did not spring from one single source. Excellent books and scholarly treatises have been written about the likeliest suspects: the growth of income inequality, the polarization and paralysis of American democracy, the dominance of political money, or the recklessness that precipitated the financial crash of 2008–9 and the ensuing failure to hold anyone accountable. The story of America’s breakdown is about all of that, and more. And there is a theme that threads through and ties together all of these subplots: The most talented, driven Americans chased the American dream—and won it for themselves.


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Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

So we should expect less consumption inequality than income inequality. The issue is whether we see the same basic trends in inequality of consumption that we do in inequality of income, namely, a big increase. Tackling this issue turns out to be extremely difficult, in part because the main source of evidence, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, largely misses the high-income folks who’ve benefited from the winner-take-all economy. Still, it is increasingly clear there is no “consumption paradox.” Consumption inequality is not as great as income inequality, as we’d expect (especially since the evidence fails to capture the big winners at the top).

But something else was at work in creating the winner-take-all economy—something that fostered a sharp divide between broadly shared prosperity and winner-take-all. Figure 1: The Richest 1 Percent’s Share of National Income (Including Capital Gains), 1960–2007 Source: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39. Data updated through 2007 available at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2007.xls. Clue #3: Limited Benefits for the Nonrich We come, finally, to the third clue—and perhaps the most puzzling of all.

After all, didn’t the United States grow much more quickly than other rich nations during this period, allowing the rich to get richer even as the rest of Americans moved ahead as well? In particular, didn’t the United States grow a lot faster than Europe, where incomes are generally much more equal and where the massive rise in income inequality seen in the United States did not occur? The answer is no. The American economic engine ran hotter in some years than the European economic engine. But on average, between 1979 and 2006, economic growth per capita was essentially the same in the fifteen core nations of Europe as it was in the United States.8 The United States is richer than these nations, but the gap has been surprisingly stable since the late 1970s.


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SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Andy Serwer and Melanie Shanley, “Wall Street’s Hottest Hand Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman Has Built a Powerhouse Unlike Any Other,” Fortune, June 9, 2003, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/06/09/343947/index.htm. 10. Tyler Cowen, “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality,” New York Times, December 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-couples-reinforce-income-inequality.xhtml. 11. Jordan Weissmann, “Ben Bernanke to Princeton Grads: The World Isn’t Fair (and You All Got Lucky),” The Atlantic, June 3, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/ben-bernanke-to-princeton-grads-the-world-isnt-fair-and-you-all-got-lucky/276471. 12.

Lawrence Mishel, Elise Gould, and Josh Bivens, “Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts,” Economic Policy Institute, January 6, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation. 9. Peter Georgescu, “Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality,” New York Times, August 7, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/opinion/sunday/capitalists-arise-we-need-to-deal-with-income-inequality.xhtml. 10. Lawrence Mishel, Elise Gould, and Josh Bivens, “Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts.” 11. “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground,” Pew Research Center. 12. Tim Montgomerie, “The World Lost Faith in Capitalism?”

An unapologetic capitalist, he argues that the U.S. is changing from a capitalist to a feudal society. In his opinion, this wealth accumulation is socially destabilizing and will inexorably lead to a revolution, which will likely be triggered by a sudden and unforeseen event.11 Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones echoes that view, opining that “income inequality will end in revolution, taxes, or war.” While he also praises capitalism, he feels “we’ve ripped the humanity out of our companies . . . threatening the very underpinnings of our society.”12 And Rob Johnson, who is now executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and previously worked with George Soros on his billion-dollar bearish bet on the pound, revealed that he knows “hedge fund managers buying airstrips in New Zealand in case they need a quick getaway.”13 * * * In this chapter, we have been introduced to some of the world’s most influential bank CEOs, managers of trillion-dollar funds, and billionaire investors, who pull the levers of our global financial system.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

The growth in services should be actively encouraged, both in megacities such as Beijing or Shanghai, which are already well -served, but also and importantly in other cities, especially those inland, which are not.28 Modern service industries, which remain relatively closed, could be deregulated and opened up, for example in a wide range of communication, professional, business, entertainment and information services. Income inequality should be lowered across both income groups and regions. China has a relatively high Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality between 0 and 1, where, theoretically, a reading of 0 means that income is equally shared by all, and a reading of 1 means income accrues to just 1 person). The latest data from official sources in China revealed a Gini coefficient of 0.47 in 2015, compared with 0.3 in the 1980s. Gini coefficients around 0.3–0.4 are generally thought to be high. Another measure of income inequality shows that 1 per cent of Chinese households own a third of the country’s wealth, while just 1 per cent of wealth is owned by the bottom 25 per cent.29 Rebalancing is complex and Xi’s China will be unwilling to adopt many of the reform proposals and suggestions that Western thinking normally urges.

Mindful of the risks posed by local governments to China’s financial stability, Premier Li Keqiang said in 2013 that the central government should consolidate its macroeconomic authority and ensure local government officials respected its orders and policies without hesitation. In this way, he explained, Beijing would assert its authority over fundamental economic goals, such as lower sustainable growth, environmentally friendly expansion, fiscal reform and lower income inequality. He wanted local governments to switch their focus from chasing growth and engaging in GDP growth statistics competition with other provinces to providing public goods and services. Yet, Li famously said at the time that tackling vested political and Party interests at the local level was a task that was harder than ‘stirring the soul’.26 He was right.

Indebtedness and a rising dependency on credit to sustain high rates of economic growth became entrenched in public policy. Pollution and corruption became much bigger political and economic problems. When Premier Wen stepped down from office, he admitted that ‘even among top officials, abuse of power, trading power for cash, and collusion between officialdom and commerce continue unabated’.30 Income inequality between the countryside and the cities and within urban areas increased. The role and influence of SOEs expanded again, not just in the economy, but as powerful and well-heeled interest groups politically. Social unrest became a more important problem, with the number of ‘mass incidents’ – many about low-level public sector corruption, construction and planning injustices, and pollution and environmental degradation – reportedly rising from about 50,000 a year in 2002 to about 180,000 a year by 2012.


The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

They have led indirectly to greater concentration of our most talented college students in a small set of elite institutions. They have made it more difficult for "late bloomers" to find a produc- Winner-Take-AII Markets 5 tive niche in life. And winner-take-all markets have molded our cul­ ture and discourse in ways many of us find deeply troubling. Growing Income Inequality Despite a flurry of denials from Bush administration officials when bur­ geoning income inequality first made headlines in the late 1980s, there is now little doubt that the top U.S. earners have pulled sharply away from all others. For example, the incomes of the top 1 percent more than doubled in real terms between 1979 and 1989, a period during which the median income was roughly stable and in which the bottom 20 percent of earners saw their incomes actually fall by 10 percent. � Growing inequality is by no means confined to the United States.

As we will see in chapters 6 and 7, it is this reward-by-relative-per­ formance feature that gives rise to many of the inefficiencies we at­ tribute to winner-take-all markets. The fact that rewards are large and concentrated in many winner-take-all markets is of interest primarily because of its implications for income inequality. Highly concentrated rewards, by themselves, do not give rise to the kinds of inefficiencies we describe. Nor, for that matter, are winner-take-all markets the only source of income inequality. In assembly tasks for which workers are paid by the piece, for example, a small proportion of unusually pro­ ductive workers may consistently earn several times more than the av­ erage worker. Whether championship performance yields large financial rewards in a winner-take-all market naturally depends on the arena in which it occurs.

In the United Kingdom, for example, the richest 20 percent earned seven times as much as the poorest 20 percent in 1991, compared with only four times as much in 1977.5 The British gap between males with the highest wage rates and those with the lowest is larger now than at any time since the 1880s, when U.K. statistics on wages were first gathered systematically.6 As in other times and places, the growing gap between rich and poor has increasingly strained our bonds of community. The top earn­ ers are richer now than ever before, yet few among them can feel proud of the social environment we have bequeathed to our children. Despite a recent spate of books on income inequality, there remains little consensus about why it has grown so sharply. Some commenta­ tors mention changes in public policy, citing the Reagan-Thatcher pro­ gram of tax cuts for the wealthy and program cuts for the poor. Others emphasize the decline of labor unions, the downsizing of corpora­ tions, and the growing impact of foreign trade.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

People do not want to show off. Nor do they want to recognize the shame and stigma of being at the bottom. Yet, despite people’s hesitancies about identifying themselves economically, we will insist on the centrality of such inequalities in shaping people’s lives. The power of income inequalities Income inequalities in Britain are very high, and have been rapidly increasing. In their highly influential book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett use the standard metric to measure inequality between countries – the Gini coefficient – in the fifteen states who were members of the European Union prior to its major enlargement in 2004 and also the major industrial English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the USA.2 Figure 2.1 gives an indication of the inequalities within nations as they reflect the relative differences between countries in terms of earnings.

In their highly influential book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett use the standard metric to measure inequality between countries – the Gini coefficient – in the fifteen states who were members of the European Union prior to its major enlargement in 2004 and also the major industrial English-speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the USA.2 Figure 2.1 gives an indication of the inequalities within nations as they reflect the relative differences between countries in terms of earnings. The UK is a country of high gross income inequalities between households, coming second only to Ireland in the list of eighteen nations. Figure 2.1 shows also that those inequalities increased between 2008 and 2010 in the UK, as indeed they did in the vast majority of countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This clearly points to the impact of the financial crisis in exacerbating inequalities within the UK and across the globe. Why is income inequality so intense in Britain? There is clearly a gulf between those wealthy households benefiting from Britain’s centrality in global trading, corporate, professional and financial networks, when compared to poor households, which have been affected by the decline of manufacturing jobs and the proliferation of poorly paying jobs at the lower ends of the service economy.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, the UK also has an increasingly large number of people working in low-paid, long-hours, service-sector roles.3 There are powerful biases, therefore, in the structure of the UK economy, that tend towards greater income inequality over and above other nation states with more balanced employment frameworks. Figure 2.1 Income Inequality in the EU15 and Major Anglophone Nations in 2008 and 2010 Source: Social Protection and Wellbeing – Social Protection – Income Distribution and Poverty: this data comes from the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s statistics website, accessed 22 May 2015.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

Over 2.47 billion people live on less than US$2.50 a day; 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty, meaning that they live on less than US$1.25 a day (in 2008 dollars).25 Their most basic needs go unmet. Inequality. Recent research points to issues related to income inequality, including civil unrest, immigration and refugee crises, recession, and slow economic growth.26 In 2008, the International Labour Organization (ILO) conducted a global study of income inequality in more than seventy developed and developing countries.27 Key findings include that, in 70 percent of countries surveyed, the income gap between the top and bottom 10 percent of the population increased over the preceding twenty years.28 THE SPIRITUAL-CULTURAL DIVIDE While ecological and social divides concern the split between self and nature and between self and other, the spiritual-cultural divide concerns the split between self and Self.

Surprisingly, the leverage to increase well-being seems to be connected to reducing the size of one of the above-mentioned issue bubbles: inequality.3 Figure 7 shows that health and social problems are more common in countries with wider income inequalities, such as the United States. On the other end of the spectrum are countries with fewer health and social problems, such as Japan, Sweden, and Norway. These countries have the lowest income inequalities among the developed countries. These two data points raise a question: To increase the health of citizens in developed countries, would we be better off focusing on reducing the income and inequality bubble instead of focusing on improving health-care delivery?

., Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009); Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière, “Inequality, Leverage and Crises,” International Monetary Fund (IMF), working paper no. 10/268 (2010), www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2010/wp10268.pdf (accessed February 27, 2013); and Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins, “Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion: A Rapid Review of Income Distribution in 141 Countries,” UNICEF Social and Economic Policy, working paper (April 2011), www.networkideas.org/featart/apr2011/Ortiz_Cummins.pdf (accessed December 9, 2012). 27. International Labour Organization (ILO), “World of Work Report 2008—Global Income Inequality Gap Is Vast and Growing,” press release, October 16, 2008, www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_099406/lang--en/index.htm (accessed December 9, 2012). 28. Income inequality has increased particularly in the following countries since the 1990s: China, India, and English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, and, to a lesser degree, Canada.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Like the classic precariat, the Middle Precariat has lost the narrative of their lives and futures. Who are they and what will they become? Their income has flatlined. Many are “fronting” as bourgeois while standing on a pile of debt. There are many culprits for the straits in which they find themselves—most crucially growing income inequality, or as the business TV shows like to call it euphemistically, as if to deny their role in creating it, “disparity.” The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world. It has the largest wealth inequality gap of the two hundred countries in the Global Wealth Report of 2015.

In a study published in 2017 by the organizations the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now (full disclosure; IPS is the fiscal sponsor of my organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project), the median wealth—assets minus debt—of white households is now over sixty-eight times higher than that of black households. For black families, the median was just $1,700. The 2017 tax bill will likely only make these numbers even worse for many Americans. But this so-called tax reform is only the most recent example of how income inequality is written into the law of the land. If you are an American working parent dealing with all of these stresses, you may feel like you are betting against the house and the house is always winning. Yet most of the parents I spoke to blamed only themselves, not a system stacked against them. In Squeezed, you will meet a professor on food stamps in Chicago, an unemployed restaurant manager in Boston, and a nanny in New York City betrayed by the American Dream, and you will even hear about pharmacists who lost their jobs to a robot in Pittsburgh.

Jones of the Bay Area ask: ‘Am I doing as well as my neighbors?’” I thought I should take a look at people like Tanner, those who were distinctly upper-middle-class but who were still running in place in order to stay that way. I did so because I knew they too felt an emotional and to a smaller extent a financial sting as a side effect of the extremes of income inequality in this country. “Week to week,” Tanner said of his life, he “still feels a crunch” on Fridays. “There’s nothing left here.” The complaints of the relatively privileged can raise hackles. Their problems can seem bespoke and psychological problems akin to memory exercises, specialized summer camps, or homemade jam.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Norway Finland Czech Republic Denmark Belgium Sweden Netherlands Austria Switzerland Germany France Ireland Taiwan Canada New Zealand United Kingdom Italy Greece Spain Portugal Venezuela United States Argenna Vietnam China Russia Indonesia Bolivia Philippines Chile Brazil Peru South Africa 0 20 40 60 80 Gini coefficient (%) Before tax Aer tax Figure 5.6. The Gini coefficient of income inequality before and after tax for selected countries in 2015. Do we need a carbon price? 145 Tax is undoubtedly a massively important mechanism for reducing income inequality and countries use it to very different extents. The chart shows income inequality in selected countries before and after income tax. The inequality measure shown here is a well established Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0% (everyone having the same income) to 100% (one person has all the country’s income).

To be told that how you live is not fit for the twenty-first century is not what any of us can easily hold on to unless we at least have some idea of what we might do differently. Notes to Pages 145–149 267 20 Gini coefficient data from The Standardized World Income Inequality Database. (SWIID) https://fsolt.org/swiid/ For a stack of interesting stats and charts on income inequality, I recommend browsing Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality 21 WeAll, an interesting start-up organisation focussed on the Wellbeing Economy. Website coming soon. ‘The purpose of the economy should be to achieve sustainable wellbeing – the wellbeing of all humans and the planet.

The UK’s tax system takes it out of the inequality doghouse to a somewhat more respectable position. Taiwan, interestingly, has similar income equality after tax to Ireland, but gets there without much recourse to income tax. Brazil and Peru, for example, have high income inequality before tax, don’t use tax to sort the problem out and are left with hugely unequal societies. (For more stats and data on tax and income inequality follow this endnote20.) For all the moaning that goes on about income tax, most people are far better off for it, in relative terms at least, and in absolute terms too, provided the money is tolerably well spent on things we can all benefit from.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

When looking at household income, about 20 percent of the decline reflects the fact that households are somewhat smaller than they were thirty years ago. 15. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that income inequality increased in seventeen of twenty-two nations including Mexico, the United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Norway, and Denmark. See “An Overview of Growing Income Inequalities in the OECD Countries: Main Findings,” from the OECD, 2011, http://www.oecd.org/social/soc/49499779.pdf. 16. See, for instance, Robert M. Solow, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–20, doi:10.2307/1926047. 17.

But when we look at the data and research, we conclude that none of these are the primary driver of growing inequality. Instead, the main driver is exponential, digital, and combinatorial change in the technology that undergirds our economic system. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that similar trends are apparent in most advanced countries. For instance, in Sweden, Finland, and Germany, income inequality has actually grown more quickly over the past twenty to thirty years than in the United States.15 Because these countries started with less inequality in their income distributions, they continued to be less unequal than the United States, but the underlying trend is similar worldwide across sometimes markedly different institutions, government policies, and cultures.

And at the same time, the demand for tasks that could be completed by high school dropouts fell so rapidly that there was a glut of this type of worker, even though their ranks were thinning. The lack of demand for unskilled workers meant ever-lower wages for those who continued to compete for low-skill jobs. And because most of the people with the least education already had the lowest wages, this change increased overall income inequality. Organizational Coinvention While a one-for-one substitution of machines for people sometimes occurs, a broader reorganization in business culture may have been an even more important path for skill-biased change. Work that Erik did with Stanford’s Tim Bresnahan, Wharton’s Lorin Hitt, and MIT’s Shinkyu Yang found that companies used digital technologies to reorganize decision-making authority, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of their management and organizational processes.20 This coinvention of organization and technology not only significantly increased productivity but tended to require more educated workers and reduce demand for less-skilled workers.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

., 86–87 and trade wars, 93–94 value systems and, 94–97 GMO (genetically modified food), 88 Goebbels, Joseph, 266n35 Goldman Sachs, 104 Google AlphaGo, 315n1 antipoaching conspiracy, 65 and Big Data, 123, 127, 128 conflicts of interest, 124 European restrictions on data use, 129 gaming of tax laws by, 85 market power, 56, 58, 62, 128 and preemptive mergers, 60 Gordon, Robert, 118–19 Gore, Al, 6 government, 138–56 assumption of mortgage risk, 107 Chicago School’s view of, 68–69 debate over role of, 150–52 and educational system, 220 failure of, 148–52 in finance, 115–16 and fractional reserve banking, 111 and Great Depression, 120 hiring of workers by, 196–97 increasing need for, 152–55 interventions during economic downturns, 23, 120 lack of trust in, 151 lending guarantees, 110–11 managing technological change, 122–23 and need for collective action, 140–42 and political reform, xxvi pre-distribution/redistribution by, xxv in progressive agenda, 243–44 public–private partnerships, 142 regulation and rules, 143–48 restoring growth and social justice, 179–208 social protection by, 231 government bonds, 215 Great Britain, wealth from colonialism, 9 Great Depression, xiii, xxii, 13, 23, 120 “great moderation,” 32 Great Recession, xxvi; See also financial crisis (2008) deregulation and, 25 diseases of despair, 42 elites and, 151 employment recovery after, 193 inadequate fiscal stimulus after, 121 as market failure, 23 pace of recovery from, 39–40 productivity growth after, 37 and retirement incomes, 214–15 weak social safety net and, 190 Greenspan, Alan, 112 Gross Fixed Capital Formation, 271n4 gross investment, 271n4 growth after 2008 financial crisis, 103 in China, 95 decline since 1980, 35–37 economic agenda for, xxvii failure of financial sector to support, 115 and inequality, 19 international living standard comparisons, 35–37 knowledge and, 183–86 labor force, 181–82 market power as inimical to, 62–64 in post-1970s US economy, 32 restoring, 181–86 taxation and, 25 guaranteed jobs, 196–97 Harvard University, 16 Hastert Rule, 333n31 health inequality in, 41–43 and labor force participation, 182 health care and American exceptionalism, 211–12 improving access to services, 203 public option, 210–11 in UK and Europe, 13 universal access to, 212–13 hedonic pricing, 347n13 higher education, 219–20; See also universities Hispanic Americans, 41 hi-tech companies, 54, 56, 60, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 152, 266n35 Hobbes, Thomas, 12 home ownership, 216–18 hours worked per week, US ranking among developed economies, 36–37 House of Representatives, 6, 159 housing, as barrier to finding new jobs, 186 housing bubble, 21 housing finance, 216–18 human capital index (World Bank), 36 Human Development Index, 36 Human Genome Project, 126 hurricanes, 207 IA (intelligence-assisting) innovations, 119 identity, capitalism’s effect on, xxvi ideology, science replaced by, 20 immigrants/immigration, 16, 181, 185 imports, See globalization; trade wars incarceration, 161, 163, 193, 201, 202 incentive payments for teachers, 201 voting reform and, 162–63 income; See also wages average US pretax income (1974-2014), 33t universal basic income, 190–91 income inequality, 37, 177, 200, 206 income of capital, 53 India, guaranteed jobs in, 196–97 individualism, 139, 225–26 individual mandate, 212, 213 industrial policies, 187 industrial revolution, 9, 12, 264–65n24 inequality; See also income inequality; wealth inequality benefits of reducing, xxiv–xxv and current politics, 246 in early years after WWII, xix economists’ failure to address, 33 education system as perpetuator of, 219 and election of 2016, xix–xxi and excess profits, 49 and financial system design, 198 growth of, xii–xiii, 37–45 in health, 41–43 in opportunity, 44–45 in race, ethnicity, and gender, 40–41 and 2017 tax bill, 236–37 technology’s effect on, 122–23 in 19th and early 20th century, 12–13 20th-century attempts to address, 13–14 tolerance of, 19 infrastructure European Investment Bank and, 195–96 fiscal policy and, 195 government employment and, 196–97 public–private partnerships, 142 returns on investment in, 195, 232 taxation and, 25 and 2017 tax bill, 183 inheritance tax, 20 inherited wealth, 43, 278n38 innovation intellectual property rights and, 74–75 market power and, 57–60, 63–64 net neutrality and, 148 regulation and, 134 slowing pace of, 118–19 and unemployment, 120, 121 innovation economy, 153–54 insecurity, social protection to address, 188–91 Instagram, 70, 73, 124 institutions fragility of, 230–36 in progressive agenda, 245 undermining of, 231–33 insurance companies, 125 Intel, 65 intellectual property rights (IPR) China and, 95–96 globalization and, 88–89, 99 and stifling of innovation, 74–75 and technological change, 122 in trade agreements, 80, 89 intelligence-assisting (IA) innovations, 119 interest rates, 83, 110, 215 intergenerational justice, 204–5 intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage, xxv–xxvi, 199–201, 219 intermediation, 105, 106 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 217 International Monetary Fund, xix internet, 58, 147 Internet Explorer, 58 inversions, 302n10 investment buybacks vs., 109 corporate tax cuts and, 269n44 and intergenerational justice, 204 long-term, 106 weakening by monopoly power, 63 “invisible hand,” 76 iPhone, 139 IPR, See intellectual property rights Ireland, 108 IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 217 Italy, 133 IT sector, 54; See also hi-tech companies Jackson, Andrew, 101, 241 Janus v.

In just forty years, while incomes for all but the very top in the US have largely stagnated, incomes in China have increased more than tenfold,15 and more than 740 million have moved out of poverty.16 Growing Inequality While America doesn’t excel in growth, it does so in inequality: the country has greater income inequality than any other advanced country; in terms of inequality of opportunity it also ranks well toward the bottom. It should go without saying that this is contrary to America’s identity as the land of opportunity.17 America’s workers are getting a smaller share of a pie that is growing more slowly—so much smaller that their incomes are stagnating.

Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.”28 A half century after we began the struggle to eliminate discrimination, women’s wages are still only 83 percent that of men’s, black men’s 73 percent that of white men’s, and Hispanic men’s 69 percent that of white men’s.29 There are many other dimensions of inequality in America, including those in health, wealth, and most importantly, opportunity. Inequalities in each of these are larger than those in income. Inequality in health No statistics summarize better the dire straits that so many Americans find themselves in than those on health. Americans have a lower life expectancy than do citizens of most other advanced countries 30—more than five years shorter than in Japan—and are dying younger—the Centers for Disease Control has reported decreases in life expectancy every year from 2014 on.31 This decrease comes despite advances in medicine that, in most of the rest of the world, have led to declining mortality rates32 and longer life expectancies.


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The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Although regulations can redistribute downward and sideways as well as upward, there has been a clear shift toward more upward redistribution in recent decades. At the same time that other economic, social, and political developments have been widening the gap between rich and poor, regulatory policy has amplified those underlying inegalitarian trends. Consider the situation in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when income inequality was falling. The post–New Deal economic order was rife with government-created rents, but they tended to redistribute downward or sideways. The minimum wage was relatively high and roughly three-quarters of the country’s blue-collar workers belonged to unions. Strict immigration controls propped up wages of less-skilled native-born workers.

Although licensing inflates compensation for low-skill and high-skill occupations alike, the effects are most pronounced in the high-income, high-status professions—think doctors, dentists, optometrists, and lawyers. As Kleiner notes, this means that the effect of licensing overall is to increase income inequality. “Since occupational licensing appears to increase earnings, on average, for persons in high income occupations relative to persons in low income ones,” Kleiner writes, “this state and local policy may serve to exacerbate income dispersion in the United States.”28 At this point, we want to leave behind this panoramic analysis of licensing as a whole.

Meanwhile, in the top ten cities the unweighted average of output per worker exceeded $91,000, more than double the average of just under $40,000 in the country’s ten least productive metro areas.8 These big differences in productivity translate into big differences in incomes. We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status, such that workers in high-skill occupations with high levels of educational attainment make more than workers with less education and lower skill levels. Much more than generally realized, geographic differences are also a major source of inequality.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

It significantly precedes these phenomena, and it exists even in economies that have been far less economically stressed. The hollowing out of democracy, the corruption of the political classes, the seeming irrelevance of elections, the inability to prevent recessions, increases in wealth and income inequality, and rapid technological change, all matter. But these stresses are channeled in different ways in different countries due to the coincidence of interests between politicians’ need to motivate a minority to win elections and the legitimate grievances of those most affected. Modern tribalism has its origins in a loss of motivating political identity.

We have identified a series of forces that coalesced to undermine our sense of voice. The financial crisis and its aftermath brought this and other underlying economic tensions to the fore. The effects of recession and a secular trend in inequality provide legitimate economic reasons for anger. The regional picture is nuanced. We have argued that income inequality may matter less in Europe because income itself is less unequally distributed, but also because critical components of consumption, healthcare and education, are either a lot cheaper or provided for free, even if their supply has been constricted in recent years. The problem in Europe seems to be an inbuilt tendency towards financial and cyclical instability that is causing a severe and structural problem of unemployment, and in many countries, relative wage stagnation.

The problem in Europe seems to be an inbuilt tendency towards financial and cyclical instability that is causing a severe and structural problem of unemployment, and in many countries, relative wage stagnation. In the US, the problem is reversed. Healthcare costs, in particular, are debilitatingly high by global standards, and income inequality is more extreme. We can argue about the long-term trend of real median incomes in America, but the reality is that the vast majority of gains have gone to the very top of the distribution, while a simple illness can bankrupt an American family. Demography, as we shall discuss, is exacerbating trends that have been caused by policies of deregulation, a shift in the balance of global power towards capital, and the well-known destabilizing effects of technology.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Using “head” in the sense of “brain”, AI will give more “head” to people with big hearts, but no extra heart to people with big heads. I think this twenty-first century skill twist will have unexpected implications for income inequality going forward. Presuming that the distribution of “heart” skills in the population is basically unrelated to the distribution of “head” skills, there is no reason that this new skill twist should lead to further rises in income inequality. It might even lower inequality in the long run. Reaching this felicitous future is the challenge. There is a very real danger that the shift from unsheltered service jobs to sheltered service jobs happens too fast.

As Catherine Spence’s example illustrates, such conditions shifted between fair-to-middling in good years to dire deprivation, or simple starvation, in downturn years. Help receivers were stigmatized with special clothes and humiliated with strict rules; husbands and wives were separated to prevent families from growing. Work was mandatory and rations were meagre. Income Inequality—The Ups and Downs Almost as disturbing as the misery itself was the fact that prosperity was spreading as fast as the poverty. The affluent and the afflicted lived close together in Victorian London. The slums were built up in the same years as London’s greatest attractions. Big Ben, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Marble Arch, and Trafalgar Square were all constructed in the decades bracketing Catherine Spence’s starvation.

It is the subject of much debate, as Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capitalism in the 21st Century points out. By its very nature, inequality involves almost every aspect of the economic system—ranging from education, technology, and globalization to urbanization, voting rights, and imperialism. Most of these are interrelated. Figure 2.1 Income Inequality in the Great Transformation, 1688–2009. SOURCE: Author’s elaboration of data provided privately by Max Roser (Our World in Data). His sources are Peter Lindert “Three Centuries of Inequality in Britain and America,” in Handbook of Income Distribution, ed. A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000); A.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

However, if you include all the taxes that mostly reduce incomes at the top and the transfers that add more at the bottom, the difference is reduced from 16.7 to just four times as much.20 Globally, of course, inequality is more conspicuous, but thanks to the fact that low- and middle-income countries have grown faster than rich countries during the era of trade liberalization and international supply chains, global income inequality has decreased for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. This is a monumental change, and it has been dizzyingly quick. Betwee n 2000 and 2018 the global Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality, rated from 1 to 100) decreased from seventy to sixty points, thus erasing a hundred-year build-up of global inequality in less than two decades.21 Nor have we seen a rapid increase in global inequality in assets.

Ireland, the Netherlands and Australia have about half the social spending as a share of GDP as Belgium, Italy and France do, but they are significantly happier. Government redistribution has not even succeeded in creating a more equal distribution of well-being. ‘Happiness is not greater in welfare states,’ Veenhoven now states, ‘I was simply wrong.’42 Another conclusion that surprised Veenhoven was that income inequality does not reduce a country’s well-being: ‘Income inequality is a by-product of capitalist societies and they have such a positive effect on well-being that outbalance the negative effect of being relatively poor.’ This is not a popular conclusion in all camps: ‘My colleagues are not amused. Inequality is big business here in the sociology department.

But the fact remains that international trade, as defined by a fair, rules-based system in the WTO, is much more important, not only to fight hunger, but also to foster development worldwide’, the old protectionist eventually explained.19 Since 1990, Latin America’s economies have begun to grow again, albeit with a legacy of commodity dependence and political instability that creates vulnerabilities and volatility. The region’s inequality has finally begun to diminish. In countries such as Brazil, Chile and Peru, income inequality has decreased by around 10 per cent. Extreme poverty has decreased by three-quarters.20 Latin America’s freest economies are Chile and Peru, which have also been the most successful ones in recent decades. In the mid-1970s, Chile was poorer than the Latin American average, but after market reforms – first under the brutal dictator Pinochet, but then under democratic left- and right-wing governments – the country grew so fast that it is now almost twice as rich as the average.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Representative systems of government. Roughly equivalent systems of law. An aging workforce and falling measures of fertility among native-born families. Median incomes around the $50,000 mark. Growing measures of wealth and income inequality. But in one crucial way, they are different. Europe has a safety net that eliminates poverty for nearly all of its native-born citizens, doing far more to blunt the effects of income inequality as well. To accomplish this, the governments of the European Union tax and spend an amount equivalent to half of their economic output each and every year, versus about a third here in the United States.

As a result of those legal changes and the rise of cash-rich and profit-obsessed Wall Street, any number of major industries—hospitals, agriculture, telecoms, trucking, insurance, airlines, banking, energy—saw significant consolidation. Even pizza delivery has become dominated by a handful of major players, with Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Little Caesars, and Papa John’s accounting for more than one-third of the national pie. It might not be obvious, but economists think this has contributed to income inequality and wage stagnation. With fewer companies to work for, workers have fewer potential employers to bid them up—especially given the prevalence of non-compete agreements even in industries as low-wage and menial as fast food. Plus, consolidated industries tend to be dominated by older companies that gobble up their younger and more dynamic competitors.

Over the past forty years, a small number of firms have gotten much richer, their earnings growing far faster than those at less profitable firms. That means people at a few firms are making lots of money, while most people at most companies are not. While top executives at public companies have become part of a superstar economy, with their earnings trajectory diverging wildly from just about everybody else’s, income inequality in fact stems mostly from differences among the pay scales at different companies, not the pay scales within companies. The ratio of pay between managers and janitors within a given firm has not really changed much over time. And yet, it is a lot less likely for companies to employ their janitors anymore.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

High taxation on capital income and real estate were important factors in preventing the income share of the rich from rising. Since the 1970s, however, the rich have reasserted themselves with a vengeance, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, and less in Germany and Japan. There has been a pronounced rise of income inequality in the US, facilitated by the laxer tax regime for the rich characteristic of the ascendancy of neoliberalism. It is striking that the reassertion of income inequality has taken place through earned income (wages and salaries) often taking the form of stock options and other financial returns. Financial profit appears to have been a major lever for the enrichment of the top layers of the income distribution, but without a return to the coupon-clipping rentiers of the first decades of the twentieth century.

The impact of new technologies on productivity also depends on the social conditions within which technologies are deployed, and these have been unfortunately shaped by the ascendancy of finance. 22 See, selectively, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 118:1, 2003, pp. 1–39; Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.’ American Economic Review 96:2, 2006, pp. 200–5; Thomas Piketty, ‘Income Inequality in France, 1901–1998.’ Journal of Political Economy 111:5, 2003, pp. 1004–42; Thomas Piketty, ‘Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Summary of Main Findings’, in Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries, ed.

Third, perhaps the most striking aspect of the recent period has been the financialization of the personal revenue of workers and households across social classes.73 This phenomenon refers both to increasing debt (for mortgages, general consumption, education, health) and to expanded holdings of financial assets (for pensions, insurance, money market funds). Household financialization is associated with rising income inequality but also with the retreat of public provision across a range of services, including housing, pensions, education, health, transport, and so on. In this context, the consumption of workers and others has become increasingly privatized and mediated by the financial system. Banks and other financial institutions have facilitated household consumption but also the channelling of household savings to financial markets, thus extracting financial profits.74 Note that relations between banks and households are qualitatively different from relations between banks and industrial capitalists.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The middle of America’s labour market are likely to become ever more squeezed.”3 Economist, June 17, 2006 “US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”4 MICHAEL CEMBALEST, Chief Investment Officer, JP Morgan Chase Eye on the Market, July 11, 2011 The skewed allocation of the gains from growth in recent decades in America has reasserted the traditional extractive pattern common prior to the Industrial Revolution as outlined by economists Doran Acemoglu and James Robinson. It caused American income disparities to widen noticeably. Some of the most extensive contemporary research on US income inequality is by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University. Chart 15.1 is reproduced from his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy. During the golden age, income inequality remained relatively stable, with incomes at the 80th percentile of the income spectrum about three times greater than at the 20th percentile. Chart 15.1. Source: Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy, fig. 2.2. This stable pattern began to deteriorate in the late-1970s due to inflation, a cyclical event.

Much of America’s middle and working classes didn’t even get to share in the illusion while it lasted—their incomes have grown little and the debt-fueled jobs growth proved as illusionary as George Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ and Fannie Mae’s balance sheet.”69 Rising Income Disparity By compressing wages and seeing that virtually all the gains from growth are being redistributed upward, Reaganomics has caused income disparities to widen to levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties. Some of the best scholarly research on American income inequality was performed by economist Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University. During the decades of the golden age, incomes at the top of the middle class were about three times greater than at the bottom of the middle class. It takes a dramatic shift over many years to change income disparities, but events during the Reagan era proved sufficiently powerful that Bartels has determined the ratio is now close to four times larger.70 A poster child for this new Gilded Age is former Walmart CEO Lee Scott, Jr. who in 2005 received 900 times the paycheck of his typical employee.

Here is German journalist Thomas Schulz, writing in Hamburg-based Der Spiegel in August 2010: “One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world’s richest nation…. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages, and dramatic increases in inequality…. Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s.”72 This reads as though Schulz is writing about some misfiring society in a far-off land. America today has by far the most severe income disparity of any rich democracy, nearly identical to the income disparity in Turkey and more than twice as skewed as other rich democracies like Australia.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The latter course may be the most politically acceptable. A scheme could be designed that would allow substantial income inequality to persist forever, that would merely be aimed at preventing a serious worsening of income inequality. It would after all be easier to accustom people to inequality indexation of taxes if such a system had no immediate impact, and no chance of changing the current social order. People would still be able to get rich, as they can today, but we would plan in advance not to let income inequality get much worse. If inequality never worsened, then the inequality indexation scheme would have no effect.

I have proposed that in the future nations should index their tax systems to inequality.19 Under inequality indexation (which I have also called inequality insurance) the government would not legislate xed income tax rates for each tax bracket, but would instead prescribe in advance a formula that would tie the tax rates to statistical measures of pretax inequality. If income inequality were to worsen, the tax system would become automatically more progressive. This is a “ nancial” solution to the problem of inequality in the sense that we impose the indexation scheme before we know that income inequality will worsen, and before people know who might e ectively be highly taxed by it. So the indexation scheme is dealing with a risk, the risk of rising inequality, before it happens, much as insurance contracts do.

An inequality indexation formula might be enacted as a political quid pro quo for some pro-growth policy that is controversial because of its possible consequences for income inequality. The formula would promote average economic well-being as well as deal with risks to that well-being. Leonard Burman at Syracuse University and I did a historical analysis of the possible e ects of inequality indexation, had it been imposed many years ago. 21 We found that if an inequality indexation scheme had been legislated in 1979 that would have frozen after-tax income inequality at the then-current level, the marginal tax rate on highincome individuals would have increased to an extraordinarily high level, over 75%.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Sharpe, 1997). 48 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America 2006/2007 (Ithaca, NY: ILR/Cornell University Press, 2007). 49 “The Maxwell Poll: Civic Engagement and Inequality,” April 2005, poll.campbellinstitute.org. 50 Gabriel Lenz, “The Policy-Related Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality,” Russell Sage Foundation, January 2003; Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons, What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 51 Elizabeth A. Freund and Irwin L. Morris, “The Lottery and Income Inequality in the States,” Social Science Quarterly 86, no. 5 (December 2005): 996–1012. 52 Quoted in Jill Quadagno, “Theories of the Welfare State,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (1987): 110. 53 Jong-sung Yoo and Sanjeev Khagram, “A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption,” American Sociological Review 70 (February 2005): 136–57.

and veterans widows and elderly women women and children women tramps and vagrants See also homeless shelters; tramps and transients Hoovervilles (shantytowns) Hope VI program (1990s) Hopkins, Harry and Depression-era workers and food riots and generosity of the poor Hickok’s reports to and indignity of applying for public charity and welfare recipients and motherhood How the Other Half Lives (Riis) Howard, Helen Howells, William Dean Hoyt, Catherine Hoyt, Joyce Hudson Institute Hull House Humane Society (Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors) hunger in America defining “food insecurity,” estimates of and the other essential human needs over the life course those dismissing claims of See also food (hunger and food relief) Hunter, Robert Hurricane Katrina Illinois “Personal Liberty Law,” immigrants colonial day laborers/migrant labor camps and exploitative working conditions official poverty rates post–Hurricane Katrina work In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (Katz) incarceration. See prisons/incarceration income inequality causes of and colonial-era distribution of wealth and corruption effects of and national myth of a free and equal society indentured servitude and children and orphan asylums and Thirteenth Amendment and white colonial immigrants See also slaves and slavery Independent Indian Health Service “indignation meetings,” individualism, American “industrial armies,” industrial workers inequality and democracy income inequality and national myth of a free and equal society infant mortality rates infanticide insurance and policies for black neighborhoods state-level children’s health insurance programs unemployment insurance benefits Irvine, Alexander Isham, Edward Ivins, Molly Jackson, Brenda Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jansson, Bruce Japanese Americans, forced relocation of Jensen, Laura Jim Crow Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Stretch Joint Congressional Committee Jones, LeAlan Jones, S.M.

But throughout American history it often has been, with predictable results. Among “advanced” nations, we have the highest or almost the highest rates of poverty (highest), childhood poverty (highest), elderly poverty (second highest), long-term poverty (highest), permanent poverty (highest), and income inequality (highest); we can boast of our rates of incarceration (highest), health-care costs (highest), CEO pay (highest), average hours worked (it’s more only in Australia and New Zealand), and infant mortality (among the highest—it’s lower in Taiwan, Belgium, Cuba, and the Czech Republic, among others).


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, high-wage workers are logging more hours on the job than their low-wage counterparts, which exacerbates the total earnings gap.10 More and more industries are linking pay to performance, which increases wage gaps between those who are more and less productive. In any case, the rise in income inequality is real. Should we care? Economists have traditionally argued that we should not, for two basic reasons. First, income inequality sends important signals in the economy. The growing wage gap between high school and college graduates, for example, will motivate many students to get college degrees. Similarly, the spectacular wealth earned by entrepreneurs provides an incentive to take the risks necessary for leaps in innovation, many of which have huge payoffs for society.

Envy may be part of the explanation. It is also true, Mr. Frank points out, that in complex social environments we seek ways to evaluate our performance. Relative wealth is one of them. There is a second, more pragmatic concern about rising income inequality. Might the gap between rich and poor—ethics aside—become large enough that it begins to inhibit economic growth? Is there a point at which income inequality stops motivating us to work harder and becomes counterproductive? This might happen for all kinds of reasons. The poor might become disenfranchised to the point that they reject important political and economic institutions, such as property rights or the rule of law.

The overall poverty rate disguises some figures that would otherwise leap off the page: Roughly one in five American children is poor as are nearly 35 percent of black children. Our only resounding success is poverty among the elderly, which has fallen from 30 percent in the 1960s to below 10 percent, largely as the result of Social Security. Income inequality. We care about the size of the pie; we also care about how it is sliced. Economists have a tool that collapses income inequality into a single number, the Gini index.* On this scale, a score of zero represents total equality—a state in which every worker earns exactly the same. At the other end, a score of 100 represents total inequality—a state in which all income is earned by one individual.


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

There is now a rich literature on recent trends in assortative mating: Greenwood, Jeremy, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos. Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality. Working paper no. 19829. National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2014; and Eika, Lasse, Magne Mogstad, and Basit Zafar. Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality. Working paper no. 20271. National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2014. Journalistic summaries are provided in Bennhold, Katrin. “Equality and the End of Marrying Up.” New York Times, June 12, 2012; Cowen, Tyler. “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality.” New York Times, December 24, 2015; Miller, Claire Cain, and Quoctrung Bui.

Modern America is increasingly characterized by marriages of individuals with similar financial power. In fact, one of the major drivers of increasing income inequality recently has been the revival of assortative mating. With more marriages happening between individuals of similar earning power and educational pedigree, economic power has become more concentrated. Some estimates suggest that if mating were to happen as randomly as it did in 1960, household income inequality would have changed little over the last fifty years. In other words, it’s not just Nicky Hilton marrying James Rothschild—it’s all of us marrying people in the same social and educational strata.

Similarly, executive compensation contracts that naively use stock performance to judge how managers are doing are deeply misguided. Separating skill from luck over shorter horizons (less than ten years) is nearly impossible in financial markets. Large chunks of compensation arrangements throughout the economy don’t reflect this reality—and have actually contributed handily to growing income inequality. Finance cautions against attributing outcomes to efforts and skills in a simplistic way. Luck is a dominant and underappreciated part of life and performance. The lesson of finance is one of humility—as it was for Johnson and Milton. The harshest aspects of the parable of the talents—and the worldview of many practitioners of finance—can usefully be tempered with humility, generosity toward others, and a keen appreciation for the force of luck in life.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

The worse you score in these areas, the worse your health and the shorter your life expectancy are likely to be. In his first book, The Impact of Inequality: how to make sick societies healthier, Wilkinson scrutinises the various factors involved, rapidly coming to what would be the central theme of his second book — that is, income inequality. A very striking conclusion is that in a country, or even a city, with high income inequality, the quality of social relationships is noticeably diminished: there is more aggression, less trust, more fear, and less participation in the life of the community. As a psychoanalyst, I was particularly interested in his quest for the factors that play a role at individual level.

If anything, it seems to be more of a problem within groups that are presumed to be equal (for example, civil servants and academics). This finding conflicts with the general assumption that income inequality only hurts the underclass — the losers — while those higher up the social ladder invariably benefit. That’s not the case: its negative effects are statistically visible in all sectors of the population, hence the subtitle of Wilkinson’s second work: why more equal societies almost always do better. In that book, Wilkinson and Pickett adopt a fairly simple approach. Using official statistics, they analyse the connection between income inequality and a host of other criteria. The conclusions are astounding, almost leaping off the page in table after table: the greater the level of inequality in a country or even region, the more mental disorders, teenage pregnancies, child mortality, domestic and street violence, crime, drug abuse, and medication.

And by that I don’t mean a causal connection, but a striking pattern; a rise in one being reflected in the other, or vice versa. This was exactly the approach used by Richard Wilkinson, a British social epidemiologist, in two pioneering studies (the second carried out with Kate Pickett). The gauge they used was eminently quantifiable: the extent of income inequality within individual countries. This is indeed a good yardstick, as neo-liberal policy is known to cause a spectacular rise in such inequality. Their findings were unequivocal: an increase of this kind has far-reaching consequences for nearly all health criteria. Its impact on mental health (and consequently also mental disorders) is by no means an isolated phenomenon.


pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Family Income Mobility, 1967–2004’, Katherine Bradbury and Jane Katz, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2009, http://bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2009/wp0907.htm. 32 ‘The United States: High and Rapidly Rising Inequality’, Lane Kenworthy and Timothy Smeeding, July 2014, https://lanekenworthy.files.wordpress.com/2014/ 07/2014highandrapidlyrisinginequality.pdf. 33 ‘Income Inequality’, Marc Priester and Aaron Mendelson, Inequality.org, http://inequality.org/income-inequality/#sthash.fxNqn4JD.dpuf. 34 ‘Why Elites Fail’, Christopher Hayes, The Nation, 6 June 2012. 35 ‘Decline in professional jobs fuels increase in downward mobility’, Patrick Butler, The Guardian, 6 November 2014. 36 ‘A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries’, oecd.org, 2010, http://www.oecd.org/tax/public-finance/chapter%205%20gfg%202010.pdf.

In other words, social mobility has regressed just like the doom-mongers claim. The authors of the report attributed this fall to ‘the increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment’. They also noted that the decline in social mobility had occurred at a time of increasing income inequality. They added that there was greater intergenerational mobility between income groups in more egalitarian societies like Canada and the Nordic countries. In countries with high levels of inequality, such as Britain and the United States, intergenerational mobility was ‘at the lower end of international comparisons’.

Educational selection at age eleven is ultimately liable to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 75 ‘Long live grammars’, Nick Cohen, The Guardian, 31 July 2005. 76 ‘One in four families move house to secure school place – survey’, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 2 September 2015. 77 ‘Fee-paying schools: bargain hunting’, The Good Schools Guide, https://www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk/help-and-advice/choosing-a-school/fee-paying-schools-bargain-hunting. 78 ‘State of the nation 2013’, op. cit. 79 ‘UK schools “most socially segregated”’, Sean Coughlan, bbc.co.uk, 11 September 2012. 80 ‘Unborn babies join queue for school places’, Javier Espinoza, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2016. 81 Ibid. 82 Social Class in the 21st Century, Professor Mike Savage, op. cit. 83 ‘Cameron steps up grammars attack’, bbc.co.uk, 22 May 2007. 84 ‘New Kent grammar school in Sevenoaks to be approved by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan following Weald of Kent Proposal’, Kent Online, 15 October 2015. 85 ‘“Local schools” drive inequality’, Sean Coughlan, bbc.co.uk, 6 October 2014. 86 ‘Grammar schools do not boost social mobility, report finds’, Sarah Cassidy, The Independent, 16 October 2015. 87 ‘Grammar schools create wider pay gap, research finds’, Richard Adams, The Guardian, 29 May 2014. 88 ‘Grammar schools – Sutton Trust fact sheet’, http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/GRAMMAR-SCHOOLS-FACT-SHEET.pdf. 89 ‘5 reasons why a return to grammar schools is a bad idea’, Policy Exchange, 5 December 2014. 90 ‘Entry to grammar schools in England for disadvantaged children’, Jonathan Cribb, Luke Sibieta and Anna Vignoles, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 8 November 2013. 91 ‘Grammar schools – do they really help social mobility?’, Helen Barnard, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 19 October 2015. 92 ‘Grammar school myths’, Chris Cook, Financial Times, 28 January 2013. 93 Equality, R. H. Tawney, op. cit. 94 The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams, Chatto & Windus, 1st edition (1961). Part VII INCOME INEQUALITY HAS increased rapidly in Britain since the late 1970s. The unstoppable advance of the so-called 1 per cent has been compounded in the public mind by austerity. Why, after all, should ordinary people suffer when a small minority appear to be doing so well? Originating in a 2006 documentary about the growing gap between a wealthy American elite and the rest of society, the term ‘1 per cent’ has spawned an extensive literature on both sides of the Atlantic.


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The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen. The slowdown in ideas production mirrors the well-known rise in income inequality. Labor and capital are fairly plentiful in today’s global economy, and so their returns have been somewhat stagnant. Valuable new ideas have become quite scarce, and so the small number of people who hold the rights to new ideas—whether it be the useful Facebook or the more dubious forms of mortgage-backed securities—earned higher relative returns than in earlier periods. The “rise in income inequality” and the “slowdown in ideas production” are two ways of describing the same phenomenon, namely that current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods.

The American left has pointed out and indeed stressed measures of stagnant median income, but it usually blames politics, insufficient redistribution, or poor educational opportunities rather than considering the idea of a technological plateau. The American right is more likely to deny the relevance of the slow-growth numbers, but at this point, the combination of slow median income growth, rising income inequality, and a massive financial crisis—the latter accompanied by overoptimism about the financial future—is too strong and too persistent to treat as a mere artifact of statistical mismeasurement. One common criticism of the numbers is that median household income is falling mainly because households are getting smaller.

The “rise in income inequality” and the “slowdown in ideas production” are two ways of describing the same phenomenon, namely that current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and, as we will see in chapter five, the financial crisis. You can argue about the numbers, but again, just look around. I’m forty-eight years old, and the basic material accoutrements of my life (again, the internet aside) haven’t changed much since I was a kid.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Indeed, America still draws immigrants from all over the globe who want to enjoy the benefits of American capitalism and freedom; many come to America to escape socialist hellholes (which supposedly champion “equality”), whether they be in Cuba, Africa, China, or elsewhere. The anticapitalists rail against income inequality, and there will always be income inequality in a vibrant, capitalist economy. But the same is true of a socialist economy, where wages are often determined by political rather than economic considerations. Indeed, any type of economy will produce income inequality. More important, when listening to the critics of capitalism, one must put American income inequality into proper perspective, as Cox and Alm do so effectively: America isn’t an egalitarian society. It wasn’t designed to be.

As these studies clearly convey, capitalism is the best-known source of upward economic mobility. And, despite the oft-repeated claims of anticapitalists, capitalism actually reduces income inequalities within a nation as well. While there will always be inequalities of incomes—this is only natural, for every human being has different aptitudes, priorities, and interests—the economic opportunity in a capitalist economy enables those at the bottom of the economic ladder to ascend to the middle and the top. Over time, income inequalities diminish as more and more people take advantage of job opportunities, work hard, learn skills, educate themselves, save their money, get married and raise families, and start up their own businesses.

Nevertheless, the anticapitalist mentality is stuck on a mindless egalitarianism that insists that “equality” must be pursued even though no two people were ever equal in terms of talent, productivity, interests, and so forth. (Making everyone equal under the law is an entirely different matter.) The quixotic pursuit of economic equality is essentially a revolt against human nature. Statistics on “income inequality” can be very misleading, providing a totally inaccurate picture of American capitalism. For example, critics of capitalism are fond of pointing to U.S. Census Bureau data that seem to indicate that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” From 1967 to 1997, for example, census data show that the share of total national income going to the top 20 percent of income earners in America increased from 43.2 percent to 49.4 percent, whereas the share going to the bottom 20 percent fell from 4.4 percent to 3.6 percent in that period.10 But such statistics are deceiving because they are a snapshot at a single point in time and say nothing about how actual individuals progress over time.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The main exception to that claim is workers at the very top, which of course does include CEOs, whose pay has risen at high rates over at least parts of the last few decades. But changing pay scales within firms are not major drivers of income inequality.18 But wait, how can that be? Doesn’t it contradict so many of the articles published on income inequality? In fact, the main driver of income inequality has been the blossoming of superstar firms that sell an innovative product and have global reach, as well as productivity shifts that benefit those companies especially. These firms include Google, Facebook, Boeing, and Verizon, as I’ll discuss in chapter 5.

One more piece of evidence: the stock market reacts positively when companies announce compensation plans tying CEO pay to stock prices or other long-term indicators of the company’s prosperity, a sign that those practices build up corporate value more broadly and not just for the CEO.17 Yet from the press you receive a very different impression of what is going on, one that focuses much more on issues of economic inequality. In fact, high CEO pay has less to do with income inequality than it might seem at first glance. Note that CEOs have generated a lot of their high pay by creating new superstar firms or by significantly upgrading old firms into corporate superstars, as happened with Apple, Facebook, and many other “unicorn” examples. These are the cases where it is easiest to see that very high senior management returns stem from value creation, at least on average if not in every individual case.

These firms include Google, Facebook, Boeing, and Verizon, as I’ll discuss in chapter 5. Typically, everyone in these companies—from senior managers to personal assistants and janitors—is paid more than workers at their older, more traditional counterparts.19 That is one of the truths about American business that you are least likely to read about in a major media outlet: income inequality is mostly about the differences between the superstar companies and the others. But that reality makes for a less juicy narrative than stories of CEOs taking money from their workers. And to tie this back to CEO pay, the overall value of superstar firms is yet another reason a first-rate CEO can be so very, very valuable.


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This defensive orientation gives the profession an unusual position within the finance industry, which is otherwise associated with aggressive profit seeking.28 A century ago wealth managers’ clients were known collectively as “the leisure class,” a group that probably numbered in the low four figures, concentrated in North America and Europe.29 These days the clients are far more diverse, since “the world is becoming more wealthy, and much of this wealth is global rather than in traditionally wealthy countries.”30 Thus the contemporary client base includes the world’s 167,669 “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” defined as those with at least $30 million in investable assets.31 Unlike their predecessors, these elites are widely distributed around the globe, and—thanks in part to the expert interventions of wealth managers—they constitute “the hegemonic fraction of capital worldwide.”32 As world wealth has grown to record levels in recent years—to an estimated $241 trillion—inequality has also grown, with 0.7 percent of the global population owning 41 percent of the assets.33 This is coupled with lowered wealth mobility, meaning that to an increasing extent, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, generation after generation.34 This is important because, despite recent attention to income inequality, the distribution of wealth is actually far more unequal, and far more consequential.35 While income fluctuates, wealth stabilizes, affecting access to opportunities in virtually every domain, from education to the labor market, marriage, property ownership, and political power.36 Through facilitating tax avoidance—including the intergenerational transfer of family fortunes free of inheritance tax—wealth managers have contributed to this pattern of increasing global inequality.

Chapter 5 takes up the subject of inequality in detail, examining the economic and political impact of wealth managers’ work, not just for their clients but for larger patterns of socioeconomic organization as well. It offers an analysis of wealth inequality and its significance in comparison to the better-known form of stratification, income inequality. The chapter also provides a model to illustrate the three processes by which wealth managers contribute to inequality, through techniques that can turn one individual’s surplus income into a “perpetual-motion machine” of wealth reproduction. A final theme of this chapter will be practitioners’ reflections on their role in deepening economic inequality globally, and how they respond to the reputational challenges this poses to the profession.

These observations are supported by scholarly research indicating a “psychological impediment in Chinese culture against relinquishing ownership over one’s property to another person.”46 More generally, research in social psychology suggests that trust in professionals and organizations is more likely to arise among individuals in countries where income inequality and corruption are low, and where the rule of law provides strong protections for property rights and contracts.47 This is not the case for many wealthy people from developing countries, creating a significant additional challenge for wealth managers. Translating trust Culture affects the kinds of signals that indicate trustworthiness, as well as how those signals are interpreted.48 As a result, trust is more likely to develop among those who share the same norms and assumptions about “the types of actions that indicate whether trust is warranted.”49 This is a particularly important challenge for wealth managers, because the clients’ lack of trust in institutions places the whole weight of the professional relationship on individual practitioners.


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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Perhaps even more important has been the fact that an increasing share of what makes a product valuable is accounted for by the ideas embedded in it. Ideas don’t weigh anything so are costless to ship. Cook and I argued that these changes help explain both the growing income differences between ostensibly similar individuals and the surge in income inequality that began in the late 1960s. In domain after domain, we wrote, technology has been enabling the most gifted performers to extend their reach. Local accountants were displaced in two waves—first by franchised services like H&R Block and more recently by tax software for the masses. Brick-and-mortar shops have been going out of business at a rapid clip, replaced by Amazon and other online retailers.

I came up with a simple measure I call the “toil index” (see figure 7.1), which tracks the monthly number of hours the median earner must work to rent a house in the median school district. When incomes were growing at the same rate for everyone during the early post-WWII decades, the index was almost completely stable. But income inequality began rising sharply after 1970, and since then the toil index has been rising in tandem. For the past ten years, it’s been approximately one hundred hours a month, up from only forty-two hours in 1970. FIGURE 7.1. The toil index. The median real hourly wage for men in the United States is actually lower now than in the 1980s.

The median real hourly wage for men in the United States is actually lower now than in the 1980s. If middle-income families must now spend more than before to achieve basic goals, how do they manage? Census data reveal clear symptoms of increasing financial distress among these families. Of the one hundred largest US counties, those where income inequality grew most rapidly were also those that experienced the largest increases in three important symptoms of financial distress: divorce rates, long commutes, and bankruptcy filings.3 In developed countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, higher inequality is associated with longer work hours, both across countries and over time.4 Standard economic models predict none of these relationships.


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Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

“Mnuchin ‘Not At All’ Worried About Automation Displacing Jobs.” U.S. News, March 24, 2017. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-03-24/steven-mnuchin-not-at-all-worried-about-automation-displacing-jobs. Sommeiller, Estelle, Mark Price, and Ellis Wazeter. “Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County.” Economic Policy Institute, June 16, 2016. http://www.epi.org/publication/income-inequality-in-the-us/. Spross, Jeff. “You’re Hired!” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas no. 44 (Spring 2017). http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/youre-hired/. Stern, Andy. Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream.

To understand how our new economy, defined by technological advances and globalization, affects the bottom lines of working people, two researchers, Rachel Schneider and James Morduch, set out to monitor the day-to-day financial behavior of 235 low- and middle-income families over the course of a year. They tracked all money in, all money out, what they spent it on, and why. They combined that data set with anonymized statements from Chase bank accounts to create an even larger sample. The top-line conclusion from their work: while income inequality gets a lot of attention, financial instability and the challenges that come with weathering the ups and downs of unpredictable income are just as problematic, if not more so. I worked with a woman on the Obama campaign who lived that instability every year. A Chicago local, she didn’t have a fancy educational pedigree or deep campaign experience, but for all that her resume lacked, she had a dedication and passion that matched or exceeded everyone else’s to put her senator in the White House.

When asked, Alaskans say that the dividend does not cause them or their neighbors to work any less. Thanks in part to the dividend, Alaska has one of the lowest poverty rates in the nation, even though a meaningful portion of the state’s population lives in geographically isolated areas accessible only by plane. In a ranking of states by their relative levels of income inequality, Alaska comes in dead last, 50 out of 50. It’s the most equal state in the nation. Small amounts of regular cash have an outsized power because they mitigate the ups and downs of income cycles. They reduce the feeling of living on the brink, which research unsurprisingly shows causes immense amounts of stress and poor decision-making.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

Over 700 million people have escaped from poverty in China alone.18 Broadly speaking, globalization has decreased income inequality between nations— especially between newly industrializing economies and Western industrial powers.19 Despite these felicitous developments, globalization has also generated a variety of predictably negative consequences that threaten global stability, and that of Eurasia, from a long-term perspective. Most importantly, globalization seems to have deepened income inequality within nations—with the fruits of global interdependence flowing disproportionately to urban professionals, corporate executives, and in many cases government officials—particularly in the financial sector.

That said, SinoIndian relations seem less likely to be plagued by serious conflict than the relations between China and Japan. Both of the emerging giants are growing rapidly and have broadly complementary economies—manufacturing versus services.66 Populism and the Western Industrial World Income inequality within the major nations of the world is deepening, even as income inequality between nations is generally falling, as noted earlier. Such domestic inequality is felt more intensely in the West than in Asia, because economic growth is lower in the West and competition between immigrants and the native born is more intense. The tension is especially intense in Eu- Shadows and Critical Uncertainties 201 rope, both because growth is generally lower there than in North America and also because immigration is more extensive.

More than 78 million migrants, for example, were resident in Europe during 2017—by far the largest number inhabiting any region of the world, relative to local population.67 The periphery of Europe also houses a large number of refugees, due to continuing turbulence in the Middle East. These include over three million in Turkey, with the largest refugee population in the world,68 and many of them are trying to enter the EU through the Balkan peninsula.69 Stagnant growth, income inequality, rampant unemployment, and surging immigration have together triggered a surge of local populism in many European nations that does introduce uncertainty into their otherwise deepening relations with Asia. Collectively, populist parties scored an average of 16.5 percent of the vote in national elections of sixteen European countries over the 2010 –2015 period, and actually gained the largest share of parliamentary seats in six (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland).70 Populism has been particularly strong in Eastern Europe, strengthening the East-West divide within the region that has, as noted in Chapter 8, aided the rise of Chinese influence in the East.71 Recent European populism has come in two varieties, both catalyzed by income inequality, unemployment, and surging immigration, particularly from the Middle East and Africa.72 On the left, parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain have stressed an antiausterity theme but have embarrassingly been forced by financial need to accept many of the painful spending cuts and neoliberal structural reforms that they had previously pledged domestically to prevent.


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Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Household income for a couple consisting of a man with education level lM and a woman with education level lW earns the following estimated household income:12 Income(M, lM) + Income(W, lW) Cause of inequality: Increases in the number of educated women, increased pay for workers with higher levels of education, and assortative mating (the tendency for people to marry others of the same income level) result in an increase in household-level income inequality. Had marriages been random rather than assortative, income inequality would be much less. One study finds that inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, a common measure of inequality, would have decreased by 25%.13 Our next model analyzes movements between income categories using a Markov model. It categorizes people (or households) by income level: high, upper middle, lower middle, and low.

To confront the complexity of these challenges, to create a world of broader educational achievement, will require lattices of models. By learning the models in this book, you can begin to build your own lattice. The models originate from a broad spectrum of disciplines, addressing phenomena as varied as the causes of income inequality, the distribution of power, the spread of diseases and fads, the conditions that precede social uprisings, the evolution of cooperation, the emergence of order in cities, and the structure of the internet. The models vary in their assumptions and their structure. Some describe small numbers of rational, self-interested actors.

This structure also means that we can pull the book from our bookshelves or open it in our browsers and find self-contained analyses of linear models, prediction models, network models, contagion models, and models of long-tailed distributions, learning, spatial competition, consumer preferences, path dependence, innovation, and economic growth. Interspersed throughout the chapters are applications of many-model thinking to a variety of problems and issues. The book concludes with two deeper dives into the opioid epidemic and income inequality. 2. Why Model? Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. —Jean Piaget In this chapter, we define types of models. Models are often described as simplifications of the world. They can be, but models can also take the form of analogies or be fictional worlds mined for ideas and insights.


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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Yet to suggest that growing income inequality was entirely due to capital would be misleading. Economists tend to rely on the Gini coefficient to measure levels of inequality across time and space. One of its virtues is that it is straightforward to interpret. If every citizen of a country had the same income, the Gini coefficient would be 0. If one person captured all the income, the income Gini coefficient would be 1. As Lindert and Williamson show, the Gini coefficient for property income was naturally higher, as property ownership is typically more concentrated, but labor income inequality rose even more rapidly: between 1774 and 1870 the property Gini grew from 0.703 to 0.808, while the earnings Gini increased from 0.370 in 1774 to 0.454 in 1860.62 A large part of this can be explained by the displacement of the blue-collar artisan, which led to the hollowing out of middle-income jobs and, thus, greater earnings inequality.63 Moreover, as Kuznets conjectured, inequality rose as a result of American workers shifting from low-income agricultural jobs to high-income manufacturing jobs in the city.

Williamson, 2016, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 194. 54. R. M. Solow, 1956, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1): 65–94; S. Kuznets, 1955, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review 45 (1): 1–28; Kaldor, 1957, “A Model of Economic Growth.” 55. Kuznets, 1955, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality.” 56. Lindert and Williamson, 2016, Unequal Gains. 57. A. de Tocqueville, 1840, Democracy in America, trans. H. Reeve (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2:646. 58. Quoted in Lindert and Williamson, 2016, Unequal Gains, 117. 59.

This mechanization, as we shall see, set the wheels in motion for what economic historians have called the Great Divergence—the period after the Industrial Revolution, when the West grew much wealthier than the rest of the world. But in the early days of industrialization, a great divergence happened within Britain, too: wages stagnated, profits surged, and income inequality skyrocketed. 4 THE FACTORY ARRIVES The annus mirabilis of 1769, as Donald Cardwell has called it, is often seen as the symbolic beginning of the Industrial Revolution.1 As noted, it was the year when Richard Arkwright and James Watt patented their defining inventions. But the origins of the Industrial Revolution can actually be traced much farther back and largely occurred simultaneously with the evolution of the factory system.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

Morrisson, Christian (2000) “Historical Evolution of Income Distribution in Western Europe,” in Anthony B. Atkinson and François Bourguignon (eds.). Handbook of Income Distribution; Amsterdam: North-Holland. Morrisson, Christian, and Wayne Snyder (2000) “The Income Inequality of France in Historical Perspective,” European Review of Economic History, 4, 59–84. Muller, Edwin N. (1988) “Democracy, Economic Development, and Income Inequality,” American Sociological Review, 53, 50–68. Muller, Edwin N. (1995) “Economic Determinants of Democracy,” American Sociological Review, 60, 966–982. Bibliography 393 Muller, Edwin N., and Mitchell A. Seligson (1987) “Inequality and Insurrections,” American Political Science Review, 81, 425–51.

Democracy and Tax Revenue 1990s. found (p. 122) “dictatorships . . . are much more vulnerable when the functional distribution of income is more unequal.” They also found that (p. 122) “democracies are less stable in societies that are more unequal to begin with, in societies in which household income inequality increases [when inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient or the ratio of top to bottom income shares], and in societies in which labor receives a lower share of value added in manufacturing.” Using a similar methodological approach, Boix (2003) reports results in which higher inequality reduces the propensity of a society to democratize.

The limited data that exist on nineteenth-century inequality are consistent with the notion that inequality was rising until democratization (and then it started declining because of the redistribution following democratization). Much of this literature focuses to trying to discover whether there was a “Kuznets curve” historically, following Kuznets’ (1955) conjecture that inequality first rises and then falls with economic development. Data on income inequality for the nineteenth century are not extremely reliable. Figure 3.21 plots three different estimates of the historical evolution of the Gini coefficient in Britain. There is consensus among economic historians that income 70 What Do We Know about Democracy? inequality in Britain fell sharply after the 1870s.


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The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

In 2015, there is more income inequality in the United States than in any other “developed” democratic country. The financial implications of this inequality are enormous for all of us. How has this happened? A disturbing part of the answer is that our tolerance for inequality has risen. Timothy Noah writes that as recently as the mid-twentieth century, “mainstream American opinion . . . considered the prospect of growing income inequality to be unacceptably antidemocratic.” It wasn’t only radicals outside the mainstream of American culture who supported the idea of setting limits on income inequality; it was widely considered a reasonable viewpoint.

Noah reports that President Franklin Roosevelt “wanted to raise the marginal tax on people making more than today’s equivalent (after inflation) of about $345,000 to 100 percent [and to] bookend the minimum wage he’d created a dec­ade earlier with a new maximum wage.” (The marginal tax is the amount someone pays on the next dollar of income. The marginal tax rate rises as income rises.) Today these policy ideas seem extreme. Declining wages compound income inequality. Controlling for inflation, wages have been declining since 1972. That’s a forty-five-year downtrend. Not everyone has had to make do with less. Productivity has actually risen during this same forty-five-year period. Historically, when productivity goes up (our economy becomes more efficient, the cost of inputs declines), we all share in the increased wealth that’s generated.

Raphael, “The American Middle Class Is Shrinking,” Public Radio International, December 13, 2015. http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-13/american-middle-class-shrinking “screwed”: Kevin Drum, “Chart of the Day: Even the Rich Think the Middle Class Is Getting Screwed,” Mother Jones, March 15, 2015. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/03/chart-day-even-rich-think-middle-class-getting-screwed “doing worse than you”: Haley Sweetland Edwards, “The Middle Class Is Doing Worse Than You Think,” Time, April 8, 2015. http://time.com/3814048/income-inequality-middle-class/ “turning proletarian”: Joel Kotkin, “The US Middle Class Is Turning Proletarian,” Forbes, February 16, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2014/02/16/the-u-s-middle-class-is-turning-proletarian/#2715e4857a0b284313c82f29 “the precariat, an emerging class”: Guy Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 1.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In 2000, 33 percent of Americans described themselves as “working class,” according to Gallup. By 2015 that number had risen to 48 percent. “Far from dying out, the working class now accounts for almost half of America by people’s self-perception,” wrote one author. “In some respects these measures are more revealing than statistics on median income, or income inequality. They express a feeling about being shut out from the benefits of growth. It is a very un-American state of mind.”10 * * * — Inequality is not always bad. Progress depends on it since society never moves in lockstep. If you accept that, the only alternative to inequality is stagnation.

Inequality is rising within most countries, especially high-income ones, but on a global level, inequality between some nations is actually shrinking.17 At the very least, the gap between incomes in parts of Asia, on the one hand, and Western Europe, the US, and Australasia on the other, has narrowed, particularly since 2000. Much of that has occurred because of rapid industrialization in Asia, especially in China, and more recently, India. As growth in those two countries—which together account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s population—gathers steam, the income inequalities opened up by the West after the Industrial Revolution are gradually being narrowed. Where once there was a great divergence of standards of living in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, now there is a great convergence. So the income benefit gained thanks to the accident of birth is beginning to fall.18 For humanists who support equality of opportunity regardless of nationality this is a wonderful thing.

(It is also relatively hard to move up in the world in the UK and Italy.)22 Generally, the more unequal a society, the harder it is to move, as the wealthy entrench their advantages through education, political lobbying, inheritance, connections, and so on. The so-called Great Gatsby curve shows that, as inequality increases, social mobility decreases.23 If you’re in the wrong lane of the Lincoln Tunnel, the OECD report shows, you’re likely to get stuck. “Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve,” it says. Inequality has increased for three main reasons, according to the OECD. Wages have risen for those people who were already well paid, especially bankers, professionals, and corporate executives; there are fewer jobs for less well-educated people, who have been dropping out of the jobs market in large numbers; and there are more single-parent families.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the US Since 1913,” NBER Working Paper No. 20615, October 2014. 3. Estelle Sommiller and Mark Price, “The Increasingly Unequal Income States of America,” Economic Policy Institute, January 26, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/income-inequality-by-state-1917-to-2012/. 4. “17 Things We Learned About Income Inequality in 2014,” Atlantic, December 23, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/17-things-we-learned-about-income-inequality-in-2014/383917/. 5. Federal Reserve Board of Governors, “Changes in US Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 100, no. 4 (September 2014), http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2014/pdf/scf14.pdf. 6.

Those from Africa and the Middle East did not need to be reminded of the disruptive and violent role of nonstate actors—be it in Iraq, Syria, or Nigeria, just to name a few—and of a West too weak to inform, influence, and coordinate a proper response, let alone impose more peaceful outcomes. And the surge in refugee migration was not that far away. And no one in the room needed to be reminded of the shocking growth of income inequality within nations—one that was contributing to a gradual hollowing out of the middle class in the context of an ever-growing contrast between spreading poverty and unthinkable wealth. Those sitting in that Paris room knew very well that there was a lot riding on central banks’ crucial, unique, and experimental policy-making role, and not just for the institutions but, more broadly, for both current and future generations.

This brings us naturally to the third issue, or the extent to which individual countries have experienced a rise in what I call the inequality trifecta—inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. Worsening inequality is not new. It has been a feature of a number of countries for decades, including the United States. But it has gotten a lot worse. Indeed, according to data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “income inequality…is at the highest for the past half century” with “the average income of the richest 10% of the population [now] about nine times that of the poorest 10% across the OECD, up from seven times 25 years ago.”1 This already considerable gap widens substantially if the richest group is redefined to be the top 5 percent and 3 percent, and it flies off the page if it’s the top 1 percent or 0.1 percent.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, those without college degrees are more likely to abuse drugs and frequently use federal disability insurance as their only economic lifeline.4 We should concern ourselves with these inequalities in outcomes not merely for the benefit of those on the bottom, but because of the relationship between this inequality and the perpetuation of the system that creates it—a dynamic that should make progressives very uncomfortable. It’s a bitter irony of contemporary American life: it is in our most progressive spaces that we see the most social inequality. As the urban sociologist Richard Florida has demonstrated, those cities that are the most liberal—New York, San Francisco, Austin—also are home to the greatest income inequality and wealth segregation.5 It’s in these places where the soaring egalitarian ideals of the contemporary left clash with the reality of who is winning the great twenty-first-century meritocratic race. In Park Slope and Uptown and Echo Park, the journalists and artists and academics who help define what it means to be progressive live lives of great privilege, thanks to the very meritocratic system that creates inequality.

But his book shows that “the real class divide … is between the upper-middle class and everyone else.”7 This tendency of the upper middle class to replicate itself has likely been accelerating because of the depressing phenomenon of assortative mating. Assortative mating refers to the increasing tendency for people to marry and have children with partners who share the same educational and economic strata. The recent trends are clear: assortative mating by education level is growing, and this phenomenon is significantly increasing income inequality.8 (Worth mentioning in the context of this book is that there is some evidence of increasing genetic assortative mating—that is, people of similar genotypes do tend to partner together—but the effect is modest.)9 Given that the college educated are more likely to be progressive than the population writ large, this is another example of people with liberal beliefs contributing to an unequal society through their behavior.

If the poverty rates for each educational bin remained the same, then the upward redistribution of adults from the lower bins to the higher bins would have led to lower overall poverty. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the poverty rate for each educational bin went up over this time and overall poverty didn’t decline at all. In fact it went up.24 And of course in the same period income inequality famously grew at a breakneck pace. The rates of college completion continue to trend steadily upward; there are more and more people per capita with professional and doctoral degrees; and a graph of the number of master’s degrees in our country over the past several decades looks like a skyrocketing arrow.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

Trickle-down theory’s emphasis on incentives has led many to predict that greater income inequality should be positively correlated with economic growth rates. The idea here is that greater income disparities should cause people to feel greater pressure to catch up with those ahead of them. As discussed in chapter 4, inequality does indeed affect spending patterns. Yet when researchers examine the data within individual countries over time, they find a negative correlation between growth rates and inequality. During the three decades immediately following World War II, for example, income inequality was low by historical standards, yet growth rates in most industrial countries were extremely high.

61 wedding in 2009 was $28,082.20 The corresponding figure in 1980 (also in 2009 dollars) was $11,213.21 The collective effect of all this extra spending has been largely just to raise the bar that defines special occasions. The events end up costing substantially more than they used to, but no one walks away feeling any more special than before. Rising Income Inequality and Expenditure Cascades The libertarian’s faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand rests on the assumption that consumer spending is essentially independent of context. Yet context is often decisive, and when it is, the incentives that drive individual spending often produce results that are profoundly wasteful.

I note in passing that this exercise is in at least one important respect very different from the famous thought experiment proposed by the moral philosopher John Rawls.1 Rawls asked readers to imagine themselves behind a veil of ignorance that shielded them from knowing what their own talents and temperaments were. He argued that distribution rules chosen from behind such a veil would be presumptively fair, since people wouldn’t know which particular rules would work to their advantage. Rawls argued that rules chosen under these circumstances would permit an increase in income inequality only if it served to raise the income of society’s poorest member. Although others have argued that most people behind a veil of ignorance 202 CHAPTER TWELVE would permit more inequality than that, there is broad agreement that the Rawlsian thought experiment provides a strong rationale for taking aggressive steps to limit inequality.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

The top 10 percent alone accounts for 36 percent, and the top 5 percent alone accounts for 25.9 percent of the total (Congressional Budget Office 2012, 5). Moreover, income has great staying power over time. That is, the same households in the top income group now are very likely to have been in the top income group in previous years (Mishel et al. 2012, 144). Another indication of income inequality is revealed by a comparison of pay for the chief executive officers of major corporations with that of rank-and-file employees. CEO pay as a ratio of average worker pay increased from 18.3 to 1 in 1965 to 231 to 1 in 2011 (Mishel and Sabadish 2012), with much of the compensation package for CEOs coming in the form of stock options.

Because of the amount of ownership highly concentrated in this group, the top 1 percent of wealth holders are often referred to as “the ownership class” and are used as a proxy threshold for inclusion in the American “upper class.” In short, the degree of economic inequality in the United States is substantial by any measure. In fact, the United States now has greater income inequality and higher rates of poverty than other industrial countries (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Grusky and Krichell-Katz 2012; Mishel et al. 2012; Kerbo 2006; Smeeding, Ericson, and Jantti 2011; Salverda, Nolan, and Smeeding 2009; Sieber 2005). Moreover, the extent of this inequality is increasing.

As financier Warren Buffett noted in response to those who question the fairness of the system as “class warfare,” “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning” (New York Times 2006). Summary The United States has high levels of both income inequality and wealth inequality. In terms of the distribution of income and wealth, America is clearly not a middle-class society. Income and especially wealth are not evenly distributed, with a relatively small number of well-off families at one end and a small number of poor families much worse off at the other.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

a mere 18 percent of Americans “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2017,” Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/​2017/​05/​03/​public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/. Finland has a low level of economic inequality “Income Inequality,” OECD Data, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, last modified 2015, https://data.oecd.org/​inequality/​income-inequality.htm. “People will tell you brutally what is wrong” Vesterbacka was speaking at the annual Mobile Summit sponsored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Linda Tucci, “Mobile Business Advice from Peter Vesterbacka of Angry Birds,” https://searchcio.techtarget.com/​opinion/​Mobile-business-advice-from-Peter-Vesterbacka-of-Angry-Birds.

This makes perfect sense—things that are or seem scarce in relation to their demand, like gold and truffles and dermatologists, are pricey. Things that are or seem less scarce in relation to their demand, like wood pulp and saltwater and writers, are far less so. So why, throughout the first nine decades of the twentieth century, did the rise in average educational attainment coincide with a dramatic reduction in income inequality? The quick answer is that while the rich often got richer, so did many other people. This was due in part to the rise of labor unions that fought hard to ensure that even low-skilled workers earned a living wage. But it was also due to the more subtle and perhaps counterintuitive factor we’ve already touched upon: the relative decline in the market value of education as more people acquire it.

In response, the government pioneered a very progressive estate tax on large fortunes and a progressive income tax. As a result of these taxes and other reforms and factors from 1910 through 1970 inequality declined, but since then has made its steady creep higher. Economists Katz and Goldin attribute this rise in income inequality to an “educational slowdown,” a decline in educational attainment that continued into the early 2000s. They reasoned that a lack of education made it difficult for many Americans to find and sustain good jobs in a global economy that, they and many others contend, demanded ever more sophisticated skills, in particular computer skills.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

This is apparent in the fast food industry, for the primary tools to provide rapid and accurate delivery of fast food to customers arriving in their own vehicles were developed in the 1990s, not within the past decade.18 FOOD ISSUES: INEQUALITY AND OBESITY U.S. income inequality was high between the 1890s and 1920s and fell sharply during the Great Depression and World War II. The era between 1945 and 1975 was called by Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo “The Great Compression,” after which income inequality began its multidecade increase, which still continues. The growing divide between middle- and upper-class Americans and their poorer fellow citizens has numerous causes and consequences, most of them treated in chapter 18. Here our attention turns to the relationship between income inequality, nutrition, and obesity. There is day-and-night difference in the quality and quantity of food consumed at the top and bottom of the income distribution.

See health and health care; infectious diseases dishwashers, 360 doctors, 224–28; education of, 232–33; paying for services of, 234–37; since 1940, 476–78; working in hospitals, 230 Domar, Evsey, 569 domestic service workers, 256 Douglas, Donald, 395–96 Downing, Leslie, 429–30 Dranove, David, 493 drive-in movie theaters, 420 driverless cars, 599–601 driver’s licenses, 388–89 drug legalization, 646–47 drugs (medications), 222–24, 643; birth control pill as, 486; future of, 594; new molecular entities for, 479; penicillin and antibiotics, 465–67; regulation of, 476 DVDs (Digital Video Disks), 437 DVRs (digital video recorders), 427, 436, 439 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 645–46 Eastland (ship), 239 Eastman, George, 197 e-books, 437 e-commerce, 443, 457–58 economic growth: after 1970, 523–28; changing pace of, 2; education and, 624–27; faster and slower, 528–31; forecasting future of, 634–39; global warming’s effects of, 634; mid-twentieth century peak in, 18–19; mismeasurements in, 526–28; objective measures of, 585–89; promoted by federal government, 310–16; slowdown in (1970-), 325–28, 522–23 Edison, Thomas, 568; electric light bulb of, 20, 117–19, 128, 150, 191; as entrepreneur, 571; first electric power plant by, 17; long-playing records invented by, 427; motion pictures and, 198, 200; patents held by, 572; phonograph invented by, 186–87, 197 education: in 1870, 58–59; child labor and, 282–85; college, costs of, 510–14; contribution to productivity of, 15; income inequality and, 624–27; inequality in, 606; in labor quality, 543–44; land-grant colleges for, 311–12; life expectancy and, 485; in medical schools, 226–27, 232–33; in nursing schools, 230; preschool education, 647–48; reform of, 644; secondary and higher, 648; as source of income inequality, 620–24; of women, 507; after World War II, 499–500, 520, 521 eight-hour day, 543 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 389, 390 elderly people: hospital stays for, 491; increased life expectancy of, 463; in labor force, 252–54; medical care of, 483–84; retirement of, 514–19; after World War II, 500, 520–21 electric irons, 121–22 electricity: batteries for, 182; diffusion of house wiring for, 114; electrification of housing, 115–22, 315; elevated trains powered by, 148; generation of, 559; houses wired for, 95; increase in productivity tied to, 17; invention of, 4; railroads powered by, 142; used by household appliances, 359–62; used by television sets, 423; used for public transportation, 131; used for streetcars, 146–47; used in department stores, 89; used in manufacturing, 269–70, 557, 560; wiring of housing for, 5 electric lights, 117–19; as General Purpose Technology, 555–56; for railroads, 142; safety of, 237 electric typewriters, 452, 579–80 electrocardiogram, 226 electronics: home and consumer, 583–84; medical, 478–81; See also communications; computers elevated trains, 147–48 elevators, 4 Eliot, Charles, 50, 51 Elwood, Paul, 491 e-mail, 443, 454, 456 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 288 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA; 1974), 516–17 employment: in 1870, 248; between 1870 and 1970, 6; after 1940, 501; age discrimination in, 519; in clothing manufacturing, 350–51; criminal records and, 632; distribution of occupations, 52–54; health insurance tied to, 488–89, 493–94; humans replaced by machines in, 602–3; of immigrants, 614–15; in manufacturing, decline in, 628–29; by occupations (1870–2009), 254–58; pensions and, 515–17; of servants, 47; unemployment and, 272–73; of women, 273–74, 286–87, 505–7; work week and hours for, 258–61; in young firms, 585; See also labor force; work energy: global warming and, 634; production of (1899–1950), 558–59; used by household appliances, 359–62; used by television sets, 423; See also electricity Engerman, Stanley L., 56 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), 449 entertainment, 174; in 1870, 49–50; from 1870 to 1940, 202–5; cable television for, 425–26; digital media for, 435–38; Internet for, 456; movies for, 197–203; newspapers and magazines for, 174–77; phonographs for, 186–90; post-World War II, 409–11; post-World War II music, 427–29; radio for, 190–97; superstars in, 618; television for, 412–13, 415–20, 421–25; video cassette recorders for, 426–27; during World War II, 413–15 entrepreneurs, 570–72 Epperson, Frank, 74 erectile dysfunction, 486 Europe: automobile developed in, 150–51; decline of growth in, 562; opinion of U.S. in (1851), 27–28; patterns of urban development in, 367–68 Ewbank, Douglas, 213 Facebook, 456–57, 579 Fageol Safety Coach (bus line), 160 families, 630–32 Farber, Sidney, 470 farm animals: cattle, 264–65; horses, 263, 264 farmhouses, 112–13 farming.

The relationship between income and height extends beyond the provision of food to also include the ability to afford health care, as well as better housing conditions affordable to those who earn a higher income. Because deprivation stunts growth whereas extreme affluence does not increase height, the average height of a given population declines with greater income inequality. Much of the biometric literature concerns differences across nations, while here we are interested in the evolution of stature in the United States over time. The most stunning result is that the adult height of native-born American males declined by more than 3 percent, from 68.3 inches for birth year 1830 to 66.6 inches for birth year 1890, after which there was a spurt to 69.6 inches in birth year 1940, with little change after that.62 Why did height decline in an era when economic growth was so rapid and progress occurred along so many dimensions, including average per-capita food consumption?


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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Hanauer, “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage,” Bloomberg View, June 19, 2013, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles /2013-06-19/the-capitalist-s-case-for-a-15-minimum-wage. xxi had the same experience: Richard Dobbs, Anu Madgavkar, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, Eric Labaye, and Pranav Kashyap, “Poorer than Their Parents? A New Perspective on income inequality,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2016, http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/poorer-than-their-parents-a-new-perspective-on-income-inequality. xxi Top US CEOs now earn 373x the income of the average worker: Melanie Trottman, “Top CEOs Make 373 Times the Average U.S. Worker,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/13/top-ceos-now-make-373-times-the-average-rank-and-file-worker/.

Social media algorithms may have affected the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. WTF? While new technologies are making some people very rich, incomes have stagnated for ordinary people, and for the first time, children in developed countries are on track to earn less than their parents. What do AI, self-driving cars, on-demand services, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy. But just because we can see that the future is going to be very different doesn’t mean that we know exactly how it’s going to unfold, or when. Perhaps “WTF?” really stands for “What’s the Future?”

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a global elite is eroding the power and sovereignty of nation-states while globe-spanning technology platforms are enabling algorithmic control of firms, institutions, and societies, shaping what billions of people see and understand and how the economic pie is divided. At the same time, income inequality and the pace of technology change are leading to a populist backlash featuring opposition to science, distrust of our governing institutions, and fear of the future, making it ever more difficult to solve the problems we have created. That has all the hallmarks of a classic wicked problem. Wicked problems are closely related to an idea from evolutionary biology, that there is a “fitness landscape” for any organism.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

For many people on the left, this is mainly a problem of income and wealth inequality that can be solved by more redistribution and greater investment in education. Yet, despite noisy claims to the contrary, income inequality has not been rising sharply in many of the countries, including Brexit Britain, where there has been the biggest pushback against the cognitive class status quo.2 If income inequality is the driving force behind political alienation and national populism, how come it is also thriving in the most equal societies on the planet: in Scandinavia? It is true that slow or nonexistent wage growth is harder to bear when a small minority, most notably those in the financial industries, seem insulated from austerity.

And status usually follows the money (with some exceptions, such as in the cases of priests or artists), although they can be more or less closely aligned at different times. The substantial element of subjectivity in the concept of status makes it hard to measure the decline that I believe has been suffered by many people in postindustrial societies, although I have grappled with it in Chapter Seven. Income inequality is easier to measure, and many people, especially on the left, find it more comfortable to focus on because it points the finger of blame at the rich and big business. But the preferences of the cognitive class—especially the “creative class” cohort in the arts and universities—for openness, autonomy, and change is also a source of discomfort and conflict.

The size, influence, and definition of the creative class is contested, but the connection with both liberal attitudes and economic inequality is not. Here is Richard Florida, the author of the concept, himself: “Across the United States, inequality is not just a little higher, but substantially higher, in liberal areas than in more conservative ones. All of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest levels of income inequality were represented by Democrats, according to a 2014 analysis.” II. According to the 2012 British Social Attitudes survey, only 13 percent of people agree that “a man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after home and family,” with little difference between the genders. In the mid-1980s the figure was 49 percent.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

Section 6 discusses Ecuador’s capacity in future years to help the poor to manage crises and to deepen their human-capital formation. Section 7 discusses some of the strategic policy options available to policymakers. 2. Inequality and Poverty Ecuador’s recent crises have come in a context of high poverty and income inequality. Although Latin America as a whole has extremely high income inequality compared with other regions of the world, especially Europe and East Asia, Ecuador’s record is unenviable even within Latin America. Moreover, unlike some other Latin American countries, which combine high inequality with relatively high per-capita income, Ecuador’s inequality is accompanied by low per-capita income.

Dec 99 Jun 00 Dec 00 Jun 01 Dec 01 56 CRISIS AND DOLLARIZATION IN ECUADOR ceased, and this largely explains why the economy slid into such a deep recession in 1999. This recession aggravated Ecuador’s deepening poverty (see chapter 4) and worsened most social indicators. Ecuador had gone into the crisis with some of Latin America’s most unfavorable indicators of poverty incidence and income inequality. In 1998, at the outset of the crisis, 46 percent of the population was poor, compared with 34 percent in 1994. During the same years, extreme poverty (insufficient income for a minimum food basket) had worsened from 15 to 17 percent. In 1998 69 percent of the rural population was impoverished, compared with 56 percent in 1994.

“Dollarization in Latin America: Recent Evidence and Some Policy Issues.” International Monetary Fund Working Paper. 4 Ecuador: Crisis, Poverty, and Social Protection Suhas Parandekar, Rob Vos, and Donald Winkler 1. Introduction Ecuador’s economic crisis of 1998–99 and its move to full dollarization in early 2000 took place in a context of high poverty and income inequality—exposing the poor to the risk of irreversible losses. The constraints on public expenditure have set tight limits on the ability of the Ecuadoran government to protect the poor and have threatened the delivery of basic social services. This chapter updates our understanding of Ecuador’s poverty, especially as it concerns the human capital of the poor; evaluates the government’s policy framework for protecting the poor in times of crisis; and discusses policy options for improving that framework.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

But there is reason to believe that the intangibles-rich economy is also partially to blame. It turns out that a significant share of observed increases in inequality can be explained by changes that are themselves driven by intangibles, particularly from the leader/laggard gap and from the effects of clustering. Consider income inequality. Recent research on income differentials suggests that a major driver of the increase in income inequality in recent decades was the difference in salaries between staff at the most profitable firms and staff at all other firms. This finding has been observed not only in the United States but also in egalitarian Sweden. A world in which some companies do very well and others very badly is, it seems, one where the gap increases between high earners and low earners.9 Intangible investment by businesses seems also to have increased inequality by making it easier to observe and manage workers’ performance.

If intangibles have a spillover effect on TFP growth, then TFP rises and falls respectively. 4. Vollrath 2020. 5. See Bajgar, Criscuolo, and Timmis 2020. 6. Corrado et al. 2019. 7. Markovits 2019. 8. Garicano 2000. 9. The reason income inequality has not risen more in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century is that the UK benefits system has to some extent restrained it. For an excellent summary of recent trends in UK income inequality, pre- and posttax, see Francis-Devine 2020. 10. Garicano and Hubbard 2007. 11. Rognlie 2015. 12. Hsieh and Moretti 2019. 13. Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy 2019, table 1. 14.

Periods of low growth are not in themselves unusual, but our current slump is both protracted and puzzling. It has proved resistant to ultra-low interest rates and a host of unconventional attempts to stimulate the economy. And it coexists with widespread enthusiasm about new technologies and new businesses that exploit them. Inequality. Whether you measure it in terms of wealth or income, inequality has increased considerably since the 1980s and has stayed constant. But inequality today is not simply a matter of haves and have-nots. Rather, it is complicated by what we might call inequality of esteem: a perceived divide between high-status elites and low-status people left behind by cultural and social change.


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The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

In other words, the 1% earns almost twice as much income as the entire working-class population, a group fifty times larger demographically. And the increase in the share of the pie going to 2.4 million adults has been similar in magnitude to the loss suffered by more than 100 million Americans. The United States is unique, among advanced economies, to have witnessed such a radical change in fortunes. Rising income inequality is undoubtedly a global phenomenon, but the speed at which income concentration has been rising over the last four decades depends markedly on which countries you are looking at. Compare, for instance, the United States with Western Europe. In 1980, the top 1% share of national income was the same across the Atlantic, around 10%.

In 1960, for example, the top marginal tax rate of 91% started biting above an income threshold that was nearly a hundred times the average national income per adult, the equivalent of $6.7 million in income today.1 The merely rich—high-earning professionals, medium-size company executives, people with incomes in the hundreds of thousands in today’s dollars—were taxed at marginal rates in a range of 25% to 50%, in line with what’s typical nowadays (for instance, in states like California and New York, when you count state income taxes). The policy of quasi-confiscatory tax rates for sky-high incomes, according to the available evidence, achieved its objective. From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, income inequality fell. The share of pre-tax national income earned by the top 1% was reduced by a factor of two, from close to 20% on the eve of World War II to barely more than 10% in the early 1970s. In 1960, for example, only 306 families earned more than $6.7 million in taxable income a year, the threshold above which income was taxed at 91%.2 Meanwhile, the economy grew strongly.

“Justice too long delayed is justice denied”:11 this is true also when it comes to taxation. Contrary to what is widely believed, the VAT exempts a significant fraction of the economy. Finance, education, and health care, three of the largest sectors in our modern economies, are typically exempt. Finance has contributed more than any other sector to the upsurge in income inequality in the United States; health care is high on the list too.12 Introducing a new tax that exempts these sectors would not exactly advance the fight against inequality. VAT excludes finance because there’s no easy way to compute “value-added” in the financial industry. For regular businesses, value-added is equal to sales to customers minus cost of intermediate inputs.


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The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“We need to hire a 22-22-22,” said one new media manager quoted in The New York Times, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year. Shortly before the Atlantic story broke, a video depicting income inequality in the United States went viral. Based on data from a 2011 study, the video showed that most Americans seek a more equitable distribution of wealth than what they believe exists—but that the reality of income inequality is far worse than they had imagined. When income was graphed, the middle class was barely distinguishable from the poor. Eighty percent of Americans hold 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, while 1 percent of Americans hold 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

But what it demonstrated is how much better society could be if generosity were consistently applied toward all, instead of concentrated into brief celebratory affairs. “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld,” Saint Augustine once declared. This is painfully clear in San Francisco and its surrounding area, home to some of the highest income inequality in the country. “San Francisco itself is turning into a private, exclusive club,” noted Anisse Gross in The New Yorker. “The city, long reputed as a haven for provocateurs and cultural innovators, has quickly transformed into a playground for the rich, where tech money sends rental prices soaring as the less fortunate tenants battle it out with the rent board.”

The terms of public debate are rarely set by the public. “Inequality” has risen to the fore in pundit discourse, but mostly in terms of whether it deserves to be debated at all, as recent columns by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and The New York Times’ David Brooks demonstrate. For a public well aware of income inequality—since they have to live with its consequences every day—such debates reflect an inequality of their own: a paucity of understanding among our most prominent voices. In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters.


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The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

There was only one problem: the bulk of these gains went to the richest members of society—and the times of the most rapid growth often coincided with the times of the greatest inequality. Between 1827 and 1851, for example, the English economy grew by about 80 percent. But during that same time period, the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality, increased just as rapidly. In effect, England had, in the span of a quarter century, gone from the level of income inequality recorded in today’s Iceland to the level of income inequality recorded in today’s India.3 Then another big aberration in human history set in: a period of unprecedented economic equality. Back in 1928, Thomas Piketty shows, the richest 1 percent could expect to capture 15–20 percent of income in European countries like France or the United Kingdom and almost 25 percent of income in the United States.

And to understand its likely effect, we must bear in mind that these liberal institutions are, in the long run, needed for democracy to survive: once populist leaders have done away with all the liberal roadblocks that impede the expression of the popular will, it becomes very easy for them to disregard the people when its preferences start to come into conflict with their own. Politics Is Simple (and Everyone Who Disagrees Is a Liar) Over the past decades, global gross domestic product (GDP) has grown rapidly. A billion people have been lifted out of poverty. Literacy rates have skyrocketed while child mortality has fallen. Taking the world as a whole, income inequality has shrunk.20 But many of these improvements have been concentrated in rapidly developing countries like China. In developed economies, GDP has grown rather more slowly. And in much of the West, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, the lion’s share of that growth went to a small sliver of the elite.

Productivity Over the past years, the bulk of the public conversation about the economy has focused on inequality.48 This is welcome for many reasons: rampant inequality corrupts the political process, allows the upper middle class to hoard the best educational and professional opportunities, and weakens the social ties that bind citizens together.49 But though containing income inequality is important in itself, the role that the rise of inequality plays in the stagnation of living standards has sometimes been overstated. According to the 2015 Economic Report of the President, for example, the income of the median American household would be significantly higher today if inequality had not risen so dramatically: if the share of income going to the bulk of the population had not shrunk since the 1970s, the average American household would now have $9,000 more at its disposal every year.


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Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin

coronavirus, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, financial independence, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, job automation, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, occupational segregation, old-boy network, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, remote working, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Another important feature of these occupations concerns the inequality of earnings. Occupations with the greatest income inequality among men have among the largest gender earnings gaps. The occupations with the highest income inequality are also those in which employees vie for clients, contracts, deals, and patients. They also have among the longest hours, with the most on-call and rush hours (consider the long hours of lawyers, surgeons, accountants, and those in the C-suite). For all these reasons, occupations with high levels of income inequality are ones in which women, particularly mothers, will be less likely to earn the higher incomes.

The work of professionals and managers has always been greedy. Lawyers have always burned the midnight oil. Academics have always been judged for their cerebral output and are expected not to turn their brains off in the evenings. Most doctors and veterinarians were once on call 24/7. The value of greedy jobs has greatly increased with rising income inequality, which has soared since the early 1980s. Earnings at the very upper end of the income distribution have ballooned. The worker who jumps the highest gets an ever-bigger reward. The jobs with the greatest demands for long hours and the least flexibility have paid disproportionately more, while earnings in other employments have stagnated.

Rising inequality in earnings may be one important reason why the gender pay gap among college graduates has remained flat in the last several decades, despite improvements in women’s credentials and positions. It may be the reason why the gender earnings gap for college graduates became larger than that between men and women in the entire population in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Women have been swimming upstream, holding their own but going against a strong current of endemic income inequality. Greedy work also means that couple equity has been, and will continue to be, jettisoned for increased family income. And when couple equity is thrown out the window, gender equality generally goes with it, except among same-sex unions. Gender norms that we have inherited get reinforced in a host of ways to allot more of the childcare responsibility to mothers, and more of the family care to grown daughters.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And urban elites look down on them for holding retrograde views about the flag, faith, and community that are no longer politically correct.12 Resentment of the establishment, and adherence to the older values of traditional Christian morality, fitting in, and deference toward authority (‘Queen and country’), are said to flourish among the ‘left-behinds.’13 Thomas Piketty’s influential work has called attention to rising levels of income and wealth inequality.14 In recent decades, the US and UK and other high-­income countries have experienced sharply rising income inequality; despite substantial economic growth, the gains have gone almost entirely to the top 10 percent of the population.15 Yet advanced economies differ, with income inequality rising much faster and further in the United States than in the European Union. Inequality has been exacerbated by growing automation and outsourcing, globalization, the erosion of labor unions, government austerity policies, the growth of the knowledge economy, and the limited capacity of governments to regulate investment decisions by multinational corporations or to stem migration flows.

Cambridge, MA: Bellnap Press. 15. http://wir2018.wid.world/part-2.html. 16. Thomas Piketty. 2014. Capital. Cambridge, MA: Bellnap Press. 17. Robert M. Marsh. 2016. ‘What have we learned from cross-­national research on the causes of income inequality?’ Comparative Sociology 15 (1): 7–36; Andreas Bergh and Therese Nilsson. 2010. ‘Do liberalization Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 169 and globalization increase income inequality?’ European Journal of Political Economy 26 (4): 488–505; Giray Gozgor and Priya Ranjan. 2017. ‘Globalisation, inequality and redistribution: Theory and evidence.’ World Economy 40 (12): 2704–2751.

They include the advanced globalization of labor, finance, investment, trade and goods flowing across national borders, coupled with economic liberalization and deregulation, deteriorating job security for unskilled workers, the loss of manufacturing industries, and growing economic inequality.8 Millions of people in low and middle-­ income countries, particularly China and India, have benefitted from international trade and finance – and by the remarkable growth in GDP, which has halved the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty since 1990, and reduced income inequality and raised living standards in these countries.9 The less-­educated population in advanced industrialized economies have been losers from global markets. The ‘left-­behinds’ in developed societies, suffering from sluggish job growth, stagnant wages, and deteriorating public services, seem most vulnerable to the call of authoritarian populism.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

: Economic Gains from Gender Equality in Nordic Countries (summary brief, Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 2018), https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/last-mile-longest-gender-nordic-countries-brief.pdf; “Income Inequality,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, accessed July 21, 2020, https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm#indicator-chart; Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, “Which Places Have the Highest Concentration of Billionaires?,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, June 29, 2018, https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/which-places-have-highest-concentration-billionaires.

Honda Hong Kong Horowitz, Sara Horsfall, Pierre hostile takeovers House of Commons (UK) HSBC Huawei human rights Hummelgaard, Peter Hurricane Maria IBM Iceland Icicle iFLYTEK IG Farben IKEA Illinois Illinois and Michigan Canal income inequality. See also wealth gap independent contractors. See also gig economy India individualism industrialization Industrial Revolution inequality income inequality organized labor and technology and unions and wealth gap influence industry infrastructure initial public offerings (IPOs) innovation Instacart insulin intellectual property, tax avoidance and Inter-American Democratic Charter Internal Revenue Service (IRS) International Monetary Fund (IMF) International Rescue Committee (IRC).

He’s not wrong, but the fact that you have to, in his words, “look at all the economic rules that have been written” and rewrite labor laws that have not changed in seventy-five years highlights not just how much dramatic change is needed, but also how little progress Trumka and his peers have made in the last few decades. We stood together by his window so he could show me his dramatic, unobstructed view of the White House, and he told me, “When people talk about inequality they only talk about inequality of income. We talk about it in three levels: inequality of income, inequality of opportunity, and inequality of power. And unless you solve the inequality of power, you’ll never solve the inequality of income and the inequality of opportunity. So right now we have an economy that is on a trajectory towards implosion. If inequality continues to grow, the system will implode.”


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The authors are open about the many caveats regarding accurate income data before 1950. 58 “Corn Laws”, UK Parliament Historic Hansard, HL Deb 02 April 1840 vol 53 cc398-404, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1840/apr/02/corn-laws Chapter Six: And Justice for All 1 Pilon, M., “Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality”, Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/ 2 Piketty, T., Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014), pg. 8. 3 Jordà, O. et al., “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870-2015”, NBER Working Paper Series, 24112, May 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112 4 Milton Friedman himself stated that it would be the “least bad tax”.

Data for China is from CEIC: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/resident-income-distribution/gini-coefficient. Data for US is from US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.html (Figure 3). 33 Darvas, Z., “Global income inequality is declining – largely thanks to China and India”, Bruegel Institute, 19 Apr. 2018, http://bruegel.org/2018/04/global-income-inequality-is-declining-largely-thanks-to-china-and-india/ 34 According to data from the Conference Board’s Total Economy Database, Mexico’s GDP per capita (PPP) in 1981 was 51.7% that of the US, falling further to 37.7% by 1994 the year that NAFTA came into effect, and 33.2% by 2018. https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/ 35 Rodrik, D., “Goodbye Washington Consensus, Hello Washington Confusion?

., “Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don’t Realize It)”, Atlantic, 2 Aug. 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/americans-want-to-live-in-a-much-more-equal-country-they-just-dont-realize-it/260639/ 49 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2005), Ch. III 50 Tcherneva, P.R., “When a Rising Tide Sinks Most Boats: Trends in US Income Inequality”, Levy Economics Institute, Policy Note 2015/4, Mar. 2015, http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/when-a-rising-tide-sinks-most-boats-trends-in-us-income-inequality 51 Unsurprisingly for a book that is considered one of the most important works of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice received criticism from many fronts including libertarians (Robert Noczik), Marxists (G.A.


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Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Subdued labour incomes – thanks to a mixture of weak demand, technological change and competition from cheaper labour elsewhere in the world – meant that gains in sales revenues alone led to higher corporate profits; higher profits, in turn, fed through to further stock market gains, even in the absence of a recovery in investment. For both the owners and managers of companies, this appeared to be a case of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’, triggering much gnashing of teeth and, not surprisingly, a renewed interest in the causes of, and the cures for, rising income inequality. Not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was – in the absence of wars and revolutions – always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth: the implication was simply that the already well-off – basically those with no shortage of capital – would steadily get richer, a conclusion that appeared very much to be playing out before our eyes.

THE LEWIS MODEL Admittedly, this is not the first time that we have seen a big increase in inequality; nor is it the first time that we have seen a disproportionate benefit accruing to the owners of capital. The Lewis model – named after Arthur Lewis, who, in 1938, became the first black academic at the London School of Economics – describes the typical increase in income inequality in the early stages of a country’s industrialization.10 In Lewis’s version of events, an impoverished country will likely have an excess supply of labour, much of which will be underemployed in rural poverty. Entrepreneurs set up shop in urban areas. Their efforts encourage an influx of underemployed rural workers into the cities.

Eventually, however, a Lewis ‘turning point’ is reached, when the excess supply of rural labour dries up, wages begin to rise and the benefits of industrialization spread to the masses: think, for example, of the transition from Dickensian squalor to urban comfort in London over the last 150 years (a process Karl Marx failed to anticipate) or, more recently, the extraordinary transformation of living standards in Beijing and Shanghai (thanks, in part, to the efforts of entrepreneurs who themselves became billionaires). Once this stage of development is out of the way, the Lewis model implies that income inequality should fall: with labour no longer in excess supply, wages are likely to rise more swiftly, ensuring that labour’s share of national income rises. Moreover, with the emergence of a middle class strongly incentivized to prevent the rich from lording it over them and equally determined to prevent the poor from stealing from them, society ends up appearing to be increasingly meritocratic.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

This is not to say that all corruption was imported. Missouri has its own long history of high-end dirty dealers. Some, like early twentieth-century Kansas City political fixer Tom Pendergast, constructed such elaborate nexuses of politics and business and crime that they gained national notoriety. What changed in the 1980s was that income inequality became coupled with geographical inequality in a way that would transform the American economy, culture, and media for decades to come. The once thriving cities of the Midwest became known as “the Rust Belt,” Midwest family farms went bankrupt, and coastal elites—both liberal and conservative—came to view the region as an object of pity or prey.

He went on to consolidate a crime network and launder money through purchased properties, eluding the FBI, who searched for him for years before realizing he had been living in a luxury apartment in Trump Tower the entire time.54 The 1990s were when the term “globalization” came into the popular vernacular, including as a target of protest, most notably in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. Most protesters decried the detrimental effect of globalization on labor both domestically and abroad, as American jobs went to foreign workers who were paid a pittance. They also denounced the rise of income inequality and gentrification, leading to extreme increases in the cost of living in international hubs like New York, San Francisco, and Miami due to the influx of wealthy foreigners driving up rent. Defenders of globalization saw unregulated global markets as a liberating force that went hand in hand with the democratization of former dictatorships that had occurred in the earlier part of the decade.

Much of what Americans took for granted was lost within that brief window of time. We lost our faith in the electoral system through the contested 2000 presidential race. We lost our sense of safety from foreign threats through the September 11, 2001, attacks. We lost our sense of prosperity through a recession followed by skyrocketing income inequality. We lost what was left of our shame when we went to war in Iraq based on a lie. I grieved those losses while working in the industry that tells people what is worth grieving, that defines not only the terms of the debate but the participants. I watched the public shed old illusions only to embrace new ones manufactured in my line of work—fantasies spun out of fear and favor.


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The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

They show that the way we have currently designed our society in the United States is heavily skewed toward the wealthy, to the point where a large majority of the U.S. population is suffering while a tiny percentage is concentrating a shocking amount of wealth at everyone else's expense. Section 3 – How might we solve the problems caused by the concentration of wealth and income inequality in the United States? How might we begin to solve the problems caused by the concentration of wealth and income inequality in the United States? In the current economy, as we currently think about it, one way we might begin to find a solution is by significantly increasing the minimum wage, and then scaling other wages appropriately. In addition we would simultaneously slash the wages, stock grants, cash bonuses, etc. received by the wealthy by establishing a maximum wage (or using the tax structure, which once went as high as 94%).

slug=execpay13&date=20020913 [24] http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2003-03-31-ceopay2_x.htm [25] http://www.fortune.com/fortune/ceo/articles/0,15114,443051,00.html [26] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/opinion/establishment-populism-rising.html?&_r=1 [27] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0805063897 [28] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060938455 [29] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/01/28/3616308/income-inequality-2013/ [30] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vttbhl_kDoo [31] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSxzjyMNpU [32] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph [33] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/06/this-viral-video-is-right-we-need-to-worry-about-wealth-inequality/ [34] http://www.reddit.com/r/ConcentrationOfWealth [35] http://www.census.gov/popclock/ [36] http://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?

As the truck drivers, checkout clerks, waitresses, construction workers, maids, janitors, etc. all lose their jobs, what happens to all of these displaced workers? And what happens to all of the money that used to be paid to them in wages? We can look back over the past 30 years and see exactly what will happen. There has been a consistent trend of income inequality over the past three decades, and that trend will accelerate as robots take over jobs in increasing numbers. The money paid to CEOs and executives will increase while the money available for everyone else shrinks. The trend toward the concentration of wealth happens on many different fronts, so let me give you an example.


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The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

I encourage you to contribute to the conversation and debate so that we can together design a world that allows for the best in humanity to thrive as we move into an exciting future of abundance. I invite you to continue the conversation at www.thepriceoftomorrow.com. Notes 1. Institute for Policy Studies, “Income Inequality,” inequality.org/facts/income-inequality. 2. Ray Dalio, Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (Bridgewater Associates, 2018), page 12. 3. Ray Dalio, Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (Bridgewater Associates, 2018), page 12. 4. Comments can be found at: “Testimony of Chairman Ben S. Bernanke,” nytimes.com/2007/02/14/business/worldbusiness/14iht-web.0214fedtext.4594833.html; “The Subprime Mortgage Market,” federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20070517a.htm; “Bernanke: Fed Ready to Cut Interest Rates Again,” nbcnews.com/id/22592939/#.XV2kSS3MyfV; and Danielle DiMartino Booth, Fed Up (Portfolio, 2017), page 142. 5.

Katrin Assenmacher and Signe Krogstrup, “Monetary Policy with Negative Interest Rates,” International Monetary Fund Working Paper No. 18/191, August 27, 2018. imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2018/08/27/Monetary-Policy-with-Negative-Interest-Rates-Decoupling-Cash-from-Electronic-Money-46076. 28. Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Income Inequality,” Our World in Data, October 2016. ourworldindata.org/income-inequality. 29. Institute for Energy Research, “A Primer on Energy and the Economy,” February 16, 2010. instituteforenergyresearch.org/uncategorized/a-primer-on-energy-and-the-economy-energys-large-share-of-the-economy-requires-caution-in-determining-policies-that-affect-it. 30.

The idea is simple in premise: raise taxes on the wealthy to give a minimum basic income whether people work or not, topping people up if they work to a maximum amount but also not requiring them to work for their wage. The idea is hardly new; various proposals date back hundreds of years. In theory, it sounds reasonable. Even for the most ardent capitalist, it could be self-serving. Capitalism collapses in a world where there are no buyers. Job losses and income inequality will reduce the number of people who can participate in the economy. At some point along that continuum of fewer people participating in the economy, the math doesn’t work, and the system collapses anyway. That means that even though universal basic income sounds radical to some, it is at least an alternative to that outcome.


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Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

A silver lining of the 2008 crisis is that it reduced the appeal of the financial sector for the brightest minds; a study of career choices of MIT graduates found those who graduated in 2009 were 45 percent less likely to choose finance than those who graduated between 2006 and 2008.63 This may lead to a better allocation of talent, and to the extent finance’s salary levels infect every other sector, it could further reduce income inequality. All in all, therefore, it seems to us that high marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top income inequality. They would not be extortionary, since very few people will end up paying them; top managers will simply not get these kinds of income anymore. And from all we see, they won’t discourage anybody to work as hard as they can.

Finance Industry: 1909–2006,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127, no. 4 (2012): 1551–1609. 48 Brian Bell and John Van Reenen, “Bankers’ Pay and Extreme Wage Inequality in the UK,” CEP Special Report, 2010. 49 Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” working paper, Williams College, 2012, accessed June 19, 2019, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaCole HeimJobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 50 Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in France, 1900–2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA),” WID.world Working Paper Series No. 2017/4, 2017. 51 Olivier Godechot, “Is Finance Responsible for the Rise in Wage Inequality in France?

,” Discussion Papers 15–12, University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics, 2015. 26 Oriana Bandiera, Michael Carlos Best, Adnan Khan, and Andrea Prat, “Incentives and the Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats,” CEP/DOM Capabilities, Competition and Innovation Seminars, London School of Economics, London, May 24 2018. 27 Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, “Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right,” New York Times, October 24, 2013, accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bottom-of-healthcaregovs-flop.html?_r=0. 28 Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in France, 1900–2014: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts (DINA),” Journal of Public Economics 162 (2018): 63–77. 29 Thomas Piketty and Nancy Qian, “Income Inequality and Progressive Income Taxation in China and India, 1986–2015,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1 no. 2 (2009): 53–63, DOI: 10.1257/app.1.2.53. 30 World Inequality Database, accessed June 19, 2019, https://wid.world/country/india/ and https://wid.world/country/china/. 31 Luis Felipe López-Calva and Nora Lustig, Declining Inequality in Latin America: A Decade of Progress?


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Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Cooperative hunting and meat sharing 400–200 kya at Qesem cave, Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:13207–13212. Stockhuyzen, F. 1963. The Dutch Windmill. New York: Universe Books. Stone, C. et al. 2017. A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality Stopford, M. 2009. Maritime Economics. London: Routledge. Strauss, L.L. 1954. Speech to the National Association of Science Writers, New York City, September 16, 1954. New York Times September 17, 1954, p. 5.

But this was not to be the new normal: the trend was reversed and by 2008 the inequality was back to its late 1920s level, and then it was surpassed to reach new disparity highs: by 2016 the richest 1% of households claimed 39% of all income and the bottom 90% took less than a quarter (Stone et al. 2017). Similar reversals have taken place in a number of other affluent countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom (WWID 2017). As a result, since 1980 income inequalities (commonly measured by the Gini coefficient) have increased in every affluent economy, as well as globally. When this trend is seen on the national basis its most notable outcome has been the emptying of the middle, with most of the national means falling below the threshold of the middle class (Milanovic 2012).

By 2010 China’s Gini coefficient reached 0.53–0.55, considerably higher than the US value of 0.45 and ranking among the highest recorded inequalities worldwide, particularly in comparison with countries that have comparable or higher standards of living (Xie and Zhou 2014). For comparison, the Standardized World Income Inequality Database put China’s Gini coefficient at 0.5 in 2013 (Solt 2018). China also faces considerable inequality of opportunities (gaps in access to certain financial services and unemployment insurance coverage), regional disparities, and continuing rural-urban gap. Finally, another brief reminder that the categorization used in appraising past structural changes may be misleading in new circumstances.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Average spending gives information about one spot (or “moment”) in a distribution. As has been extensively documented, the distribution of purchasing power was getting vastly more unequal. Since 2000, nearly half, or 47 percent, of the nation’s entire income has accrued to the top 20 percent of the population. Before the crash, income inequality was worse than at any time since the end of the 1920s boom, and by some measures had even exceeded that historic peak. Even though consumption was increasing, so too were poverty, indebtedness, and lack of health insurance. Broader measures showed erosion in well-being even as spending was accelerating.

More than half earning less than a thousand dollars annually is the author’s calculation from Chen and Ravallion (2008), table 5. 26 In 1960 the average person consumed just a third: Economic report of the president (2009), table B-31, p. 321, per capita consumption expenditures in 2000 dollars, author’s calculation. 1960-2008:3. 26 inflation-adjusted per-person expenditures have tripled for furniture and household goods: Economic report of the president (2009), table B-17, p. 305, author’s calculation of per capita changes from aggregate expenditures, 1990-2008:3. 26 Overall, average real per-person spending increased 42 percent: Economic report of the president (2009), table B-31, p. 321, per capita consumption expenditures in 2000 dollars, author’s calculation, 1990-2008:3. 26 Since 2000, nearly half, or 47 percent, of the nation’s entire income: Mishel, Bernstein, and Shierholz (2009), table 1.7, p. 61. 26 income inequality was worse than . . . since the end of the 1920s: The U.S. Census Bureau’s historical data on Gini coefficients shows the 2006 Gini of 47 as the highest since 1967, the earliest reported by the Census. See United States Census Bureau (2009). The Gini in 1929 is estimated at 41 as reported by Brenner, Kaelble, and Thomas (1991), p.199.

For example, the evolutionary argument predicts strong sex differentiation in consumption patterns; however, recent trends are toward convergence, as in cosmetics and other consumer purchases. A compelling treatment is Whybrow (2005). 170 consumption-based competition appears to vary with the distribution of income: For the influence of income inequality on hours and income, see Bowles and Park (2005). 170 a decline in materialist values: Inglehart (1989, 1997). 171 Gar Alperovitz has studied employee-owned companies: Alperovitz (2005). 172 Slow Money movement: Tasch (2008). 172 Conscious consumers who . . . pay a bit more for products: On the conscious-consumer movement, see Willis (2009), Willis and Schor (n.d.), Seyfang and Elliott (2009), and Schor (forthcoming). 172 investors would reduce the returns: Keynes (1936). 172 There is no magic, or “natural,” rate of return: Neoclassical economic theory has used the concept of “natural” rates, for example, the “natural” rate of unemployment.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Minxin Pei, a China expert at Claremont McKenna College, states that corruption, cronyism, and income inequality in China today are so stark that social conditions closely resemble those in France just before the French Revolution. The overall financial, social, and political instability is so great as to constitute a threat to the continued rule of China’s Communist Party. Chinese authorities routinely downplay these threats from malinvestment in infrastructure, asset bubbles, overleverage, corruption, and income inequality. While they acknowledge that these are all significant problems, officials insist that corrective actions are being taken and that the issues are manageable in relation to the overall size and dynamic growth of the Chinese economy.

This means not that economic systems cannot approach optimality but that optimality emerges from economic complexity spontaneously rather than being imposed by central banks through policy. Today central banks, especially the U.S. Federal Reserve, are repeating the blunders of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao without the violence, although the violence may come yet through income inequality, social unrest, and a confrontation with state power. While the Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek formulations of the economic complexity problem are well known, Charles Goodhart added a chilling coda. What happens when data used by central bankers to set policy is itself the result of prior policy manipulation?

The $100 “profit” per piece resulting from the underinvoicing is then left to accumulate in Panama. With millions of furniture items shipped, the accumulated phony profit in Panama can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is money that would have ended up in China but for the invoicing scheme. Capital flight by elites is only part of a much larger story of income inequality between elites and citizens in China. In urban areas, the household income of the top 1 percent is twenty-four times the average of all urban households. Nationwide, the disparity between the top 1 percent and the average household is thirty times. These wide gaps are based on official figures.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

After leaving school in the countryside, the would-be parents often moved away in search of the better jobs available in towns and cities. For couples, even if one adult in a pair could get employment with a reasonable income in a rural area, his or her partner was unlikely to be able to. This matters more in more unequal countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, as high income inequality means that, for a huge section of today’s working-age adults, two incomes are essential. Poorer workers are now paid too little for one income to be able to support a family. “Village life” is not that attractive to young people, apart from the few who do not want to leave home. Once the option of moving to a city became available, millions did so, partly to be free of community observation and control, and partly because they had no other choice when tractors came to the farm and replaced much manual labor.

As economic inequality in income begins to fall in most countries of the world, we need to ask what is now becoming the more serious issue.1 Today most things are settling down, but some things are still rising out of control, almost always as a legacy of some past event, decision, mistake, or ignorance. Wealth inequalities, and with them huge inequalities in debt, continue to rise long after income inequalities fall. Information continues to spew forth long after the ability to produce and process such information has peaked (hence the abundance of fake news at the start of the age of slowdown). The pollution caused by economic growth, growth that has long since slowed down, continues to have great effect, above all in increasing the temperature of the planet.

However, after a few decades of growing equality, many people became used to what they had achieved and did not defend it well enough from those who prefer inequality. In the United Kingdom and the United States, from the 1970s onward, with great acceleration during the 1980s, debts rose as income inequalities increased and wealth inequalities began to spiral upward. Those debts also included huge increases in national public government debt. It is only possible for debt to rise in an accelerating manner because people with money think they can make more money by lending or pretending to lend. Money can be made in all kinds of ways; it can, for example, legally be created out of thin air by private banks if those banks are sanctioned by governments to do so.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

GDP took off like a rocket and with it, shareholder value and CEO pay.26 But… meanwhile, the environmental costs of this growth—trillions of tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a poisoned ocean, and the widespread destruction of the earth’s natural systems—remained largely invisible. Worldwide inequality fell as several of the developing economies—most notably China—began to catch up to Western levels of income. But in the developed world income inequality has increased enormously. The vast majority of the fruits flowing from the productivity growth of the last twenty years have gone to the top 10 percent of the income distribution, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom.27 Real incomes at the bottom have stagnated.28 The populist fury that has emerged as a result is threatening the viability of our societies—and of our economies.

In 2013 it won one of the Financial Times’ “Boldness in Business” awards “for what it represents in terms of a real proposal for a new type of business model: ‘Humanity at work,’ based on co-operation, working together, solidarity, and involving people in the work environment.”73 Employee-owned firms—as you might expect—appear to prioritize employment over profits and to pay their employees above the going wage.74 One study found that 3 percent of employee-owners were laid off in 2009–2010 compared to 12 percent for nonemployee owners, and that employee-owners had approximately more than twice the amount in their defined contribution accounts as participants in comparable nonemployee-owned companies, and 20 percent more assets overall.75 One senior manager at Mondragon suggested that the firm played a significant role in reducing inequality, claiming that “if the Basque region in Spain were a country, it would have the second-lowest income inequality in the world.” Employee-owned firms also grow faster and are vastly overrepresented in the “Best Companies to Work For” rankings. When employee ownership is linked to the ability to participate in decision making and is accompanied by greater job security, it increases employee loyalty and motivation, lowers turnover, and drives higher levels of innovation and productivity.76 The fact that King Arthur Flour is owned by its employees, for example, makes it much easier to make the investments that are essential to building and maintaining a highly engaged workforce—not only to providing training, decent wages, and benefits, but also to invest the time and energy required to ensure that information is widely shared, that the culture is sustained, and that everyone is engaged.

Economic growth in societies with strong inclusive institutions is more consistent, and inclusive societies are significantly more prosperous than societies living under extraction. Inclusive institutions are also a strong determinant of individual well-being. Inclusive societies are happier and longer-lived. They have lower-income inequality, greater socioeconomic mobility, and greater social freedoms.30 While per capita GDP is a strong determinant of life satisfaction for poor countries, when GDP is greater than about $15,000/year, individual happiness is correlated not with income but with the presence of inclusive political institutions.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Our tunnel is just a bunch of lights—each of which represents someone, somewhere with a job. The conventional view is echoed strongly by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in his book, The Age of Turbulence. Greenspan’s book includes an entire chapter devoted to the growing problem of income inequality. Greenspan tells us that income in the United States is now more concentrated that at any time since the late 1920s.34 He correctly attributes this to globalization and, especially, technological advance, pointing out that many of the jobs previously held by “moderately skilled workers” are now handled by computers.

In other employment sectors a different scheme would need to be used, or perhaps payroll taxes could be retained. “Progressive” Wage Deductions As this book is being written, there is significant public outcry over the issue of excessive paychecks for corporate CEOs. One of the basic messages I have tried to express is that extreme income inequality and concentration of income is not simply an issue of fairness. In fact, it drives at the very heart of a functional mass market. As we have mentioned previously, if you consider nearly any moderately priced mass market product or service, an average worker contributes nearly as much to the viability of that market as a corporate CEO.

The natural incentives in the private sector would tend to accelerate, rather than resolve, the crisis. There is an ongoing trend toward concentration of income that is driven largely by the continuing advance of automation technology and globalization, and also by a lack of progressive tax policies. Many people might argue that increasing income inequality is caused primarily by a “skill premium.” In other words, in the modern, technological economy, people who are highly educated and skilled have a significant advantage in the labor force. While this has been true so far, it is largely because relatively low skill jobs have been the first to be automated and also the first to be subjected to the full force of globalization.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Hours of work since 1983 5. Income share of the richest 1 percent 6. GDP per head and life satisfaction 7. Happiness according to income position in the UK 8. Happiness and income by country 9. Alcohol-related deaths in the UK 10. Obesity in the UK 11. Unemployment in OECD countries 12. Income inequality since 1977 13. Distribution of wealth in the UK 14. Marriage and divorce in the UK 15. Attendance at cultural events in the UK Introduction This book is an argument against insatiability, against that psychological disposition that prevents us, as individuals and as societies, from saying “enough is enough.”

In his nineteenth-century classic, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that America’s “general equality of condition” was the most fertile soil for the growth of the work ethic and acquisitive instinct.35 In Europe, Tocqueville claimed, no one cared about making money, because the lower classes had no hope of it, and the upper classes thought it vulgar to think about it. Only in the United States could workers believe that through hard work they might achieve the fortunes necessary to enjoy the luxuries of the rich. The American combination of social equality and income inequality has since become the capitalist norm, leading to a situation in which every member of society is in a sense competing against every other. And the greater the inequality, the greater the competitive pressure. “If pay varies greatly,” writes economist Richard B. Freeman, “there is a sizeable incentive to do what it takes to climb up the earnings distribution, including putting in long hours.”

Wider share-ownership schemes have also been promoted on a company basis, including, famously, by John Lewis, Britain’s leading retail chain, which is owned and run by its 76,500 permanent employees.44 However, such visionary enterprises have failed to counteract the overall trend towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, as shown in Chart 13. Chart 12. Income Inequality since 1977 Source: ONS; World Bank; Eurostat Chart 13. Distribution of Wealth in the UK Source: ONS; HMRC [Note: Marketable wealth (also known as net worth) is the value of all assets that can be bought and sold—shares, property, bank savings and so on—minus liabilities. It excludes, for example, occupational pensions that cannot be transferred.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

All in all, business’ stock of outstanding debt has grown from 25% of GDP in 1979 to 101% by 2008.48 As a ratio of profits, this means that UK corporations owe 6.5 times more in debt than they earn in profits each year, making them some of the most indebted corporations in the global North.49 As well as investing less and taking out more debt, companies have also been reducing workers’ pay and making their employment conditions more precarious. The ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the average worker increased from 20:1 in the 1980s to 149:1 by 2014.50 This has driven up income inequality: the UK’s GINI coefficient — a measure of income inequality in which countries closer to zero are more equal and those closer to one more unequal — rose from 0.26 at the start of the 1980s to 0.34 by the start of the 1990s. In fact, there has been a secular decoupling of productivity (the value of what workers produce) and wages.

., Watts, B. and Wood, J. (2018) “The Homelessness Monitor: England 2018’, Crisis. 6 Butler, P. (2018) “New Study Finds 4.5 Million UK Children Living in Poverty”, Guardian, 16 September; Bulman M (2018) “Child Homelessness in England Rises to Highest Level in 12 Years, New Figures Show”, Independent, 13 December. 7 NHS (2011) “Homeless Die 30 Years Younger than Average”, NHS, 21 December. 8 This account draws on: IPPR (2018); Blakeley (2018a) 9 Garside, J. (2015) “Recession Rich: Britain’s Wealthiest Double Net Worth Since Crisis”, Guardian, 26 April. 10 Partington, R. (2019) “UK Income Inequality Increasing as Benefits Cuts Hit Poorest”, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2019/feb/26/uk-income-inequality-benefits-income-ons 11 Schmuecker, K (2018) ‘Tuesday’s Spring Statement is an opportunity to right the wrong of in-work poverty’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 12th March. https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/tuesday%E2%80%99s-spring-statement-opportunity-right-wrong-work-poverty 12 TUC (2018) 13 Harari (2018) 14 Bank for International Settlements (2019) “Credit to the Non-Financial Sector”, BIS long series on total credit. https://stats.bis.org/ 15 OECD (2019) “Non-Financial Corporations Debt to Surplus Ratio” https://data.oecd.org/corporate/non-financial-corporations-debt-to-surplus-ratio.htm 16 Blakeley (2019) 17 CEIC (2019) “United States Investment: % of GDP”, CEIC. https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-states/investment--nominal-gdp 18 BIS (2019) 19 Summers, L. (2013) “Secular Stagnation”, Speech at the 14th Annual IMF Research Conference.

The result of both models — “downsize and distribute” and “merge and monopolise” — is the same: more money stuck at the top. By prioritising paying shareholders over remunerating workers or investing in long-term production, the structure and governance of today’s firms helps to increase wealth and income inequality. By hoarding cash and investing it in financial markets, failing to pay tax, overcharging consumers for services, and mistreating their workers, global monopolies are launching a concerted attack on society itself. As these companies grow, they become more powerful than the nation states which are supposed to regulate them.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

He’s right: HBS has explicitly compared the rate of median salary increase of its graduates to the rate of tuition increase when it has sought to justify increases in tuition, in the process reducing an education to nothing more than a return-on-investment calculation. Thomas Piketty, author of the surprise 2014 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is arguably the world’s top expert on income inequality—not from a “what to do about it perspective,” but the mere fact of it, as represented by his unrivaled analysis of data, across both geographies and time. In a 2003 paper cowritten with Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” he encapsulated the dynamics of increasing inequality in the United States in just two sentences: “The marginal product of top executives in large corporations is notoriously difficult to estimate, and executive pay is probably determined to a significant extent by herd behavior.

There is some truth to the point: “While CEO salaries in the U.S. appear unconstrained by any sense of modesty,” writes Michigan’s Jerry Davis, “the more extreme sources of inequality come from outside of the corporate ambit. In 2004, the 25 best-paid hedge fund managers collectively earned more than every CEO in the S&P 500 combined. The U.S. has attained a level of income inequality higher than every country in Europe—including Russia. Yet it is not so much those at the top of bureaucracies that contribute to our current Bolivian level of income inequality, but those outside of corporate hierarchies.”7 But that’s merely a deflection, not a justification of excessive executive compensation, particularly considering that hedge fund compensation is largely determined in advance, generally as some percentage of assets under management plus a performance kicker.

Henderson, “Competitive Strategy (Book Review),” Journal of Business Strategy 1, no. 4 (1981): 84–85. 8Mintzberg, Lampel, and Ahlstrand, Strategy Safari, p. 115. 9Stewart, The Management Myth, p. 184. 10Shirley Leung, “Steve Grossman, Michael Porter Team up on Income Inequality,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2015, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/02/18/steve-grossman-michael-porter-team-income-inequality/6AjQNRc7lrTfXSbLH01ZQI/story.html. 11Henry Mintzberg, “Managing the Myths of Health Care,” World Hospitals and Health Services 48, no. 3 (2012): 4–7. 12Martin Desmarais, “Harvard’s Michael Porter: Small Businesses Hold Keys to U.S.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

A systematic review and scientific critique of methodology in modern urban heat island literature. International Journal of Climatology 31:200–217. Stoler, A. L., et al., eds. 2007. Imperial Formations. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. Stone, C., et al. 2017. A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. Stravitz, D. 2002. The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Studzinski, G. P. 2000. Cell Growth, Cell Differentiation and Senescence: A Practical Approach.

Megacities span a wide range of developmental stages, from such mature metropolitan areas as London and New York to rapidly expanding agglomerations of housing and economic activity as New Delhi, Karachi, or Lagos. All megacities, regardless of their developmental stage, face the challenges of worrisome income inequality, poor living conditions for their low-income families, and inadequate and decaying infrastructures (most often evident in the state of public transportation). In addition, emerging megacities in low-income countries share serious to severe environmental problems (including crowding, air pollution, water pollution, and solid waste disposal), high unemployment levels (alleviated by extensive black economy sectors), and public safety concerns.

Moatsos et al. (2014) traced the changes in global income since 1820, when it was fairly normally distributed, while most the world’s population lived below what we now define as the extreme poverty line. The latest reevaluation of global income, in terms of 2011 PPPs, puts it at $1.90/day or about $700/year (Ferreira et al. 2015). As economic development proceeded, the mean of income distribution has kept rising but so has the income inequality and by 1975 global income distribution was distinctly bimodal, with the first mode below the poverty line and the second mode (capturing the income in affluent nations) almost an order of magnitude higher. Then, with advances in Asia in general and China in particular, the pattern shifted again to a near-normal distribution whose mode was well above the poverty line.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

“Most Millennial Buyers Want Single-Family Home in the Suburbs,” National Association of Home Builders, http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/01/most-millennial-buyers-want-single-family-home-in-the-suburbs/. RABINOVITCH, Simon. (2013, October 23). “Property prices in urban areas raise fears of overheating,” Financial Times. RAMESH, Randeep. (2011, December 5). “Income inequality growing faster in UK than any other rich country, says OECD,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/dec/05/income-inequality-growing-faster-uk. RANDALL, Gregory C. (2010). America’s Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois, Walnut Creek: Windsor Hill Publishing. RAO, Krishna. (2014, April 15). “The Rent is Too Damn High,” Zillow, http://www.zillow.com/research/rent-affordability-2013q4-6681/.

By 2011, people in their 20s constituted roughly one-quarter of residents in the urban cores but only 14 percent or less of those who lived in suburbs, where the bulk of people go as they enter the age of family formation.68 RECASTING THE URBAN DEBATE: CORE CITIES AND LIFE’S STAGES In this way, if not for any other reason, the suburbs are essential to the health of an urban organism. Without places for people to move farther out in the periphery, these core cities, with their low birth rates and high levels of income inequality, are hardly sustainable in the long run. Many of them, as we will discuss later, can only survive by importing people, whether it be those from their own hinterlands (including young people nurtured in suburbs), immigrants from abroad, or in some places, people from the overpopulated countryside.

“Putting Singapore’s GDP in perspective,” http://furrybrowndog.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/putting-singapores-gdp-in-perspective/. FUSTGEL de COULANGES, Numa Denis. (1980). The Ancient City: A Study of Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. GAFFNEY, Declan, et al. (2002). “London Divided: Income inequality and poverty in the capital: summary,” Greater London Authority. GALE CENGAGE LEARNING. (2014, January 14). “City Parks Boost Mood, Study Suggests; Moving to greener urban areas was associated with mental-health improvements,” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA355622748&v=2.1&u=chap_main&it=r&p=ITOF&sw=w&asid=b24cccb4b028d6c2711cf2ab60ed4fa0.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

It was by far the single most important thing I did. That’s because education is the key to putting us on the path to solving what is perhaps the most pressing issue in the United States and maybe even the world today. It’s the issue in which mayors stand on the front line. That issue is income inequality. There are a lot of different ways to begin to address and attack that problem, from taxes to minimum wage to housing. But the single most important tool we have to start to try to narrow the income and opportunity gap is education. The fight for providing a good education for all of our children gets to the core of the tension in this book, the heart of the problem we now face as a country—and a world—and the heart of the solution.

But we’re all in this together. Whenever I talk to Chicago business groups, I emphasize this point. They may not realize it, but they have a serious, vested interest in this issue. I tell them that if we don’t figure out how to get more people into the winner’s circle, Chicago will stop being a global city on the move. Income inequality and access to opportunity are issues that affect everyone. In my opinion, the number-one job and priority of all mayors is to establish a level set for all of the citizens of their city. Not everyone will achieve success if you do that, of course. But at the very least everyone will be provided with the opportunity to do so.

The Neighborhood Opportunity Fund is only three years old and is generating as much as a key federal urban program, if not more. The idea was that when a business center succeeds, it sparks neighborhood, retail, and commercial success as well. This, I believe, not only helps mitigate the divide between the downtown area and struggling neighborhoods, it also helps work on the greater problem of income inequality. The Neighborhood Opportunity Fund has succeeded beyond our expectations. The Urban Institute praised the program for its innovation in sustainable growth, and recommended that other cities replicate it; and they are. In addition to our Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, we required all developers to list all minority contractors on private work prior to a vote by the Planning Commission.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

There’s no universal health care without immigration reform. The undocumented will operate in the shadows. If health care is a human right, we also have to deal with our broken immigration system so everyone has access to the medical care they need. In the United States, income inequality is a direct legacy of slavery. Until we deal with structural racism, we won’t be able to address rising income inequality. Climate change is contributing to war when drought contributes to civil unrest. Curtailing of our civil liberties through government surveillance gives police departments tools to suppress the movement to defend black lives and the work of antifracking activists.

I could also tell you stories of amazing organizing done by Bernie’s black, Latino, Muslim, and Native American volunteer leaders who got things exactly right. But I think it suffices to say that we fell short of what the moment required and so missed out on achieving what the moment put within our reach. How do we go forward? It’s true that climate change, income inequality, war, and Wall Street deregulation disproportionately hurt people of color. But talking about these issues doesn’t give white people a pass on addressing race directly. Yes, Bernie marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., got arrested protesting segregated housing, and was one of the lone white voices in Congress who endorsed and delivered his state to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988.

We have to hold our parties and our government accountable to the majority of the American people—not corporations, not the 1 percent, and not even just demographics who have historically higher voter turnout. And white people have a special responsibility to ensure that white working and middle class voters choose multiracial solidarity as the only true path to addressing income inequality. If we don’t listen to black leaders and do all these things, our revolution is doomed to fail. The literal war on black people will go on, with the body count going up every day. Participation in a racist system will also continue to hurt white people as they prop up the elites and billionaires who use dog whistle racism to divide the working class.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, “Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth,” IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN/14/02, 2014, available at https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf; and Federico Cingano, “Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth,” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 163, 2014, available at http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/trends-in-income-inequality-and-its-impact-on-economic-growth-SEM-WP163.pdf. 22 In countries with big ethnic and racial divides (such as the United States and France), there can be further dimensions to this growth in inequality. When the economy goes into a slump, it is the workers from these groups that are first laid off.

See my book Making Globalization Work. 38 It is perhaps obvious: the least skilled are those who are let go first when there is an economic downturn; and the cutbacks in government spending associated with economic downturns are particularly costly to those at the bottom, who depend on government social spending. While many governments say that they will “protect” such social spending, in many cases, the cutbacks are in fact regressive. See, for example, Jason Furman and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Economic Consequences of Income Inequality,” in Symposium Proceedings—Income Inequality: Issues and Policy Options (Jackson Hole, WY: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 1998), pp. 221–63; and Stiglitz, Price of Inequality. 39 This was an early insight in the literature in the theory of local public goods, where individuals could move freely from one local community to another.

We don’t have good data to see how these citizens are faring, but for a few countries, we do have data on what has been happening to inequality. These data suggest that indeed, many are facing hardship. In Spain, for instance, in the years before the crisis, inequality had been coming down, but by 2014, the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, was about 9 percent over its 2007 level. In the case of Greece, the Gini coefficient increased by 5 percent from just 2010 to 2014. It usually takes years and years to move the Gini coefficient by a few percentage points. Data on poverty reinforce the conjecture that those in the middle and bottom have suffered particularly from the crisis.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

George Orwell was prescient when he wrote that “we all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue.”12 Economic apartheid, in the shape of inequality, now threatens growth.13 The newfound focus on inclusive capitalism highlights the exclusion of significant portions of the population from the benefits of economic expansion. Greater income inequality increasingly constrains an already weak recovery. Empirical research suggests that an increase in income inequality by one Gini coefficient point decreases the annual growth in GDP per capita by around 0.2 percent. Higher income households have a lower marginal propensity to consume, spending a lower portion of each incremental dollar of income than those with lower incomes.

In China, businesses are frequently forced to pay 10–25 percent of the value of contracts in “commissions” to politicians and bureaucrats. President Xi Jinping's administration sought to tackle the problem. It published an infidelity map as part of the campaign to root out corrupt Chinese government officials, simultaneously disposing of political opponents and consolidating the new regime's power. Income inequality, excessive concentration of economic power in heavily subsidized state corporations or business oligarchies, as well as political rigidities and instability increasingly compound economic problems. The population in developing countries is also aging rapidly, as a result of declining fertility rates and specific measures, such as China's one-child policy.

While it helped improve living standards in emerging nations, the influx of around 1.5 billion additional workers into the global economy reduced the bargaining power of employees in developed markets, ushering in declines in real wages. Ironically, China's new socialism did not unite the workers of the world, but divided them, triggering “the profoundest global reshuffle of people's economic positions since the Industrial Revolution.”4 Automation increased both corporate profits and income inequality. Apple's ubiquitous i-gadgets consist of components made in multiple countries and assembled in China, with the supply chain being managed in the US by Apple, which earns around 30–50 percent of the final price. The process favors skilled labor, reducing the share of revenue accruing to low-skilled workers.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The mitigating factor in the winner-takes-all trend, Danny Quah notes, is that dematerialisation is also helping to reduce the costs and difficulty of becoming a superstar. You do not need to be born with a great bone structure or have the huge amount of capital needed to start up a pharmaceuticals company. You need an idea, a cheap computer and a telephone. He writes: ‘At the same time that income inequalities become more extreme, mobility between The Weightless World 14 rich and poor also rises’. It is a bit like Britain’s National Lottery fever, he argues. People are willing to see a few win millions of pounds because they can also have a chance at untold riches for just £1 a ticket. Weightless politics Politics will be transformed by the weightless world.

In fact, the concentration of the unemployment problem in the European Union countries makes it unlikely that any world-wide phenomenon like Weightless Work 45 the information technology revolution can take sole blame for job losses. America has raced ahead in the use of information technology without suffering permanent mass unemployment — although whether it has paid the price for generating jobs in lower incomes for many workers and greater income inequality instead is something that is discussed in more detail later. Neither theory nor evidence supports the conclusion that computers have destroyed jobs in the aggregate. What the available evidence from a series of studies does indicate is that lagging behind in information technology has probably hindered long-run job creation in Europe.

The distinction has a venerable history. What makes it fresh now is the way it interacts with another long-standing difference, between the haves and the have-nots. For the US and UK, where deregulation and flexibility have given a new edge to the insider-outsider distinction, have also seen a startling increase in income inequality for the first time in a century. In fact, inequality might be as pronounced now as it was a hundred years ago. For the earnings of British men are more unequal now than they have been at any time since 1870. The Britain of today resembles the Britain of George Gissing. The novelist painted a grim picture of life not only for the destitute but also for the struggling petit bourgeoisie for whom economic disaster was only ever a hair’s breadth away.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

We can scale globally yet adapt to the very local. The old industrial model cannot solve climate change. It is too slow, too inefficient, too exclusive. Peers Inc is driving the rapid transformation of our economy and will also provide an answer to the conundrum of disappearing jobs, escalating income inequality, and devastating resource scarcity. What we do now will have profound and lasting effects on our future. We are at the end of the old fossil-fuel-saturated, consumption-based industrial economy. We are at the beginning of the new collaborative economy, which thrives on sharing, openness, and connectedness.

The winners keep winning and tend to wind up with monopolistic power. She continues: It soon grows beyond replacement. Just look at how even after [Microsoft] management wasted billions of dollars on Bing, it is still failing against [Google], while [Google] never even missed a quarter. Thus, hyper efficiency, automation, wealth transfer and income inequality go together. In addition, this concentrating quality has all the power of the gravitational pull of a black hole. That is because in this model, with a relatively fixed cost for the central processing engine, he with the most transactions wins. Not only are all transactions amortized against a similar fixed base allowing for lower end prices, but the biggest engine gets smarter, faster.

“It allows employers to quickly change and reallocate resources in the workplace.”30 All the while, Denmark is among the most productive economies in the world.31 True, it has one of the highest tax rates to pay for these benefits and commitment to retraining,32 but it is also ranked as the “Happiest Country” in the United Nation’s 2013 World Happiness Report.33 Can these policies (also implemented in other Nordic and northern European countries) be adapted to accommodate a fully flexible workforce? Let’s go back to one of Roxane’s sentences: “Hyper efficiency, automation, wealth transfer, and income inequality go together.” While this has been the path of least resistance, we just saw that tax and employment policies can in fact deliver both higher growth rates and adequate income equality. But can these policies work in an environment of increased unemployment? I recently talked to a CEO of a telecommunications company that had been sitting on a technology improvement that would not only dramatically reduce the company’s costs and improve customer service but do so by reducing the company’s workforce by 40,000 people.


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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Already the cars are smart enough to do much of the brainwork involved in driving, from plotting routes to keeping a safe distance from the car ahead. Driverless cars are not yet generating discomfort among the men who drive cabs around central Gothenburg, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants. The hollowing out of the industrial workforce is, however. Income inequality has risen in this famously egalitarian country,1 and recent Swedish governments have reformed their country’s generous welfare programmes to encourage more unemployed people to seek work. In a country in which people with an immigrant background (that is, who are either immigrants or the children of immigrants) represent a disproportionate share of claimants, political support for generous welfare has broken down.

On the one hand, much of the growth in benefit compensation has come from rising health insurance contributions, and since that is driven by soaring healthcare costs, it hardly represents much of an improvement in inflation-adjusted compensation. More importantly, growth in total benefits has also stagnated for much of the last twenty years.19 The hardships suffered by workers show up in other worrying trends as well. One is rising income inequality – which helps to explain why average incomes have risen faster than median ones, since those at the top have risen most. Though inequality is occasionally dismissed as an American problem, dispersion in incomes is, in fact, widespread. Over the last thirty years, the share of total income earned by the top 10 per cent of earners in America has soared from about a third in 1980 to half today.

This decline, incidentally, is what we would expect in a world in which productivity is growing faster than wages; the difference is captured by someone, and if it isn’t workers then it is some other group with a claim on an economy’s economic output.22 It is not a coincidence that these trends all developed at roughly the same time, in the 1970s and 1980s. They represent a distinct break from what had come before. For decades before that, real wage growth kept up with productivity growth, which had itself risen faster than in any prior period. Income inequality, which had been extraordinarily high in the early twentieth century, fell dramatically from the 1930s to the 1950s and stayed low for the two decades after that. And, before this period, the labour share ‘wiggled’ yet did not trend, not as it has over the last generation. So where does this leave us?


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Mark Niquette, ‘Dalio Says Capitalism’s Income Inequality is a National Emergency’, Bloomberg, 8 April 2019. 124. Nick Hanauer, ‘The Pitchforks are Coming … for Us Plutocrats’, Politico, July/August 2014. See also, Niquette, ‘Dalio Says Capitalism’s Income Inequality is National Emergency’. 125. Jordan Ellenberg, ‘The Summer’s Most Unread Book is …’, Wall Street Journal, 3 July 2014. Ellenberg reported that most readers of Piketty’s book in the Kindle e-book version never made it past the introduction. 126. Piketty, Capital, p. 305. 127. Carlos Góes, ‘Testing Piketty’s Hypothesis on the Drivers of Income Inequality: Evidence from Panel VARs with Heterogeneous Dynamics’, IMF Working Paper, August 2016, p. 10.

Over the course of that decade, ‘inequality went up mainly because of rising stock prices, asset valuations and the incomes drawn from stock option realizations and capital gains, as well as wages and salaries paid in sectors that were financed by new equity.’21 During the Dotcom bubble changes in income inequality were correlated with movements in the Nasdaq index of technology stocks, with most income gains clustered around Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the epicentres of the bubble.22 The final stage of the bubble occurred after the Fed’s rate cut in the fall of 1998. This period marked the apogee of Chairman Greenspan’s popularity on Wall Street.

By 2008, the income share of the top decile was back at its 1929 peak.23 As in the 1920s, the very richest Americans (the top 0.1 per cent) laid claim to nearly a fifth of total household assets.fn2 Since the financial sector employs fewer workers relative to its share of national income, its expansion during the credit boom exacerbated income inequality.24 Between 1997 and 2007, the revenues of American fund managers – highly leveraged to the stock market – rose from less than 1 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP. By the latter date, top hedge fund managers were earning more than $1 billion a year.25 Inequality trickled down from the top: ‘Although soaring executive compensation and the “financialization” of the economy,’ writes Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, ‘are directly responsible for only some of the recent growth in top incomes, their influence on other sectors such as law and medicine has amplified their disequalizing effect.’26 During Dotcom and real estate bubbles, the pay gap between graduates and other workers became more pronounced.27 As the financial sector expanded, the ‘skill premium’ earned by college graduates climbed.28 On the eve of the global financial crisis, finance workers enjoyed a 50 per cent income premium, adjusted for educational attainment.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

See also financial crisis (2008) The Great Transformation (Polanyi), 76 Greece as allowed to remain in currency union, 148 clientelism of, 144 demands for reparations of to Germany, 171 government replacement in, 143 as increasingly impoverished and declining, 68 rise of risk premiums on public debt, 128 as saturated with cheap credit, 145, 147 suspension of democracy in, 92, 94 SYRIZA government of, 36 greed, as symptom of individualized individuals, 14, 205 Greek Central Bank, 144 Greenspan, Alan, 85 gridlock, 6 growth models, 21, 22, 24 H Habermas, Jürgen, 169, 198 Haffert, Lukas, 136 hard work and hard play, 9 haute finance, 94, 162, 215, 246 Hayek, Friedrich von, 3, 74, 79, 154, 155, 159 Hayekian growth model, 21, 22, 24 Hayekian/Hayekianism, 52, 53, 75, 126, 155 Heller, Hermann, 151–63 The Hidden Persuaders (Packard), 210–11 Hilferding, 3 Hirschmann, Albert, 108 Historical School of Economics (Historische Schule), 166, 201, 243 historical social order, 203 Hodgson, Geoffrey, 61 Holder, Eric, 32 home ownership, 84 homo oeconomicus model, 223, 239 hoping, 42–3 Horkheimer, Max, 244 I IG Metall, 148 IMF Economic Forum, 66 immaterial economic needs, politics of, 212 income inequality, 53, 83–4, 140. See also economic inequality; inequality income tax rates, top marginal income tax rates (1900–2011), 55f indebtedness, 16, 47, 53, 66, 85–9, 114, 121–2 independent crisis cycles, 13 indeterminacy, 12, 13, 37 individualized individuals, 14 inequality. See also economic inequality; income inequality as apocalyptic horseman of contemporary capitalism, 18 as factor intertwined with low growth, 66 oligarchic inequality, 28–30 as something people could potentially get used to, 60 rise of, 15, 17, 34, 35, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 62, 67, 69, 186, 215, 219 inflation as conquered after 1979, 79, 81–2 current efforts to raise, 18, 67 as monetary reflection of distributional conflict between working class and capitalist class, 78–9 as public enemy number one in 1970s, 18, 20 rates of (1970–2014), 80f information technology, impact of rise of, 9 insecure workers, conversion of into confident consumers, 2–3 instability, 3, 73 Institut für Sozialforschung, 244 integration in Europe, 144, 146 neo-functionalist integration, 146, 175 social integration.

Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the ‘Matthew principle’ governing free markets: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.’3 Furthermore, rising debt, while failing to halt the decline of economic growth, compounds inequality through the structural changes associated with financialization – which in turn aimed to compensate wage earners and consumers for the growing income inequality caused by stagnant wages and cutbacks in public services. Can what appears to be a vicious circle of harmful trends continue forever? Are there counterforces that might break it – and what will happen if they fail to materialize, as they have for almost four decades now? Historians inform us that crises are nothing new under capitalism, and may in fact be required for its longer-term health.

Growing public indebtedness is put down to electoral majorities living beyond their means by exploiting their societies’ ‘common pool’, and to opportunistic politicians buying the support of myopic voters with money they do not have.9 However, that the fiscal crisis was unlikely to have been caused by an excess of redistributive democracy can be seen from the fact that the build-up of government debt coincided with a decline in electoral participation, especially at the lower end of the income scale, and marched in lockstep with shrinking unionization, the disappearance of strikes, welfare-state cutbacks and exploding income inequality. What the deterioration of public finances was related to was declining overall levels of taxation (Figure 1.5) and the increasingly regressive character of tax systems, as a result of ‘reforms’ of top income and corporate tax rates (Figure 1.6). Moreover, by replacing tax revenue with debt, governments contributed further to inequality, in that they offered secure investment opportunities to those whose money they would or could no longer confiscate and had to borrow instead.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Contradiction 12 Disparities of Income and Wealth An analysis of the Internal Revenue Service income tax returns for New York City in 2012 showed that the average income of the top 1 per cent in that year was $3.57 million, while half of the population in this extremely high-rent and high-cost-of-living city were trying to get by on $30,000 a year or less. In three days the ultra rich made more money than most New Yorkers made in a year. By any standards, this level of income inequality is astonishing, surely making New York City one of the most unequal cities in the world. On the other hand these figures should not surprise anyone, given the enormous earnings of the leading hedge fund managers (five of whom earned, in the wake of the crisis, more than $3 billion each in 2009) and the huge bonuses customarily doled out by the leading banks in the city.

It comprises a broad offensive against all those institutions – such as trade unions and socialist political parties – that had for long struggled to protect labour from the worst impacts of periodic bouts of widespread unemployment. The conditions prevailing within the labour reserve have, as a consequence, deteriorated markedly since the 1980s for political and strategic reasons. Capital in effect has been deepening income inequalities and poverty in order to sustain itself. This story is a gross oversimplification, but it provides a neat illustration of how the contradictory unity of production and realisation has been manifest historically through the cyclical movement in income disparities from relatively narrow to explosively expansive.

Indeed, such a reduction, it can be plausibly argued, is absolutely necessary for capital to survive in the present conjuncture because the current disparities threaten to become an absolute contradiction by virtue of escalating imbalances between the capacity to manage the contradictory unity between production and realisation. But, if the theory of capital’s necessary inequalities is correct, then there will come a point where a programme to reduce wealth and income inequalities will threaten the reproduction of capital. Once a move towards a profit squeeze gets under way, then it can ultimately threaten to squeeze the lifeblood out of capital to compensate for the way capital systematically sucks the lifeblood out of labour. Nobody knows exactly where the breaking point might lie, but it will surely be well before the levels of equality preferred in the US public opinion polls are reached.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

All one needs for success is a little bit of gumption and a willingness to take risks. That was, in many ways, the key argument that GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum laid out in a major speech before the Detroit Economic Club on February 16, 2012. “I’m about equality of opportunity. I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be,” Santorum told his audience, in a city in which two-thirds of children were currently living below the poverty line. “Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace.

In 2010, two-plus years into an economic crisis that had created the worst job market in America since the Great Depression, only 1.86 million families were on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the successor program to AFDC.4 In the 2000s, George W. Bush talked about “compassionate conservatism” while presiding over a stampede toward income inequality the likes of which America hadn’t seen in nearly a century. By 2004, the poverty rate had bounced back up to 12.7 percent, following four straight years in which the Census Bureau reported growing economic hardship for those at the bottom of the economy—falling median wages, despite enormous productivity increases and an expectation that workers would work ever more hours per year,5 and an increased inability to meet the daily needs of life.6 By 2008, at the end of Bush’s two terms in office, the poverty rate was up to 13.2 percent.7 At the same time, tax rates were cut for high-end earners, for investors, and for corporations, resulting in a massive expansion in wealth for those at the top of the economic pyramid.

By the early 1970s, solid majorities favored cutting back welfare dollars for the poor. And by 1977, more than 90 percent of respondents believed welfare recipients should be working.16 From the 1970s on, as misery and hardship stubbornly refused to vanish from the national landscape, America’s commitment both to reducing income inequality and to mitigating the effects of that inequality began to wane. Both rhetorically and in terms of practical policies, America’s leadership class began a long march away from redistributive liberalism. Tax policy became more regressive. And the tax code came overwhelmingly to benefit the wealthiest Americans, with a falloff in the progressive nature of the tax bands and the near-complete emasculation of the estate tax system.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

They also generate rising social tensions: real hardships in the most disadvantaged communities which have a spill-over effect on society as a whole.9 Extraordinarily, these disparities appear to be worsening. According to the UN Development Programme, incomes today are more unequal than at any time since the middle of the last century. In the space of less than half a century the richest 1 per cent of the population have more than doubled their income share. Income inequality within developing countries increased by 11 per cent in the last two decades. Even within the advanced economies, inequality is 9 per cent higher than it was 20 years ago.10 While the rich got richer, middle-class incomes in Western countries were stagnant in real terms long before the financial crisis.

At higher levels of substitutability between capital and labour, inequality does indeed escalate out of control as growth rates decline, just as Piketty predicted. But in an economy with a lower elasticity of substitution, the dangers are much less acute. In fact, when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour is less than one, it’s possible to reduce income inequality, even as the growth rate declines to zero. The most striking thing about this finding is that low elasticities of substitution between capital and labour are associated precisely with the essential ‘service-based’ sectors on which we have already focussed so much attention. The Cinderella sectors of the previous chapter are less amenable to the substitution of capital for labour, because of the key role of people’s time and skill in delivering them.

Policy must pay closer attention to the structural causes of social alienation and anomie. It must have at its heart the goal of a meaningful and lasting prosperity. Progress depends on building the capabilities for people to flourish in less materialistic ways. Tackling inequality Systemic income inequalities increase anxiety, undermine social capital and expose lower income households to higher morbidity and lower life-satisfaction. In fact, the evidence of negative health and social effects right across unequal populations is mounting. Systemic inequality also drives positional consumption, contributing to a material ‘ratchet’ that drives resource flows through the economy.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

In the 1970s, when my parents worked at GE and Blue Cross Blue Shield in upstate New York, their companies provided generous pensions and expected them to stay for decades. Community banks were boring businesses that lent money to local companies for a modest return. Over 20 percent of workers were unionized. Some economic problems existed—growth was uneven and inflation periodically high. But income inequality was low, jobs provided benefits, and Main Street businesses were the drivers of the economy. There were only three television networks, and in my house we watched them on a TV with an antenna that we fiddled with to make the picture clearer. That all seems awfully quaint today. Pensions disappeared for private-sector employees years ago.

The Federal Reserve categorizes about 62 million jobs as routine—or approximately 44 percent of total jobs. The Fed calls the disappearance of these middle-skill jobs “job polarization,” meaning we will be left with low-end service jobs and high-end cognitive jobs and very little in between. This trend goes hand-in-hand with the disappearance of the American middle class and the startlingly high income inequality in the United States. The vanishing jobs are due in part to the incredible development of both computing power and artificial intelligence. You might have heard of Moore’s Law, which states that computing power grows exponentially, doubling every 18 months. It’s hard to understand what exponential growth means over time.

The Alaska Permanent Fund accrued earnings and started paying dividends in 1982. Each Alaskan now receives a petroleum dividend of between $1,000 and $2,000 per person per year; a family of four received more than $8,000 in 2015. The dividend reduces poverty by one-quarter and is one reason that Alaska has the second lowest income inequality in the country. Studies have shown that the dividend has increased average infant birthweight and helped keep rural Alaskans solvent. It has also created at least 7,000 jobs due to the increased economic activity each year. The program, now in its 36th year despite numerous changes in government, is overwhelmingly popular.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

A survey by the Pew Research Center found that even as the Republican candidate John McCain headed for disaster in the presidential election of November 2008, 37 percent of Republicans rated themselves as “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats. A similar trend has held since 1972, when the General Social Survey started asking the question. This is true around the world. Apparently, it has to do with the left’s guilt. A study by psychologists at New York University found that the right-left happiness gap increases with deepening income inequality. This suggests people on the right are better at rationalizing inequality as a normal feature of life and feel less guilty about it. But improve people’s economic outlook and chances are you will make them happier. More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, former East Germans remained unhappier than their fellow citizens from the western side.

In Goa, on the west coast, average dowries rose from about 2,000 rupees in 1920 to between 500,000 and 1 million rupees in 1980. They are rising. One study estimated that dowries across India rose by 15 percent a year between 1921 and 1981. Some suggest it is due to economic development and rising income inequality, which has allowed richer lower-caste women to bid up the prices for higher-caste grooms. Others suggest that fast population growth since the 1920s tilted the male-to-female ratio in favor of men. That’s because women marry at a younger age than men. As the population grew, there were more young brides available for each successive cohort of older grooms.

There are large pockets of misery even in highly developed countries. In these impoverished corners religious belief will thrive, offering a shot at security and ultimate happiness. Here God can play His role as the ultimate form of insurance. In the United States—which suffers the most acute income inequality in the developed world—these pockets abound. Seen this way, it becomes obvious why religion is growing in some parts of the world even as secularization advances in others: in poor religious countries, people have more babies than in rich, secular states. Across the world, development has reduced fertility rates.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

One of the best measures of the rent seeking relationship between elites and citizens in a stagnant economy is the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality; a higher coefficient means greater income inequality. In 2006, shortly before the recent recession began, the coefficient for the United States reached an all-time high of 47, which contrasts sharply with the all-time low of 38.6, recorded in 1968 after two decades of stable gold-backed money. The Gini coefficient trended lower in 2007 but was near the all-time high again by 2009 and trending higher. The Gini coefficient for the United States is now approaching that of Mexico, which is a classic oligarchic society characterized by gross income inequality and concentration of wealth in elite hands.

In short, there is nothing about the post-1947 period of so-called hard economic science to suggest that it has had any success in mitigating the classic problems of boom and bust. In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that the modern practice of economics has left society worse off when one considers government deficit spending, the debt overhang, rising income inequality and the armies of long-term unemployed. Recent failures have stripped economists of their immunity from rigorous scrutiny by average citizens. What works and what does not in economics is no longer just a matter of academic debate when forty-four million Americans are on food stamps. Claims by economic theorists about multipliers, rationality, efficiency, correlation and normally distributed risk are not mere abstractions.

Winners are typically those using leverage as well as those with a better understanding of inflation and the resources to hedge against it with hard assets such as gold, land and fine art. The effect of creating undeserving winners and losers is to distort investment decision making, cause misallocation of capital, create asset bubbles and increase income inequality. Inefficiency and unfairness are the real costs of failing to maintain price stability. Another mandate of the Fed is to function as a lender of last resort. In the classic formulation of nineteenth-century economic writer Walter Bagehot, this means that in a financial panic, when all bank depositors want their money at once, a central bank should lend money freely to solvent banks against good collateral at a high rate of interest to allow banks to meet their obligations to depositors.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

It made exhausting reading. …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for cooptation in the political system…[72] The action words used for these improvements of the status quo connoted negation and elimination: “reform,” “control,” “reverse,” “limit,” “combat,” “fine,” “critique.”

Ormerod’s endless list of parliamentary claims of competence can find a mirror image in the equally endless expectations of government culled by Manuel Castells from Occupier statements: …controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet…[185] The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.

Britain and the major countries of continental Europe, involving a variety of economic models and attitudes toward law-breaking, have also seen sharp spikes in their crime rates. An analyst from Mars, unblinkered by ideology, might conclude that the efforts of democratic governments to prevent or reduce or punish crime appeared largely disconnected from actual crime rates. [197] A parallel disconnect existed with regard to poverty, income inequality, and geographical segregation along class, ethnic, or religious lines. Democratic governments for decades have labored mightily, and spent immense amounts of money, to raise citizens out of poverty, redistribute income more fairly, and integrate neighborhoods to promote cohesive communities.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Assembling them in one place reveals how they overlap and reinforce one another. There are links between debt accumulation and debt traps, easy money and financial crises, artificial intelligence (AI) and workplace automation, deglobalization, geopolitical clashes among great powers, inflation and stagflation, currency meltdowns, income inequality and populism, global pandemics and climate change. Each hampers our ability to address the others. A single threat sounds distressing. Ten megathreats happening at once is far, far worse. After examining each threat in its own chapter, I will consider our collective prospects for surviving them.

“The central bank does have an important role in ensuring that banks are prepared for the direct risks from severe weather and from the globe’s transition to new energy sources.”2 Inequality is another serious problem that can tear social fabric apart and is now leading to political populism and economic nationalism. Moreover, the greater the rate of inflation, the greater the gap between haves and have-nots. Thus, easing income inequality has become another priority for central banks like the Fed. It now pursues a “broad and inclusive maximum employment” target where the term inclusive implies addressing inequality and the jobs of those left behind in a recession: women, minorities and the poor. But again, are all these priorities in conflict?

Globalization has bestowed robust benefits on emerging market economies (EMEs), but that does not satisfy increasingly vocal opponents. Owners of capital in the EMEs, and manufacturing workers in those countries, have chalked up visible gains, but capital owners more than workers. Others—including rural workers—have been left behind. “Income inequality has worsened significantly in some EMEs and, probably more importantly, this deterioration is positively correlated with globalization,” authors Yavuz Arslan, Juan Contreras, Nikhil Patel and Chang Shu wrote in “How Has Globalization Affected Emerging Market Economies?”—a paper published by the Bank for International Settlements.8 Some fingers point at the so-called Washington Consensus, a doctrine from the late 1980s that had the support of the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department (all based in Washington) as a recipe for emerging markets in Latin America.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Morelli, Chartbook of Economic Inequality, ECINEQ Working Paper, 2014 Many factors have contributed to these shifts in income distribution. The political trends that dominated most of the twentieth century were stalled or reversed in its final decades. Globalisation has had dramatic effects on world income inequality: economic growth in China and India has lifted more people out of poverty in the last two decades than in any previous era of world history. But globalisation has tended to increase income inequality within already rich countries. While it enabled people with unique or distinctive skills – whether musical or sporting celebrities or consulting engineers – to deploy these skills in a wider market, it also intensified competition for unskilled labour as low-tech manufacturing was able to relocate to low-wage countries.

At the end of the First World War ‘the 1 per cent’ – the highest-earning percentile of the income distribution – received between 15 and 20 per cent of gross income. The USA, land of immigration and opportunity, was more equal than the countries of old Europe. But the rise of democracy, and the growth of social security and the modern state, led to sharp reductions in income inequality across the developed world in the fifty years that followed. As Fig. 2 shows, by 1970 the share of the top 1 per cent had fallen by around half, and the share of the top 0.1 per cent had diminished even more sharply. Since these figures relate to gross income, and benefits and top rates of taxation increased everywhere, the equalising effect was even greater than these figures suggest.

Many people may be surprised that Germany in 1970 was significantly less equal than Britain, France or the USA. The main explanation is the success of that country’s largely family-owned Mittelstand, or medium-size business sector, which I will discuss further in Chapter 5. The egalitarian trends did not continue. In France and Germany they simply came to an end; these measures of income inequality have not changed since 1970. In Britain and the USA incomes of the top 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent have increased sharply. The reversal is particularly marked in the USA. The share of ‘the 1 per cent’ there is now greater than it was a century ago, and US income distribution is now by some margin the most unequal of the four countries.


Firefighting by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson, Jr.

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doomsday Book, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pets.com, price stability, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail

While all crises begin with credit booms, not all credit booms end in crises, and the financial system seemed more stable than ever in the early years of the twenty-first century; 2005 was the first year without a U.S. bank failure since the Depression. The boom was masking some serious long-term economic challenges for America—rising income inequality, persistently stagnant wages, slow productivity growth, a troubling decline in labor participation for working-age men—but overall the U.S. economy seemed in pretty good shape. There was also widespread confidence that if the economy did stumble, the financial system would be resilient. It had, after all, weathered a series of modest recessions and other tests reasonably well in the previous decades, and banks seemed to have plenty of capital to absorb losses in case of a downturn.

Right now, even a modest recession could leave Washington without much fiscal leeway to respond to a financial crisis, or for that matter to upgrade infrastructure, tackle the opioid epidemic, address climate change, stabilize Social Security, or provide permanent tax relief for hardworking families. America was grappling with rising income inequality, middle-class insecurity, and other economic challenges well before the crisis of 2008, but the crisis made them worse, and unsustainable budget deficits could hobble our ability to deal with them. The financial system seems stronger today, and in some ways the economy seems more stable as well.

Growth in real potential GDP Sources: Congressional Budget Office, “An Update to the Economic Outlook: 2018 to 2028”; authors’ calculations ANTECEDENTS Overall prime-age participation in the labor force had been falling, as the participation of women slowed and men’s continued a decades-long decline. Civilian labor force participation rates for people ages 25–54, indexed to January 1990=100 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics via Haver Analytics ANTECEDENTS Income growth for the top 1 percent had risen sharply, driving income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s. Cumulative growth in average income since 1979, before transfers and taxes, by income group Source: Congressional Budget Office, “The Distribution of Household Income, 2014” ANTECEDENTS Meanwhile, the financial system was becoming increasingly fragile.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Psalm 37: 21–22 says, ‘The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously, those the Lord blesses will inherit the land, but those he curses will be destroyed.’ Religions rarely do consistency. 56 Hodgson, G. (2013) ‘Banking, finance and income inequality’, Positive Money, https://www.positivemoney.org/publications/banking-finance-and-income-inequality/. While this is interesting, it represents national financial systems as closed rather than part of an international system; it also ignores mechanisms of redistribution from poor to rich that do not depend on the creation of interest-bearing credit money. 57 Henwood, D. (1997) Wall Street, London: Verso, p 4. 58 Warren, E. (2007) ‘The coming collapse of the middle class’, Jefferson Memorial Lecture, University of California, Berkeley, http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Those in the top 1% in the UK have incomes ranging from just under £100,000 to billions.4 What’s more, the richer they are, the faster their income has grown: the top 0.5% have increased their share faster than the rest of the 1%, but not as fast as the top 0.1%, while the top 0.01% (ten-thousandth) have enriched themselves even faster.5 Inequalities in wealth – the monetary value of individuals’ accumulated assets minus their liabilities (debts) – are even wider than income inequalities, and increasing. In the US, the top 1% own 35% of the nation’s wealth and the bottom 40% a mere 0.2%! In the UK in 2008–10, the members of the top 1% each had £2.8 million or more (14% of the nation’s wealth), though, given the opportunities for the rich to hide their wealth, this is almost certainly an underestimate (Figure 1.4).

This is rationing land not simply according to who can make the best use of it, but according to who can afford it. If everyone had the same income, then the prices they were prepared to pay for a piece of land, or indeed for anything, would reflect the strength of their desire for it relative to others’. But where there are major income inequalities, what people are prepared to pay also reflects their differing purchasing power.160 But even in so far as rent does help to ration land and property in a rational way, this does not serve as a defence of private landownership. Public ownership of land, with the state renting to private individuals and organisations, could allow the same rationing function, while the revenue would go into the public purse instead of the pockets of private rentiers.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

Since both are central to the core competencies of the firm, the methods used to ensure security among the companies that provide work for the lead financial company would be key components of the organizational arrangements used. The expansion of fissuring in the legal world, however, suggests that such arrangements can be developed. 38. The definitive study of income inequality in the United States is Picketty and Saez (2003). The authors have periodically updated their detailed estimates of income inequality and made them available to researchers and the public. For the most recent updates, see Saez (2013). See also Congressional Budget Office (2011). 39. Estimates from Mishel, Bivens, Gould, and Shierholz (2013). 40. Picketty and Saez show this redistribution back to the top of the income distribution: the share of income held by the top 10%–5% of the income distribution declined slightly, from 11.5% in 1980 to 11.0% in 2007, and even the top 5%–1% increased its share only modestly, from 13.0% in 1980 to 15.2% in 2007.

Finally, reevaluate the remaining jobs in the company and repeat the process, reducing the core group of workers directly employed by the lead financial firm. Given that there are far more people paid to do mid-level jobs than those at the top of Wall Street firms, the potential to ratchet down costs is significant.37 Fissured Workplaces and Income Inequality For almost fifty years between the beginning of the Great Depression and the early 1970s, the trend in income distribution in the United States was toward greater equality. In 1928, as the Gilded Age reached its apex, the top 1% of families in the U.S. income distribution held 23.9% of national income.

Another preeminent economist, Alan Blinder (2006), notes that a country increasingly dependent on personal services for a substantial part of its GDP (as a result of offshoring of goods that can be shipped and impersonal services that can be performed at lower cost abroad) faces economic challenges in that those services typically are less amenable to productivity improvement, even if they cannot be offshored. 29. There was a large literature in the late 1990s on the impact of trade on wages and employment versus other explanations of growing income inequality (in particular skill-biased technological change). For widely cited studies from this scholarship, see Berman, Bound, and Griliches (1994); Berman, Bound, and Machin (1998); Bernard and Jensen (1997); Cline (1997); Feenstra and Hanson (1999); and Kletzer (2001). 30. See Blinder (2006) and Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon (2005). 31.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Excavating the relationship between demography and the distribution of wealth was less urgent in these years because the high-birthrate 1950s was one of the few decades in modern American history during which the gap between the rich and poor narrowed. See Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review 45 (March 1955): 1–28. On postwar inequality, see Derek S. Hoff, “Statistical Appendix: Historical Income Inequality in Seven Nations—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” in Social Contracts under Stress, ed. Zunz, Schoppa, and Hiwatari, 401–9. 80. R. A. Gordon, “Population Growth, Housing, and the Capital Coefficient,” American Economic Review 46 (June 1956): 307–22; Joseph S.

The primacy of consumption to modern economies seems obvious today, but this recognition—and the subsequent deployment of state policy to promote purchasing power—represented a seismic intellectual shift.56 During the 1930s, academic theorists and popular writers continued to build the case for a high-consumption and more equitable society, usually one that included a heavy dose of state economic planning.57 Consumptionist liberalism incorporated the argument that “underconsumption,” the purported tendency of capitalist societies to produce more goods than people can afford to purchase, had caused or at least prolonged the Great Depression. Underconsumption was also attributed to income inequality, which, assuming the wealthy save more than the poor, generates excess savings.58 Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money formally theorized a “consumption function”—the controversial proposition that, as an individual’s income rises, he or she saves an increasing percentage of income and devotes proportionally less to consumption.59 86 chapter 3 Although the aristocratic Keynes was not personally passionate about reducing inequality, the policy prescription logically derived from Keynes’s analysis was that getting more money into the hands of the lower and middle classes relative to the upper classes spurs economic growth more than the converse.

In contrast, Stable Population Keynesians—including many who actively sought a “population policy” for the United States that would adjust to and welcome the coming era of meager population growth—were sympathetic to Keynes’s broader model but broke with Keynes on the specific question of population. They maintained that population size is largely irrelevant to modern, industrialized economies; what determines per capita output levels and the growth rate are spending and saving habits. Hence, if aggregate demand can be maintained through government spending and if income inequality can be reduced so that each person consumes more, then a stable population is consistent with rising per capita and even aggregate output. The SPK camp hoped that the combination of declining birthrates and economic crisis would induce redistributive policies to engineer the transformation to a high-consumption and permanently prosperous economy.


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Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

For African American families the impact was similar to that for low-income families, and white families saw gains equivalent to gains at the median. The last bar is particularly important as it explicitly measures correlation between slack labor markets and the growth of income inequality, measured here as the ratio of high to low incomes. One extra point of labor market slack is associated with a 1.6 percent increase in the ratio of high to low incomes. Below, we see this same type of relationship in data on earnings, suggesting an important linkage between slack job markets, uneven wage gains, and income inequality. At least for working families, the mechanism upon which these correlations rest is the paycheck, and that in turn is a result of two important factors associated with tighter job markets: more hours of work, and higher hourly wages.

The relatively straight line in Figure 2-1 in Chapter 2 shows the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates of the NAIRU; the more erratic line is the actual unemployment rate.[1] The comparison enables a few pertinent observations about full employment, regardless of your thoughts about the NAIRU: Since the 1980s, the job market has spent a lot more time above than below the NAIRU, i.e., it has had a lot of slack. Not coincidentally, over those years wages have stagnated and income inequality has grown. The NAIRU is not constant. It slowly drifts up and down based on the changing relationships between unemployment and inflation, as well as changes in the characteristics of the workforce. This makes it tricky, and less useful from a policy perspective, to pin the NAIRU down to a precise percentage-point estimate.


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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Inequality in America is getting starker over time: while typical household income grew by less than 40 percent between 1979 and 2007, the income of the richest 1 percent grew by 275 percent in that same time period. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who gained international fame for his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has suggested that the level of income inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” This can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1 percent to feel powerless, but this focus neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If people focus exclusively on American inequality, they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture.

“Sure,” you might say, “the poor in developing countries might not have much money, but that money can pay for so much more because the cost of living in those places is cheaper.” It’s true that money goes further overseas. When I was in Ethiopia, I ate at one of Addis Ababa’s fanciest restaurants, and the bill came to about ten dollars. I even once stayed in a hotel room (albeit, a nasty one) for a night for one dollar. However, that graph of income inequality has already taken into account the fact that money goes further overseas. Let’s look at that bottom 20 percent of the world’s population: that’s 1.22 billion people who earn less than $1.50 per day, and thereby count as members of the “extreme poor.” You might assume that “$1.50 per day” means that every day the extreme poor live on the equivalent of $1.50 in their local currency.

That’s why the world’s average income, which is $10,000 per year, is so much higher than the typical income, which is only $1,400 per year: the richest people bring up the average. For this reason, fat-tailed distributions are unintuitive. That’s partly why it’s so difficult to understand income inequality. We don’t realize that we’re extreme outliers. In fact, fat-tailed distributions are fairly common. For example, most people live in a small number of cities; most people who have died in an earthquake died in one of the relatively rare catastrophic ones; a small number of words make up the majority of most printed text (which means that, if you want to learn a language, you’re better off learning the one thousand or so most common words first).


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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 160 risen by 22%: Taylor Telford, “Income Inequality in America Is the Highest It’s Been Since Census Bureau Started Tracking It, Data Shows,” Washington Post, September 26, 2019. 160 nowhere has it spiked more: Alvaredo et al., “World Inequality Report 2018,” 6, 8. 160 captured less than 10%: “The Unequal States of America: Income Inequality in the United States,” Economic Policy Institute infographic, adapted from Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price, “The New Gilded Age: Income Inequality in the U.S. by State, Metropolitan Area, and County,” an Economic Policy Institute report published July 2018, https://www.epi.org/multimedia/unequal-states-of-america/#/United%20States. 160 from 22% in 1970 to 15% today: Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, and Ulrike I.

The shift in that latter metric is significant, because it had been widening since 1820, when the Industrial Revolution pushed the West decisively ahead of the rest of the world. In the post-World War II era, a few non-Western countries like Singapore and South Korea joined the club of industrialized nations. But despite these exceptions, the overall gap between the world’s rich and poor had kept growing—until recently. What we often mean by income inequality is the gap between rich and poor within countries. Here the data is more mixed. That kind of inequality rose for several decades but recently began to stabilize. Between 1993 and 2008, of the ninety-one countries analyzed by the World Bank, forty-two saw rises in inequality while thirty-nine saw declines.

Meyer, “Interpersonal Trust Across Six Asia-Pacific Countries: Testing and Extending the ‘High Trust Society’ and ‘Low Trust Society’ Theory,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 4 (April 23, 2014), ttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095555; and Soo Jiuan Tan and Siok Kuan Tambyah, “Generalized Trust and Trust in Institutions in Confucian Asia,” Social Indicators Research 103, no. 3 (September 2011): 357–77, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41476527?seq=1. 165 countries with less inequality . . . have more “social capital”: Fabio Pisani and Maria Cristina Scarafile, “Income Inequality and Social Capital: An Empirical Analysis for European Regions,” University of Rome Tor Vergata, Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Society of Economists), https://siecon3-607788.c.cdn77.org/sites/siecon.org/files/media_wysiwyg/160-pisani-scarafile.pdf. 166 the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick”: Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” New York Review of Books, January 26, 1978, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/01/26/illness-as-metaphor/.


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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Past a certain threshold, more growth actually begins to have a negative impact. We can see this effect when we look at alternative metrics of progress, like the Genuine Progress Indicator. GPI starts with personal consumption expenditure (which is also the starting point for GDP) and adjusts for income inequality as well as the social and environmental costs of economic activity. By accounting for the costs as well as the benefits of growth, this measure gives us a more balanced view of what’s happening in an economy. When we plot this data over time, we see that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s, but since then has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.12 As the ecologist Herman Daly has put it, after a certain point growth begins to become ‘uneconomic’: it begins to create more ‘illth’ than wealth.

Mondragon, a huge workers’ co-operative in Spain, has rules stating that executive salaries cannot be more than six times higher than the lowest-paid employee in the same enterprise. Better yet, we could do it on a national scale, by saying that incomes higher than a given multiple of the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax. Imagine how quickly the income distribution would change. But it’s not just income inequality that’s a problem – it’s wealth inequality too. In the United States, for instance, the richest 1% have nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 50% have almost nothing: only 0.4%.37 On a global level the disparities are even worse: the richest 1% have nearly 50% of the world’s wealth. The problem with this kind of inequality is that the rich become extractive rentiers.

., ‘Transitions in pathways of human development and carbon emissions,’ Environmental Research Letters 9(1), 2014; Angus Deaton, ‘Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2), 2008, pp. 53–72; Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton University Press, 1997). 13 Tim Jackson, ‘The post-growth challenge: secular stagnation, inequality and the limits to growth,’ CUSP Working Paper No. 12 (Guildford: University of Surrey, 2018). 14 Mark Easton, ‘Britain’s happiness in decline,’ BBC News, 2006. 15 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (Penguin 2010). 16 Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown, ‘Income inequality and status seeking: Searching for positional goods in unequal US states,’ Psychological Science, 2015. 17 Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, I. V. Holmes and Derek R. Avery, ‘The subjective well-being political paradox: Happy welfare states and unhappy liberals,’ Journal of Applied Psychology 99(6), 2014; Benjamin Radcliff, The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 18 According to the UN’s World Happiness Report. 19 Dacher Keltner, Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (WW Norton & Company, 2009); Emily Smith and Emily Esfahani, The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfilment in a World Obsessed with Happiness (Broadway Books, 2017). 20 Sixty-year-old Nicoyan men have a median lifetime of 84.3 years (a three-year advantage over Japanese men), while women have a median lifetime of 85.1.


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Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Among other things we can say about the era of future: The risks of poverty have increased, particularly among people ages thirty-five to fifty-five, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance,people ages thirty-five to forty-five had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty from 1969 to 1989; that risk increased to 23 percent from 1989 to 2009. By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the US will experience bouts of economic insecurity. 35.8 percent of people who are unemployed are now classified as long-term unemployed—out of work for twenty-seven weeks or more.

“Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience . . . can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”17 In his book, The New Geography of Jobs, economist Enrico Moretti states: “For the first time in recent American history, the average worker has not experienced an improvement in standard of living compared to the previous generation. In fact he is worse off by almost every measure. On top of this, income inequality is widening. Uncertainty about the future is now endemic.”18 In our era of chasing future, everything is in flux and stability seems to be the most elusive commodity of all. There’s greater systemic inequality between the rich and poor. There are no guarantees that getting an education and being a willing eager worker will lead to meaningful or even steady work.

How can the top 20 percent grab more than 100 percent of the wealth increase? They can do that because “the other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth.” Not only that, but “5 percent accounted for over 80 percent of the net increase in wealth and the top 1 percent for over 40 percent.”34 Now that might sound like extreme income inequality, but it’s actually better than what would come next. Remember the forty trillion or so dollars in wealth the US added since 2009? The famed 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, leaving 90 percent of the population of the US poorer than they were five or ten years before.35 The trend is the same across the globe, with almost half of the world’s wealth in the hands of just 1 percent of the population, which means that the wealth of the top i percent richest people in the world ($110 trillion) amounts to sixty-five times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.36 So that’s the picture in the age of permanent future: plenty of profit, ever-increasing productivity, substantial corporate investment in technology and machinery, and the top 20 percent spending like it’s 1985.


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The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

Brown too, despite using the words fair and fairness forty times in his 2008 conference speech. How much money people have relative to others is the touchstone of equity. Gender, race, disability and class can generate injustice, but income decides, binding children’s life chances to their home background. Labour tried but did not quite prevent income inequality getting worse in an already notably unequal country. But they slowed down the rise in inequality. Tax, benefits and spending changes ‘significantly redistributed income to the less well off’, the Centre for Economic Performance concluded. ‘Inequality would have been much higher otherwise.’ The 1997 campaign banned references to poverty as too redolent of Old Labour.

Only the redistribution of extra tax would boost the income of poor households up towards the child poverty target; only extra tax would damp the soar-away incomes of the better-off. And this Labour would not address openly and squarely. Without changing the basic distribution of wealth and income, they could never attain their stated ambition. Something was pulling incomes apart in all rich countries, except possibly France. Overall income inequality is measured by a standard called the Gini coefficient – the higher it is, the more unequal the society. On a scale of 100 in 2008, the US figure was 46.6. When Labour left office in 1979, the UK stood at 25. It rose during the 1980s, far more than in comparable countries, stabilizing at 34 in the early 1990s.

A third of parents in deprived areas were not claiming, perhaps because of lack of knowledge or a consumerist society’s suspicion of something for nothing. The fund became a target for budget cutters after the 2010 election. Imagine a highly paid QC arguing Labour’s case. He might plead mitigation. (‘He’ because women had still to penetrate the upper reaches of the legal profession.) Income inequality had risen dramatically before 1997. To make a difference, Labour would have needed a much clearer understanding of trends than ministers could muster, especially the spread of rewards within private companies. Yet under Labour child poverty showed its sharpest fall for decades, and the UK showed the biggest drop in the EU.


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The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

The worst stressors—exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, and mental illness—are shaped by a surprising factor: the level of income inequality in a region. For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence. As you can see from figure 29, these countries also have the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.1 Figure 29: Income Inequality and Mental Health. A large body of research has shown that income inequality in regions and countries is associated with worse behavior (less trust, more violence, drug abuse) and worse health for all, whether it’s physical or mental health.

Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009). 3. Stone, C., D. Trisi, A. Sherman, and B. Debot, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated October 26, 2015, http://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. 4. Pickett, K. E., and R. G. Wilkinson, “The Ethical and Policy Implications of Research on Income Inequality and Child Wellbeing,” Pediatrics 135, Suppl. 2 (March 2015): S39–47, doi:10.1542/peds.2014-3549E. 5. Mayer, E. A., et al., “Gut Microbes and the Brain: Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience,” Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 34, no. 46 (November 12, 2014): 15490–96, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3299-14.2014; Picard, M., R.


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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Two populous poor countries-China and India-have grown much more rapidly in income than the rich countries of the world. Since these two countries alone account for about one-third of world population, the overall effect of this growth on the world distribution ofincome is huge.t If forced to vote, I would probably conclude that world Culture and Prosperity { 37} income inequality-as measured by the distribution ofincome per household-has probably gone down. But it is far more important to understand the complex changes that have occurred, and why they have occurred, than to engage m rhetorical debate about rising or falling inequality. *See Wade and Wolf in Prospect, March 2001.

The right won the Cold War and the left lost, so productivity theories have the upper hand today. The profits of Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola are the fruits of victory. The rewards of investment bankers and CEOs may seem outlandish to you and me, but the market tells us they are worth it. After declining for decades, income inequality within rich states has again increased in the last twenty years (see Box 4.1). But can these theories explain the different economic lives of Heidi and Ivan, Ravi and Sven? Whose output is more valuable, Heidi's or Ravi's? I don't know how to answer that question and am certain that the people who hired Heidi and Ravi, or sign their paychecks, have not thought about it.

Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs. Ferguson, A. 1767. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Ferguson, N. 2001. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. Firebaugh, G. 1999. "Empirics of World Income Inequality." American journal ofSociology 104 (May): 1597-630. Fisher, D. E. 1997. Tube: The Invention ofTelevision. Fort Washington, Pa.: Harvest Books. Fisher, D. H. 1989. Albion's Seed. New York: Oxford University Press. Flannery, K. 1973. "The Origins of Agriculture." Annual Reviews of Anthropology 2: 271-310.


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Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The growing imbalance of wealth was making life harder in both sorts of places. It was throwing the whole country off-kilter. * * * Economists and sociologists who worried about this new reality began trying to identify its causes. To some degree, regional inequality was simply a corollary of income inequality, which itself, by 2018, had grown wider than it had been in the five decades since the census started tracking it—so wide that Moody’s issued a warning that it could threaten the country’s credit profile and “negatively affect economic growth and its sustainability.” As the very rich got ever richer, so did the places where they had always tended to live.

By 2018, per capita income in metropolitan Seattle had grown to nearly $75,000—roughly 25 percent above its peers of a few decades earlier, cities like Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. And this rising wealth was not being spread evenly: by 2016, a city once known for its strong middle class, its lack of extreme poverty and wealth, had matched San Francisco for high levels of income inequality. The average income for the top 20 percent of Seattle households shot up by more than $40,000 in 2016 alone, hitting $318,000; these households took home 53 percent of all the income in the city. By 2018, the median cost of buying a home, across all home types, was higher in Seattle than anywhere in the country except the Bay Area: $754,000.

starting in 1980, this convergence reversed: Robert Manduca, “Antitrust Enforcement as Federal Policy to Reduce Regional Economic Disparities,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 685, no. 1 (September 2019): 156–171. they were now off the charts: Robert Manduca, “The Contribution of National Income Inequality to Regional Economic Divergence,” Social Forces 98, no. 2 (December 2019): 622–648. Job growth was almost twice as fast: Eduardo Porter, “Why Big Cities Thrive, and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind,” The New York Times, October 10, 2017. twenty-five cities with the highest median income: Phillip Longman, “Bloom and Bust,” Washington Monthly, November/December 2015.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

It was further popularized when Mohamed El-Erian, the Pacific Investment Management Company adviser, wrote a New York Times bestseller about the Fed in 2016 called The Only Game in Town. *3 These programs were enacted under Ben Bernanke and are the same ones discussed in the previous chapter. *4 We’ll go over the Fed’s impact on and interactions with income inequality (the differences in how much people earn each year) and wealth inequality (differences in their net worth) at much greater length in Chapter 11. It is also worth noting that, in 2015 remarks, Powell observed that his fears about QE had not materialized and the programs did have benefits. *5 The firm’s name was The Cynosure Group for the ship that brought Marriner Eccles’s father, David, across the Atlantic from Scotland

Black kids, on average, entered school (typically a worse one than the average white child was attending) at a disadvantage that only snowballed as they climbed through the grades.[16] College-bound Black students were more likely to end up at institutions with high tuition and low graduation rates, and far more likely to drop out than their white counterparts.[17] Then came the actual job application process, which research showed treated candidates who were racial minorities unfairly—“Black-sounding” names were much less likely to get a callback.[18] Race was a painfully obvious dividing line in the American economy by that tumultuous summer of 2020, but it was not the only one. The gaping racial wealth divide was partly linked to a broader bifurcation. A huge and growing rift separated America’s haves and have-nots more generally by the time the pandemic struck. Income inequality had been climbing for decades,[19] and wealth inequality had exploded even more drastically. The median household in the top 10 percent of wealth holders in America had a net worth—assets, like stocks and houses, minus liabilities, like mortgages—of $2.6 million in 2019. A family at the middle of the distribution had one-twelfth that much, $224,000, and one in the bottom 25 percent had just $300.

Central banks did not set their borrowing costs in isolation: The trend toward lower rates spanned the globe, and seemed to be the long-running result of lower demand for capital, which owed partly to trends like aging demographics that monetary policy could do little to change. To make matters even more complicated, monetary policy probably had a very different effect on income inequality—the divide between how much rich and poor people earn—because economy-stoking policy helped the job market and boosted laborers. The flip side of a booming stock market was that companies could access more capital to grow and hire. Based on decades of data, it was pretty clearly the case that low rates helped push down the unemployment rate and, if workers became scarce enough, speed up wage growth.


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Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If corporations convert too many assets from the working and business economies into pure capital, then the whole system seizes up for lack of fuel. The main figure they cite, the Gini coefficient of income inequality, measures how much income has been monopolized by the shareholders at the top. A Gini coefficient of 0 would mean that everyone has the same amount of money; a coefficient of 1 means that all the income is being taken by just one person or corporation. According to Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist at S&P, once that coefficient goes above 0.4 or 0.45—where we are as of this writing—it hurts growth for everyone. “It’s good for a market economy to have income inequality but to extremes, it can actually damage growth long term and make it less sustainable.”19 Bovino showed that it’s not just the extreme of inequality that’s to blame but the decline of labor and business income in the face of rising capital gains.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Duleesha Kulasooriya, Shift Happens: How the World Is Changing, and What You Need to Do About It (Houston, Tex.: Idea Bite Press, 2014). 15. Hagel et al., Foreword, “The Shift Index 2013.” 16. “‘Trying to Recapture the Magic’: The Strategy Behind the Pharma M&A Rush,” knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu, May 28, 2014. 17. Rushkoff, Life Inc., 174. 18. Beth Ann Bovino et al., “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” globalcreditreport.com, August 5, 2014. 19. Geoffrey Rogow, “Wealth Inequality Can Damage Economy, S&P’s Bovino Says,” blogs.wsj.com, August 5, 2014. 20. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 21.

., 229 Circuit City, 90 Citizens United case, 72 Claritas, 32 click workers, 50 climate change, 135, 227–28, 237 coin of the realm, 128–29 collaboration as corporate strategy, 106–7 colonialism, 71–72 commons, 215–23 co-owned networks and, 220–23 history of, 215–16 projects inspired by, 217–18 successful, elements of, 216–17 tragedy of, 215–16 worker-owned collectives and, 219–20 competencies, of corporations, 79–80 Connect+Develop, 107 Consumer Electronics Show, 19 Consumer Reports,33 contracting with small and medium-sized enterprises, 112 cooperative currencies, 160–65 favor banks, 161 LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), 163–65 time dollar systems, 161–63 co-owned networks, 220–23 corporations, 68–82 acquisition of startups, growth through, 78 amplifying effect of, 70, 73 Big Shift and, 76 cash holdings of, 76, 77–78 competency of, 79–80 cost reduction, growth through, 79–80 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs), 149–50 Deloitte’s study of return on assets (ROA) of, 76–77 distributive alternative to platform monopolies, 93–97 evaluation of, 69–74 extractive nature of, 71–72, 73, 74, 75, 80–82 growth targets, meeting, 68–69 income inequality and, 81–82 limits to corporate model, 75–76, 80–82 managerial and financial methods to deliver growth by, 77–79 monopolies (See monopolies) obsolescence created by, 70–71, 73 offshoring and, 78–79 personhood of, 72, 73–74, 90, 91 recoding of, 93–97, 125–26 repatriation and, 80 retrieval of values of empire and, 71–72, 73 as steady-state enterprises, 97–123 Costco, 74 cost reduction, and corporate growth, 79–80 Couchsurfing.com, 46 crashes of 1929, 99 of 2007, 133–34 biotech crash, of 1987, 6 flash crash, 180 Creative Commons, 215 creative destruction, 83–87 credit, 132–33 credit-card companies, 143–44 crowdfunding, 38–39, 198–201 crowdsharing apps, 45–49 crowdsourcing platforms, 49–50 Crusades, 16 Cumbrian Pounds, 156 Curitiba, Brazil modified LETS program, 164–65 Daly, Herman, 184 data big, 39–44 getting paid for our own, 44–45 “likes” economy and, 32, 34–36 in pre-digital era, 40 Datalogix, 32 da Vinci, Leonardo, 236 debt, 152–54 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs), 149–50 deflation, 169 Dell, 115–16 Dell, Michael, 115–16 Deloitte Center for the Edge, 76–77 destructive destruction, 100 Detroit Dollars, 156 digital distributism, 224–39 artisanal era mechanisms and values retrieved by, 233–34 developing distributive businesses, 237–38 digital industrialism compared, 226 digital technology and, 230–31 historical ideals of distributism, 228–30 leftism, distinguished, 231 Pope Francis’s encyclical espousing distributed approach to land, labor and capital, 227–28 Renaissance era values, rebirth of, 235–37 subsidiarity and, 231–32 sustainable prosperity as goal of, 226–27 digital economy, 7–11 big data and, 39–44 destabilizing form of digitally accelerated capitalism, creation of, 9–10 digital marketplace, development of, 24–30 digital transaction networks and, 140–51 disproportionate relationship between capital and value in, 9 distributism and, 224–39 externalizing cost of replacing employees in, 14–15 industrialism and, 13–16, 23–24, 44, 53–54, 93, 101–2, 201, 214, 226 industrial society, distinguished, 11 “likes” and similar metrics, economy of, 30–39 platform monopolies and, 82–93, 101 digital industrialism, 13–16, 23–24, 101–2, 201 digital distributism compared, 226 diminishing returns of, 93 externalizing costs and, 14–15 growth agenda and, 14–15, 23–24 human data as commodity under, 44 income disparity and, 53–54 labor and land pushed to unbound extremes by, 214 “likes” economy and, 33 reducing bottom line as means of creating illusion of growth and, 14 digital marketplace, 24–30 early stages of e-commerce, 25–26 highly centralized sales platforms of, 29 initial treatment of Internet as commons, 25 “long tail” of widespread digital access and, 26 positive reinforcement feedback loop and, 28 power-law dynamics and, 26–29 removal of humans from selection process in, 28 digital transaction networks, 140–51 Bitcoin, 143–49, 150–51, 152 blockchains and, 144–51 central authorities, dependence on, 142 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs) and, 149–50 PayPal, 140–41 theft and, 142 direct public offerings (DPOs), 205–6 discount brokerages, 176–78 diversification, 208, 211 dividends, 113–14, 208–10 dividend traps, 113 Dorsey, Jack, 191–92 Draw Something, 192, 193 Drexler, Mickey, 116 dual transformation, 108–9 dumbwaiter effect, 19 Dutch East India Company, 71, 89, 131 eBay, 16, 26, 29, 45, 140 education industry, 95–97 Eisenhower administration, 52–53, 63, 75 Elberse, Anita, 28 employee-owned companies, 116–18 Enron, 133, 171n Eroski, 220 eSignal, 178 EthicalBay, 221 E*Trade, 176, 177 Etsy, 16, 26, 30 expense reduction, and corporate growth, 78–79 Facebook, 4, 31, 83, 93, 96, 201 data gathering and sales by, 41, 44 innovation by acquisition of startups, 78 IPO of, 192–93, 195 psychological experiments conducted on users by, 32–33 factors of production, 212–14 Fairmondo, 221 Family Assistance Plan, 63 family businesses, 103–4, 231–32 FarmVille, 192 favor banks, 161 Febreze Set & Refresh, 108 Federal Reserve, 137–38 feedback loop, and positive reinforcement, 28 Ferriss, Tim, 201 feudalism, 17 financial services industry, 131–33, 171–73, 175 Fisher, Irving, 158 flash crash, 180 flexible purpose corporations, 119–20 flow, investing in, 208–10 Forbes,88, 173, 174 40-hour workweek, reduction of, 58–60 401(k) plans, 171–74 Francis, Pope, 227, 228, 234 Free, Libre, Open Knowledge (FLOK) program, 217–18 Free (Anderson), 33 free money theory, local currencies based on, 156–59 barter exchanges, 159 during Great Depression, 158–59 self-help cooperatives, 159 stamp scrip, 158–59 tax anticipation scrip, 159 Wörgls, 157–58 frenzy, 98–99 Fried, Jason, 59 Friedman, Milton, 64 Friendster, 31 Frito-Lay, 80 front running, 180–81 Fulfillment by Amazon, 89 Fureai Kippu (Caring Relationship Tickets), 162 Future of Work initiative, 56n Gallo, Riso, 103–4 Gap, 116 Gates, Bill, 186 General Electric, 132 General Public License (GPL) for software, 216 Gesell, Silvio, 157 GI Bill, 99 Gimein, Mark, 147 Gini coefficient of income inequality, 81–82, 92 global warming, 135, 227–28, 237 GM, 80 Goldman Sachs, 133, 195 gold standard, 139 Google, 8, 48, 78, 83, 90–91, 93, 141, 218 acquisitions by, 191 business model of, 37 data sales by, 37, 44 innovation by acquisition of startups, 78 IPO of, 194–95 protests against, 1–3, 5, 98–99 grain receipts, 128 great decoupling, 53 Great Depression, 137, 158–59 Great Exhibition, 1851, 19 Greenspan, Alan, 132–33 growth, 1–11 bazaars, and economic expansion in late Middle Ages, 16–18 central currency and, 126, 129–31, 133–36 digital industrialism, growth agenda of, 14–15, 23–24 highly centralized e-commerce platforms and, 29 startups, hypergrowth expected of, 187–91 as trap (See growth trap) growth trap, 4–5, 68–123 central currency as core mechanism of, 133–34 corporations as program and, 68–82 platform monopolies and, 82–93, 101 recoding corporate model and, 93–97 steady-state enterprises and, 98–123 guaranteed minimum income programs, 62–65 guaranteed minimum wage public jobs, 65–66 guilds, 17 Hagel, John, 76–77 Hardin, Garrett, 215–16 Harvard Business Review,108–9 Heiferman, Scott, 196–97 Henry VIII, King, 215, 229 Hewlett-Packard UK, 112 high-frequency trading (HFT), 179–80 Hilton, 115 Hobby Lobby case, 72 Hoffman, Reid, 61 Holland, Addie Rose, 205–6 holograms, 235 Homeport New Orleans, 121 housing industry, 135 Huffington, Arianna, 34, 35, 201 Huffington Post, 34, 201 human role in economy, 13–67 aristocracy’s efforts to control peasant economy, 17–18 bazaars and, 16–18 big data and, 39–44 chartered monopolies and, 18 decreasing employment and, 30–39 digital marketplace, impact of, 24–30 industrialism and, 13–16, 18–24, 44 “likes” economy and, 30–39 reevaluation of employment and adopting policies to decrease it and, 54–67 sharing economy and, 44–54 Hurwitz, Charles, 117 IBM, 90–91, 112 inclusive capitalism, 111–12 income disparity corporate model and, 81–82 digital technology as accelerating, 53–54 Gini coefficient of, 81–82, 92 growth trap and, 4 power-law dynamics and, 27–28, 30 public service options for reducing, 65–66 IndieGogo, 30, 199 individual retirement accounts (IRAs), 171 industrial farming, 134–35 industrialism, 18–24 branding and, 20 digital, 13–16, 23–24, 44, 53–54, 93, 101–2, 201, 214, 226 disempowerment of workers and, 18–19 human connection between producer and consumer, loss of, 19–20 isolation of human consumers from one another and, 20–21 mass marketing and, 19–20 mass media and, 20–21 purpose of, 18–19, 22 value system of, 18–19 inflation, 169 Instagram, 31 Intercontinental Exchange, 182 interest, 129–31 investors/investing, 70, 72, 168–223 algorithmic trading and, 179–84 bounded, 210–15 commons model for running businesses and, 215–23 crowdfunding and, 198–201 derivative finance, volume of, 182 digital technology and, 169–70, 175–84 direct public offerings (DPOs) and, 205–6 discount brokerages and, 176–78 diversification and, 208, 211 dividends and, 208–10 flow, investing in, 208–10 high-frequency trading (HFT) and, 179–80 in low-interest rate environment, 169–70 microfinancing platforms and, 202–4 platform cooperatives and, 220–23 poor performance of do-it-yourself traders and, 177–78 retirement savings and, 170–75 startups and, 184–205 ventureless capital and, 196–205 irruption, 98 i-traffic, 196 iTunes, 27, 29, 34, 89 J.


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Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

But today, the United States faces enormous challenges on the issues of income inequality, social mobility, and our shrinking middle class. Yet, most of the discussion in our country about these issues squarely revolves around tax code policy. On the topic of college’s role in leveling the playing field, our leaders espouse platitudes about how we need to help all young Americans obtain a college degree. President Obama recently called a college degree “an economic imperative.”52 Today, our higher-education system is becoming a cause of income inequality in our country, instead of a solution. In a single generation, we’ve seen college’s role in our society and economy change entirely.

“Inventing the SAT,” The Alicia Patterson Foundation, April 6, 2011. http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/inventing-sat (accessed December 17, 2014). 16 Jaschik, Scott. “SAT Scores Drop Again,” Inside Higher Ed, September 25, 2012. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/25/sat-scores-are-down-and-racial-gaps-remain (accessed December 17, 2014). 17 Zumbrun, Josh. “SAT Scores and Income Inequality: How Wealthier Kids Rank Higher.” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/10/07/sat-scores-and-income-inequality-how-wealthier-kids-rank-higher/ (accessed March 31, 2015). 18 Strauss, Valerie. “A basic flaw in the argument against affirmative action,” Washington Post, July 17, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/17/a-basic-flaw-in-the-argument-against-affirmative-action/ (accessed December 8, 2014). 19 Pinker, Steven.

Or, it’s entirely possible that millions of kids will leave school able to fully capitalize on the productivity advantages offered by a globally connected world, define their own dreams, and live happy, productive, self-sustaining lives. These millions of innovative successes will create new jobs that benefit society broadly, narrowing income inequality and reducing poverty levels. The Stakes for Civil Society For much of our nation’s history, we functioned with an effective citizenship model. Our society had a small number of information sources that were shared broadly across the population. Our limited information sources served to focus the attention of citizens and their representatives and ensured, generally for the good, a shared set of assumptions in making policy decisions.


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No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Job creation is a critical challenge for most policy makers even as businesses complain about critical skill gaps. Meanwhile, graying populations are starting to fray social safety nets—and for debt-ridden societies in advanced economies, the challenge can only get more pressing as the cost of capital starts to rise. Much-needed productivity growth continues to elude the public sector. Income inequality is rising and causing a backlash, in some cases targeted at the very interconnections of trade, finance, and people that have fueled the growth of the past three decades. The disruptive forces and trend breaks discussed in this book pose a unique set of challenges for policy makers, affecting several domains—labor, fiscal, trade and immigration policy, and resource and technology regulation.

SOURCE: EIU World Database; McKinsey Global institute analysis Inequality in a Time of Productivity Growth Global inequality between countries is shrinking as China and other emerging economies grow rapidly. With their newfound prosperity, they continue to reduce the income gap between themselves and advanced economies by increasing productivity. At the same time, however, income inequality within countries is widening. Since the mid-1980s, in all but four of the countries in the OECD, incomes have risen significantly faster for the top decile of households than for the bottom decile. The handful of exceptions that had faster income growth in the bottom decile include Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain, each of which has suffered a remarkably deep recession.15 Advanced economies are not the only ones facing this challenge.

Chun Han Wong, “Singapore tightens hiring rules for foreign skilled labor,” Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2013. 14. “Firms to consider Singaporeans fairly for jobs,” Singapore Ministry of Manpower, September 23, 2013, www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/Pages/PressReleasesDetail.aspx?listid=523. 15. Growing income inequality in OECD countries: What drives it and how can policy tackle it? OECD, May 2011, www.oecd.org/social/soc/47723414.pdf. 16. World Inequality Database. 17. A new multilateralism for the 21st century: The Richard Dimbleby lecture, Christine Lagarde, International Monetary Fund, February 3, 2014, www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2014/020314.htm. 18.


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The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Were we serious about interrupting our downward spiral, we would start by recognizing the social limits of immediate gratification and of an economic strategy that always prioritizes the largest, quickest, cheapest payoff. This isn’t to question the idea of efficiency—of exploiting technology and technique to get the biggest bang for our buck. Efficiency is what made our civilization possible, and we’ll need more and more of it as we navigate the crises of income inequality, ecological degradation, and resource scarcity that the Impulse Society has been unable to address effectively—or has simply made worse.But it is to criticize the ideology of efficiency—or the belief, sacred in contemporary politics and especially business, that the greatest output at the lowest cost should always be society’s aim.

More problematic, however, were the economic prescriptions offered by Reagan and other self-styled fiscal conservatives: massive doses of radical individualism and free-market zeal, untempered by regulation or institutional moderation. Ultimately, these policies would simply accelerate the corrosion of the very social values that conservatives sought to preserve. And yet, even as the consequences of our free-market ideology ripped through society, hammering the job market, exacerbating income inequality, and making life extremely challenging for families, communities, and the would-be self-reliant; conservatives’ near-religious faith in efficient markets required them to ignore the contradictions and the collateral damage—or to awkwardly try to justify those costs as the natural order of things.

In the aftermath of our financial and political meltdowns, many of us no longer trust the basic structures and assumptions underlying society. It’s not only that our confidence in the political system is at a historic low. We’ve also concluded, many of us, that our economic system is effectively working against us—that it has been so thoroughly corrupted by a quick-returns, winner-take-all mentality that income inequality, corporate brutality, and periodic market meltdowns are the new reality. We’ve seen the other kinds of market failure as well. We’ve seen the religion of cost cutting taken to absurd, even destructive extremes—as when Bangladesh sweatshops collapse because contractors skimp on concrete; or when a corner-cutting oil company spews a hundred million gallons of crude into the Gulf.


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More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

So to me the most plausible explanation is that as these two horsemen gallop around the world, they’re causing differences across companies to grow in country after country, and the difference between superstar and zombie firms is leading to concentration (and hence inequality) in personal wealth and income. A Tale of Three Economies The debate and ongoing research about the causes of growing wealth and income inequality are important because we want to understand what’s driving important social and economic phenomena. It seems to me, though, that much of the discussion at present begs the question of whether these types of concentration are bad. The assumption is widespread that rising wealth and income inequality across peoples and households is a major problem. I’m not sure about that; I think a bigger problem lies elsewhere. To see why this is, consider three different scenarios for change in a hypothetical country: There’s strong economic growth.

They change the laws, pack the courts, demand bribes, assume control of the largest companies (publicly or behind the scenes), hire security services for themselves and let law and order decay for everyone else, and so on. The economy slows down because it’s so badly managed, and all tech progress has to be imported. The elite get fantastically rich while everyone else suffers and becomes poorer. Wealth and income inequality skyrocket. Economic growth is healthy and institutions remain inclusive, but tech progress is extraordinarily powerful—so much so that it disrupts industry after industry. This progress fuels many types of concentration; it allows more crops to be grown on less land, more consumption from fewer natural resources, more output from fewer factories, and more sales and profits from a smaller number of companies.

Gains for those in the middle, however, slow down considerably. And some segments of the labor force face particularly tough challenges; the factories and farms that used to employ them close, and new ones don’t open. Job opportunities concentrate in cities and in service industries. Wealth and income inequality rise a great deal. Most readers, I believe, wouldn’t find the society described in the first scenario above to be unfair or unjust, or one that they wouldn’t want to live in. People at all levels of affluence are doing better, after all, and institutions remain inclusive. Few people, though, would want to live within the second scenario.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

But today, in the post–Citizens United era of unlimited political campaign financing, suggestions from pro-grassroots activists such as Eisenberg are increasingly non grata in DC power circles. On the one hand, articulate criticisms of the ‘new’ philanthropy are growing louder, a pushback that, as Benjamin Soskis suggests, ‘can be traced to the nation’s mounting uneasiness with income inequality and to the spread of an economic populism that refuses to regard the concentration of wealth charitably’.52 On the other hand, legislators don’t seem to have yet taken enough notice. ‘If I was a betting man’, Aaron Dorfman of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy said to me, ‘I would not be putting money on the idea that there would be any [major legislative] changes implemented soon’.

30Tristan Hopper, ‘York University Rejects RIM Co-founder Jim Balsillie’s $60-million Deal’, National Post, 3 April 2012. 31Freeland, Plutocrats, 14–15; see also Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, and Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, ‘The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 107, no. 1 (1992), 1–34. 32Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2013); see also James Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hacker’s comment is quoted in Judith Warner’s ‘The Charitable-Giving Divide’, New York Times, 20 April 2010. 33Freeland, Plutocrats, 246–7. 34David Futrelle, ‘Was Nick H. Hanauer’s TED Talk on Income Inequality too Rich for Rich People?’, Time, 18 May 2012. 35See Warner, ‘The Charitable-Giving Divide’. 36Zunz, Philanthropy in America, 122. 37Lears, ‘Money Changes Everything’, New Republic, 2 April 2007, newrepublic.com. 38Zunz, Philanthropy in America, 125. 39Paul Krugman, ‘The Mellon Doctrine’, New York Times, 31 March 2011. 40Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 14. 41John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998 [1958]).

., 33, 116 Bush, Jeb, 132–3 Bzdak, Michael, 97 Canada: and Americans’ buying prescription drugs, 199; and Coca-Cola, 223; and company Research in Motion, 106; mining industry scandals in, 33; mortgage market of, 171; and spending on global health issues, 154 Cargill: and consolidation, 209; and CEO Greg Page, 210, 212; as a food supplier, 204; and grain and poultry exports, 208; and profits from price hikes, 210; and TechnoServe, 227 Carnegie, Andrew: and admiration for Republicans, 49–50; and admiration for writings of Spencer, 48; and application of business techniques to philanthropy, 15, 95; as benefactor of the Tuskegee Institute, 10; and Carnegie Library, 55; as a domestic steel manufacturer, 45, 49; and duty to accumulate wealth, 47, 48; and establishment of public libraries, 10, 118; first Wealth essay of, 10, 11, 44–5, 46, 51; and idea that his wealth would be workers’ wealth, 42–4; and income inequality, 48–9; labour policies of, 43–4; and philanthropic giving, 44, 56, 110; and philanthropy, 11, 14, 27–8, 41–50, 111; and reversal of policy of increasing wages, 44, 50; and skill of private individual as investor in community, 46, 47; steel fortune of, 42–4; and trade tariffs, 49–50; and unionization, 43; and vision of public access to goods, 58; Wealth essays of, 41, 47; and workers’ strike at Homestead Plant, 43–4 Carnegie Steel, 43 Center for Effective Philanthropy, 89, 99 Centre for International Governance, 106–7 Chan, Margaret, 226–7 charter schools: and Agora Charter School, 130; and Duncan’s policies, 139; and exploitation by corporations, 123; and Gates Foundation, 118; and film Waiting for Superman, 125–6; and Harlem Children’s Zone, 127, 128; and ideas of Budde and Shanker, 123; increased resources of, 124–5; lottery system for placement in, 125–6; and low-performing students, 124–5; and MATCH schools, 126; and Michigan’s schools, 133; and operating on a for-profit basis, 131; performance and quality of, 124–5; and philanthropy, 127; and reforms championed by Gates and Broad, 139; and scarcity of choices, 124; and special needs students, 125; and virtual charter schools in Maine, 132; and Washington, DC schools, 125 Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, 99–101 China, 17, 212, 219 Cipla, 189–91 Clinton, Bill, 245; and benefits from philanthropy, 31; and business-oriented approach to philanthropy, 8; and Doug Band, 29–32; and Frank Guistra, 34–5; and publicizing campaign contributions, 35; and Teneo company, 32; and treatment of South Africa and other nations, 188, 189; and trip to Kazakhstan, 34 Clinton Foundation, 30–2 Coca-Cola: and African sales, 223; boycott of, 227; Buffett as largest investor in, 173–4, 222; and donations to World Health Organization, 226; Gates Foundation, 173, 174, 222, 227–9; and Jorge Casimiro, 226; lobbying efforts of, 26–7, 225; and sales in the US and Canada, 223 Cohen, Myron, 196–7 Davos, Switzerland, 8, 30, 64, 86, 243 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 110, 237 diseases: and cancer, 149, 164, 165, 201, 202, 224; cholera, 2; and chronic diseases, 223–4; and DPT vaccines, 158; and drug-resistant strains, 192–3; eradication of, 157–61, 207; eradication versus control efforts for, 157–61; germ theory of, 4–5; and heart disease, 224; Hepatitis C, 202; HIV/AIDS, 7, 34, 102, 108, 153–4, 188–93; hookworm, 150; immunization programmes against, 158–61; and infectious diseases, 223–4; malaria, 7, 149, 153, 157, 160, 193, 223; measles, 5, 158, 160, 173; and non-communicable diseases, 223; and philanthropic spending, 15; polio, 5, 149, 150, 154–60, 173; in poor countries, 69–70, 159; and risk of vaccines for HPV, measles and other diseases, 164; smallpox, 155, 158; syphilis, 150; thalassaemia major, 103; tuberculosis, 149, 157, 193, 223; World Health Organization’s allocations for, 224; yellow fever, 5, 150, 151 Dorfman, Aaron, 174–5, 234 Dowie, Mark, 229, 230 Drayton, Bill, 66, 68–9 drugs: Cervarix, 161; and clinical trials, 167–9; deferiprone, 103–4; and Eli Lilly’s Prozac, 104–5; and GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, 105; and Glivec, 165; and HIV drugs, 189–96; and Merck’s Gardasil, 161, 163–4; Nexavar, 201; and patented drugs, 187, 191, 202; Vioxx, 161 DuBois, W.


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The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

They understand that companies that leave their communities polluted and impoverished will wither before long. And by gently downplaying the importance of the stock market, they are even questioning the very measure of success that was so sacrosanct to Welch. There are tentative signs of progress. Companies that for years promoted policies that exacerbated income inequality and gutted labor unions are suddenly expressing concern about the plight of everyday workers. After decades of lobbying for environmental deregulation, big business is now beginning to tackle climate change. And there are new standards, certifications, and even stock exchanges emerging to support this work.

But it also became clear that without sufficient regulation, executives could extract vast sums of wealth from corporations for themselves while undermining the broader economy. The sudden rise of the oil industry, the sugar trust, the financial system, and the railways spawned monopolies and robber barons, not to mention startling income inequality. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, the New Deal helped revitalize the economy with massive investments in infrastructure, creating millions of jobs. Wall Street was reined in with new regulations, and as workers benefited, inequality waned. It was a recipe for growth, and in the postwar years companies poured profits back into their workforces, ensuring a stable, skilled employee base.

Before Welch took over, productivity and worker pay rose in tandem; following his campaign against loyalty, they diverged, and worker pay has never recovered. Until Welch came on the scene, CEOs were well-paid managers; after his gargantuan paydays, other bosses came to expect extraordinary compensation packages, too. With workers earning less and CEOs earning so much more, income inequality began to soar. Manufacturing jobs in America peaked just as Welch took over, then began to decline as he sent work overseas. Mergers and acquisitions ballooned on his watch, concentrating power in the hands of just a few companies in sector after sector, leading to higher prices, fewer options for employees, and a less dynamic economy overall.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Yet, because low skill, low wage jobs must be created to increase the employment rate, this increase inevitably leads to an increase in income inequality (Artus 2017). 68 P.-M. Menger This can be called a curse of higher employment rates. Higher income inequality—yet not the astronomically high rate observed in the US— must be tolerated if the aim is to obtain a higher employment rate. Can the curse of the high employment rate be averted? It turns out that almost all of the OECD countries that have a high employment rate and low income inequality build their welfare policy on two pillars. Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland have not only large-scale redistributive policies but also a workforce with high labour force skills, including among the low skilled, thanks to a high quality education and vocational training system.

France’s choice has been to reject the ‘working poor’ model. The minimum wage is among the highest of OECD countries. Over the last 55 years, it has increased faster than the inflation rate and faster than the average wage over the last 20 years. France has indeed a fairly redistributive policy that lowers income inequality and manages to have a rather low share of people below the poverty line. This leads to a wage compression that results from two distinct mechanisms. For the lower part of the wage distribution, the high level of minimum wage dramatically reduced lower tail inequality. For the upper part of the distribution, there is a decrease in the skill premium (Verdugo 2014).


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

And the Chinese soybean sector has been disrupted historically by changing government policy, leading to relocation of soy production further north and also much less effective extension, processing and marketing support than with other crops. 12. GINI data are per the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) and the University of Texas Estimated Household Income Inequality data set. The latter attempts to adjust for some methodological weaknesses in the SWIID series. In trend terms, both data sets tell a very similar story. Rural income data per the Landesa 2010 China survey. 13. From ‘nongye zhichi gongye’ to ‘gongye fanbu nongye, chengshi zhichi nongcun’ .

However, since most land outside the Bangkok area could not be officially taken by creditors because of the absence of formal title, and because peasants could simply disappear and find new land, there were some limits to rural suffering. After the Second World War, as the population growth rate rose to 3 per cent a year and tenancy, landlessness and wage-based labour increased further, there was a big jump in income inequality in rural areas. The government increased expenditure on rural infrastructure, but its overall policy remained heavily urban-biased. The proof of this was the setting-up of a monopoly state buyer of rice for export, or a monopsony, which pushed down domestic rice prices received by farmers, creating instead trading profits for government that in some years amounted to one-third of total state income.

See Lim, Peasants and Their Agricultural Economy, 1874–1941, p. 125. A similar pattern of high-yield market gardens feeding urban and mining populations was apparent in African colonies, like Rhodesia, with a pro-scale bias in agricultural policy. See Freund. 99. See K. S. Jomo, A Question of Class, pp. 77 and 123–4. In addition, Shireen Madziah Hashim, Income Inequality and Poverty in Malaysia (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 202, states that the export tax, research levy and replanting levy to which rubber was subjected in the 1980s amounted to a combined tax of 13 per cent of crop value. 100. On land concentration, see Jomo, A Question of Class, p. 113.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

The first generation of illiterate Gastarbeiter sent their remittances back home to their Anatolian villages, but the second generation of European Turks have become employers themselves, spreading their wealth and their skills back home by building factories and schools. In the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, warehouses churn out large stocks of fine kilims (rugs) to augment the region’s agriculture.7 The current, third-generation Turkish diaspora has spread from Berlin to Bishkek, sending back significant funds, which help reduce Turkey’s income inequality (which, alongside those of Brazil, China, and the United States, is the highest in the world). “We have so much stability now that even as a migrant people, we look forward to wandering home,” a German Turk mused while resting on the drive from Ankara to Kayseri. Indeed, the Turkish economy is now bounding toward self-sustainability.

As for modernization, Pakistan’s military-controlled economy is actually a fraud of luxury imports and rock-bottom real estate selloffs, including a sleek, Arab-financed “seven-star” property in Islamabad meant to emulate the glitter of Dubai.8 Karachi is at once the country’s richest and poorest city, the center of industry and of radical madrasahs exporting extremists to Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the site of deadly riots between pro-and anti-Musharraf forces. The only thing “booming” in Pakistan are the constant suicide bombings in all corners of the country. Most men are still employed as chauffeurs, security guards, or shopkeepers struggling for a predictable life in an increasingly disorderly country. Income inequality is increasing; carjacking, burglary, and sectarian violence are all on the rise. Over the next twenty years, the population will near two hundred million—unmanageable even for the military. Pakistan is becoming more like faltering, splintering Indonesia than the Islamist democratic powerhouse Turkey.

Neither region is economically competitive, suffering from high debt, excessive spending, low tax collection, falling productivity, low innovation, low education standards, high business costs, and stalling poverty reduction in both cities and rural areas. 20 Latin America and Africa have the highest income inequality in the world, but Latin America’s is, but worse because it has more wealthy people. The region’s indigenous peasants are a high-altitude version of Africa’s destitute farmers tilling tiny plots, while super-wealthy African and Latin elites live in mansion villas with abundant first-world amenities.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Estate taxes on the rich drop more than ever—for instance, the heirs to a $3 million fortune would pay $1 million less in taxes on it. The income of the most affluent top fifth increases by 25 percent and that of the richest top 1 percent almost doubles. Some Key Changes in the 1980s Bad for Americans in General The United States experiences the fastest and biggest increase in income inequality between the 1920s and 2020. After a century of wages increasing in sync with increases in productivity, that synchronization ends. Employees’ share of the national income abruptly declines from 62 percent to 56 percent and even more sharply for everyone but the richest tenth.

But imagine the thousands of companies and cities and schools and cultural institutions all over the country that have delegated so much of this kind of work to contractors, thereby making the treatment of all those eleven-dollar-an-hour workers somebody else’s problem. According to a 2018 study by five major-university economists, a full third of the increase in American income inequality over these last forty years has been the result of just this one new, dehumanizing labor practice. Another cunning way big businesses began squeezing workers in the 1980s was to become extremely big. “The basic idea,” explains an economist specializing in markets for labor, “is that if employers don’t have to compete with one another for workers, they can pay less, and workers will be stuck without the outside job offers that would enable them to claim higher wages.”

It’s too bad your wages haven’t gone up for forty years, goes one common argument from the right and well-to-do concerning the economic condition of the American majority, and that pensions and unions and millions of good jobs disappeared, but, hey, haven’t we let you eat cake? That is, they say, in all seriousness, that income inequality isn’t as bad as it looks because some things, like milk and eggs, are actually less expensive now, and TVs are gigantic and inexpensive, and all the other stuff at the Walmarts and dollar stores is so cheap, thanks to Chinese imports. As two influential papers by a pair of University of Chicago economists put it in 2009, the “prices of low-quality products” that “poorer consumers buy” such as “ ‘cosmetics,’ ‘toys and sporting goods,’…‘wrapping materials and bags,’ ” and “squid frozen filets,” fell during the 1990s and 2000s.*1 Yet even that booby-prize rationale for the post-1980s social contract—most pay won’t go up, but some costs won’t either!


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

For example, guaranteed access to state benefits is worth more than access to benefits of equivalent amount that depend on means testing, behaviour testing or the discretion of bureaucratic officials. Income security has a value in itself. An underlying theme of this book is that social income inequality has grown by even more than income inequality as conventionally measured. A principal reason is the expansion of forms of rent and the consequent ‘rise of the rentier’. THE SPECTRE OF RENT There is a knock on the door; it has been heard before. The man has come for the rent; he wants it now… On the mantelpiece, the tin is empty.

McClure, From a Patent Market for Lemons to a Marketplace for Patents: Benchmarking Intellectual Property in its Evolution to Asset Class Status, mimeo, May 2015. 34 K. Tienhaara, ‘Resisting the “law of greed”’, greenagenda.org.au, September 2015. 35 ‘Free exchange: Game of zones’, The Economist, 21 March 2015, p. 65. 36 C. Shepard, ‘The secret US trade agreement that will make income inequality worse’, care2.com, 15 February 2015. 37 D. Autor, D. Dorn and G. Hansen, ‘Untangling trade and technology: Evidence from local labour markets’, Economic Journal, 125 (584), 2015: 621–46. 38 ‘Trade minister must listen to medical specialists on TPP’, Scoop.co.nz, 15 July 2015. 39 J. Capaldo, ‘The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: European Disintegration, Unemployment and Instability’, Global Development and Environment Institute Working Paper 14-03, October 2014; J.

The main narrative in the age of rentier capitalism concerns the growth of distress debt. This has contributed to inequality and intensified economic insecurity for a growing proportion of the population. Those on low incomes have the highest debt relative to income and face the highest interest rates, another reason why inequality measured by money incomes understates social income inequality. In particular, the precariat is living on the edge of unsustainable debt, knowing that one accident, illness or financial mistake could unleash a spiral leading to homelessness, dependence on charity, alcoholism, drug addiction and other social illnesses. Maurizio Lazzarato, an Italian sociologist, has depicted ‘an indebted subjectivity’ – a sense of facing infinite debt that feeds into a psyche of nervousness and social passivity.6 Among the causes of mass indebtedness is a historically unique situation: people are trying to maintain a past living standard in the context of declining and more volatile real wages.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

The rich were getting richer; the poor in other countries (or the machines) were taking the jobs. Though financial and monetary stimulus were pouring into the system, there was no trickle down. “The extent and continuing increase in income inequality in the United States greatly concern me,” Bernanke’s successor Janet Yellen remarked in 2015, after seven years of quantitative easing policy. “The past several decades have seen the most sustained rise in income inequality since the nineteenth century.” Even with more money floating around, there was, paradoxically (at least using traditional thinking), less demand. But that wasn’t the whole story. Networks were also working insidiously on the supply side of the equation.

In fact they tell us exactly how our most vexing problems—the very problems networks have created—might be solved. Old-style ideas will, however, lead us down dangerous paths. Our leaders today are, as a result, often imperiling us in ways they can’t understand. Honestly, these figures are not mentally prepared to fight any sort of battle on this landscape, whether it is against terrorists or income inequality or pandemic diseases. They probably never will be. The language and habits of this new world are simply too obscure for them. This book is not, in any event, written for them. It is written for those coming to power and those already in power—even if they don’t know it yet. It is written for those who are inheriting the possibility of that last generation’s inventions and the price of their errors.

But honestly it is also temperament. Networks are packed with tremendous potential. Many of our current leaders like things as they are. The words “potential” and “threat” rhyme in their consideration. They don’t appreciate that puzzles such as the future of United States–China relations or income inequality or artificial intelligence or terrorism are all network problems, unsolvable with traditional thinking. At the same moment in time that so many of us are alive with the joy of being around something that is beginning, most of our leaders are locked, sadly or with terror, into the ending of something else.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

Capturing the world’s emerging middle class. McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/consumer_and_retail/capturing_the_worlds_emerging_middle_class. Cowen, T. (2015, December 24). The marriages of power couples reinforce income inequality. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-couples-reinforce-income-inequality.html. Crane, D. (2013, October 11). The high-end matchmaking service for tycoons. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/fashion/the-high-end-matchmaking-service-for-tycoons.html. Cunningham, M. (2008).

The disappearance of a wealthy, idle aristocracy and the rise of an educated, self-made elite (what some call a meritocratic elite) means that “leisure” is no longer synonymous with our upper classes. But there is a cost to this more egalitarian version of status. According to work done by Cornell University economist Robert Frank, there is a measurable decline in leisure and happiness among the wealthy. “In fact, while income inequality may be growing, ‘leisure inequality’—time spent on enjoyment—is growing as a mirror image” writes Frank, “with the low earners gaining leisure and the high earners losing.”30 From 1985 to 2003, wealthy men lost leisure hours, decreasing from 34.4 to 33.2 hours per week, while less wealthy men saw an increase from 36.6 to 39.1 over the same time period.

Fifteen years later, China is the world’s largest car economy, accounting for almost 14 million vehicles in 2009, compared to the United States’ 10.4 million. As early as 2008, the cell phone manufacturer Nokia generated more than three times more revenue in China than in the United States.28 It’s worth noting that massive income inequality, access to education, and the great political and cultural divides between the Chinese rural and urban populations may impact these estimates. Yet, by the sheer size of their populations alone, it seems nearly inevitable that the Asian Pacific middle-class consumer will take over where Western influence and power was once held.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

But while worker wages stagnated, the pay received by top business executives has soared in the last twenty-five years. “In 1979 the ratio of the pay received by the average CEO in total direct compensation to that of the average production worker was 37.2:1. By 2007 (the year before the recession) it had grown to 277:1.”7 The high levels of income inequality immediately before the Great Depression and Great Recession have led some to suggest that high levels of income inequality may precipitate economic crises by destabilizing the economy as a whole. Although the incomes of the wealthiest also declined during the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve’s triennial report, the 2014 Survey of Consumer Finances, shows that in the three years following the Great Recession, the typical American family’s income declined 5 percent.

As a sociologist, I examine the larger social forces that lead workers to take on gig work or turn to multiple jobs to make ends meet. I link trends in outsourcing, wage stagnation, income volatility, and mass layoffs to the rise of this “alternative” work. I focus on the stories of the workers in order to put the sharing economy in the context of larger trends related to income inequality and American labor struggles over the past two hundred years. This historical connection demonstrates that while the underlying notion of a “gig economy” is fundamentally forward-facing—new tools, new capabilities, and new ventures—most of its basic practices are distressingly familiar. It’s an exercise in regression, returning workers to an era of rampant exploitation.

“Uber’s Convenient Racial Politics.” Fusion, July 23. Pew Research Center. 2014. Views of Job Market Tick Up, No Rise in Economic Optimism. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. 2003. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(1):1–39. Plaut, Melissa. 2007. Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab. New York: Random House. Portes, Alejandro. 1994. “The Informal Economy and Its Paradoxes.” In Handbook of Economic Sociology, ed.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

One-third of our participating families have received some sort of public assistance (like SNAP, i.e., assistance buying food) since the kids were born. We also calculated the Gini index—a measure of income inequality—of our sample. It was 0.35, compared to 0.39 in the United States as a whole, indicating that we are doing a reasonable job, particularly given the geographical restriction of our sample, of capturing the broader pattern of income inequality that characterizes American society. The composition of our sample is important, because it means that we don’t see the very high heritability of EF just because we’ve only sampled children who all come from similarly affluent backgrounds.

Across many species, from rodents to rabbits to primates, animals who are higher in the pecking order of social hierarchy live longer and healthier lives.4 In the United States, the richest men live, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest, who have life expectancies at age 40 similar to men in Sudan and Pakistan.5 In my lab’s research, we found that children growing up in low-income families and neighborhoods show epigenetic signs of faster biological aging when they are as young as 8 years old.6 It might be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the gates of Heaven, but the rich man has the consolation of being able to forestall judgment day. These income inequalities are inextricable from inequalities in education. Even before the novel coronavirus pandemic, life spans for White7 Americans without a college degree were actually getting shorter.8 This historically unusual decline in life span, unique among high-income countries, was driven by an epidemic of “deaths of despair,” including overdoses from opioid drugs, complications from alcoholism, and suicides.9 The coronavirus pandemic made things worse.

7 Here is the economist Charles Manski in 2011 asking, “Why does heritability research persist? … The work goes on, but I do not know why.”8 But we don’t treat other population statistics about inequality as unimportant because of their specificity to a particular time and place. The Gini index, for instance, is a measure of income inequality. A country where everyone makes the exact same income has a Gini index of 0; a country where one person makes all the money and everyone else has nothing has a Gini index of 1. Just as a trait doesn’t have a single heritability, a country doesn’t have a single Gini index—it changes over time with economic and political changes.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

These studies all came with caveats and were thoroughly critiqued, but the critiques, at least the serious ones, tended to be studies that concluded thriving cities were indeed short on housing but that the focus on zoning discounted the broader role of income inequality in economic segregation. What this amounted to was an argument between one set of studies that said zoning was a hugely important thing making America less equal, along with a bunch of caveats about how income inequality was also important, and a batch of separate studies that said the bifurcation of the economy was making America less equal, along with a bunch of caveats about how the lack of housing was also important.

In effect, we shattered urban regions into a constellation of smallish cities and reactionary single-family house neighborhoods whose influence over local land use decisions give them an astounding amount of control over how much shelter we build, where, and at what cost. These decisions have huge implications beyond housing. Rising housing costs are a main driver—arguably the main driver—of segregation, income inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You can’t talk about educational inequities or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, so there’s no serious plan for climate change that doesn’t begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work.

Layered on top of this were a bunch of related trends that only made housing demand stronger and housing prices more expensive. Young people started delaying marriage and having fewer or no children, which had the effect of increasing the number of households within a set population; even in the late 1970s, when San Francisco was still losing people, it was already starting to add households. Add in income inequality, which exploded as good-paying factory jobs went away and were replaced with low-end service and retail positions, while engineering and other high-skill professions pulled away from the rest. All of this met in the dense confines of cities, where tech and finance workers sought the face-to-face contact that fuels creativity, and lower-paying service professions sought the higher-paid employees who could afford massages, gym classes, and frequent restaurant meals.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

That would place us squarely in the midst of a capitalist or (to periodize a bit more) neoliberal culture, waiting to see what comes next. It would also place us in Jameson’s debt. April 2010 3 Robert Brenner: Full Employment and the Long Downturn The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people. —FDR, radio address, 1937 Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least. From the establishment of FDR’s war economy through the end of the so-called Golden Age of capitalism in the early 1970s, the US matched other major economies in functioning at close to full employment (at least as the term is defined by economic orthodoxy, on which more later).

If a contest over wages and profits has to be resolved today by either the reduction of the former through a lowered standard of living, or the final elimination of the latter through the transcendence of capitalism, one possibility sounds like what you might read about in tomorrow’s paper and the other like a pipedream. Today, the profit-squeeze thesis has become a very bitter pill, to be swallowed without any chaser of revolutionary hopes. It would mean acceding to calls for still lower wages, and accepting still more income inequality and social insecurity as the ransom for future growth. You would want to be sure the prescription of this harsh medicine was correct. You might therefore seek a second opinion. Much of the originality of Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence lies in its frontal attack on the idea of wage-induced profit squeeze.

In Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), John Bellamy Foster presents Marx and Engels as properly ecological thinkers whose contemporary concerns about soil exhaustion imply a general concept of the “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature opened up by capitalism. Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economics (1991) imagines, with a sort of visionary simplicity, what the basic institutions of a metabolically or environmentally sound society might be like. These include not only checks on resource depletion but mechanisms for radically narrowing income inequality. Daly, like Keynes, is no Marxist—and an economist whose conclusions are essential for Marxists to reckon with. Meanwhile, the outlines of an ecological socialism can be glimpsed in two books by André Gorz, a Marxist opposed to what he regarded as the overemphasis on work in Marx himself: Critique of Economic Reason (1990) and Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (1991).


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

Truman, January 20, 1949. 15 In the 1950s, under President Dwight Eisenhower: See Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income, Individual Statistical Tables by Tax Rate and Income Percentile. 16 “a better, richer, and happier life”: James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), p. 73. 7. HOW WE GOT OURSELVES INTO THE SAME MESS AGAIN 1 By the late 1990s: See U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Trends in Income Inequality—Middle Class,” Table H-3, “Historical Income Tables by Quintile.” 2 the median wage flattened: See U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Trends in Income Inequality—Middle Class,” Table H-3. 3 It shredded safety nets: See U.S. Department of Labor, Workforce Security Data Tables, “Unemployment Insurance Data Tables: 1st Quarter–4th Quarter, 2007,” Division of Actuarial Resources, Office of Income Support, January 7, 2010. 4 by 2010, fewer than 8 percent: See U.S.

As the income gap continues to widen, deprivations like these are likely to cause many Americans to feel even poorer and, in many cases, more frustrated. In other nations, at other times, wide disparities in income and wealth have led to political instability. Summarizing the research, economists Roberto Perotti and Alberto Alesina have found that “income inequality increases social discontent and fuels social unrest. The latter, by increasing the probability of coups, revolutions, [and] mass violence.” This has not been the case in America, at least not so far. Here, opulence has provoked more ambition than hostility. In this respect we are different from older cultures with feudal origins and long histories of class conflict.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

In a recent review of nearly two hundred academic studies, Bob and his co-author Joshua Hall concluded, “Over two-thirds of these studies found economic freedom to correspond to a ‘good’ outcome such as faster growth, better living standards, more happiness, etc. Less than four percent of the sample found economic freedom to be associated with a ‘bad’ outcome such as increased income inequality.”8 Although Sweden is still mostly free today, it used to be even freer. Our Swedish friend, Johan Norberg, has told the story of how laissez-faire economic reforms made Sweden rich.9 In his telling, back in the early 1860s his ancestors were so poor that they had to mix tree bark into their bread recipe when they were short on flour.

Most of what we heard seemed factually accurate, but they failed to discuss the difference between North and South Korea’s economic systems. Diana mistakenly claimed that “South Korea today is among the most unequal countries in the world” as a result of capitalism. But it’s not. Economists use something called a Gini coefficient to measure income inequality across countries. In 2015, South Korea’s Gini coefficient of 33.5 ranked it the fifth most equal country out of the eighty-two countries in the world with reported data.2 More generally, research with Bob’s index has shown that there is really no relationship between how capitalist a country is and how unequal its incomes are.

Kevin Grier, Robert Lawson, and Sam Absher, “You Say You Want a (Rose) Revolution? The Effects of Georgia’s 2004 Market Reforms,” Economics of Transition 27 (2018): 301–323. CHAPTER SEVEN 1. The Association of Private Enterprise Education, www.apee.org. 2. Frederick Solt, “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database,” Social Science Quarterly 97 no. 5 (2018): 1267–81. Harvard Dataverse, https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/11992. 3. Economic Freedom of the World: 2017 Annual Report, https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2017-annual-report. 4.


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A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

Classification: LCC HD60 .Y863 2017 | DDC 330—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017988 ISBNs: 978-1-61039-757-5 (HC); 978-1-61039-758-2 (EB); 978-1-5417-6792-8 (INTL) First Edition: E3-20170807-JV-NF CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PART ONE THE CHALLENGE 1The Failures of Capitalism 2Creating a New Civilization: The Countereconomics of Social Business PART TWO THE THREE ZEROS 3Zero Poverty: Bringing an End to Income Inequality 4Zero Unemployment: We Are Not Job Seekers, We Are Job Creators 5Zero Net Carbon: Creating an Economics of Sustainability 6A Road Map to a Better Future PART THREE MEGAPOWERS FOR TRANSFORMING THE WORLD 7Youth: Energizing and Empowering the Young People of the World 8Technology: Unleashing the Power of Technology to Liberate All People 9Good Governance and Human Rights: Keys to Building a Society That Works for All PART FOUR STEPPING STONES TO THE FUTURE 10The Legal and Financial Infrastructure We Need 11Redesigning the World of Tomorrow About the Author Also by Muhammad Yunus: Notes Index To the young generation, who will build a new civilization PART ONE THE CHALLENGE 1 THE FAILURES OF CAPITALISM I’VE DEVOTED MOST OF MY life to working for the poorest people, particularly the poorest women, trying to remove the hurdles they face in their efforts to improve their lives.

Now we need to create the new economic system that will unlock their powers and allow them to realize their potential. In the remaining chapters of this book, I’ll explain what this new economic system could look like, and I’ll describe some of the hopeful signs that this system is already beginning to take shape. PART TWO THE THREE ZEROS 3 ZERO POVERTY: BRINGING AN END TO INCOME INEQUALITY WHAT COMES TO MIND WHEN you think about the word entrepreneurship? Maybe you think about California’s Silicon Valley, with its countless high-tech manufacturers, app developers, and software companies. Or maybe you think of one of today’s fast-growing hubs for biotechnology, robotics, and computers, such as Boston, Massachusetts; Sydney, Australia; Bangalore, India; or Vancouver, Canada.

Decent Work and Economic Growth: Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth; full and productive employment; and decent work for all. 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation. 10. Reduced Inequalities: Reduce income inequality within and among countries. 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. 12. Responsible Consumption and Production: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. 13. Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts by regulating emissions and promoting developments in renewable energy. 14.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As the industrial era wound down and the Great Depression took hold in the 1930s, attitudes toward the wealthy changed dramatically, and the government finally had the mandate and political will to begin reshaping the distribution of money in society. Certainly a change in attitude had been brewing for decades. Starting in 1876, third-party candidates such as William Jennings Bryan launched a series of increasingly strong runs for the presidency, largely on platforms of addressing income inequality and protecting the interests of the urban and rural poor. These third-party efforts might have helped the poor if they had succeeded, but their failures had unintended consequences; throughout the late 1800s, most presidential victors failed to claim a majority of the popular vote, and the lack of a mandate weakened the presidency.

Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders, and Robyn Dixon, ‘‘Dark Cloud Over Good Works of Gates Foundation,’’ Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2007, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la na-gatesx07jan07,0,4205044,full.story (accessed April 14, 2008). C H A P T E R T W E L V E The Plutonomy When 5 Percent of the Haves Own More Than the Other 95 Percent Combined ‘‘[I]ncreasing income inequality is bad for the economy, bad for crime rates, bad for people’s working lives, bad for infrastructural development, and bad for health—in both the short and long term.’’ —George Davey Smith, British Medical Journal ‘‘Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.’’

It is a transformation that Americans will have to start thinking about.’’6 It is a remarkable—and accurate—choice of words: They will have to start thinking about it. The Plutonomy 207 Not rise up, or take to the streets, or create a revolution at the ballot box. Not even have been thinking about. For most Americans, income inequality is an abstract philosophical conundrum that barely registers as troubling, amid the myriad concerns that face them today. In October 2007, Harrison Group conducted a nationally representative survey (of all Americans, not just affluent or wealthy ones), asking which social problems and national issues people were most concerned with; poverty barely cracked the top ten, behind health care, Iraq, terrorism, Internet predators, education, guns in schools, and drugs.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Many have suggested that AI will make us poorer or worse off. That’s not true. Economists agree that technological advance makes us better off and enhances productivity. AI will unambiguously enhance productivity. The problem isn’t wealth creation; it’s distribution. AI might exacerbate the income inequality problem for two reasons. First, by taking over certain tasks, AIs might increase competition among humans for the remaining tasks, lowering wages and further reducing the fraction of income earned by labor versus the fraction earned by the owners of capital. Second, prediction machines, like other computer-related technologies, may be skill-biased such that AI tools disproportionately enhance the productivity of highly skilled workers.

See also uncertainty AI canvas for, 134–138 AI’s impact on, 3 centrality of, 73–74 cheap prediction and, 29 complexity and, 103–110 decomposing, 133–140 on deployment timing, 184–187 elements of, 74–76, 134–138 experiments and, 99–100 fully automated, 111–119 human strengths in, 98–102 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 judgment in, 74, 75–76, 78–81, 83–94, 96–97 knowledge in, 76–78 modeling and, 99, 100–102 predicting judgment and, 95–102 preferences and, 88–90 satisficing in, 107–109 work flow analysis and, 123–131 decision trees, 13, 78–81 Deep Genomics, 3 deep learning approach, 7, 13 back propagation in, 38 flexibility in, 36 to language translation, 26–27 security risks with, 203–204 DeepMind, 7–8, 183, 187, 222, 223 Deep Thinking (Kasporov), 63 demand management, 156–157 dependent variables, 45 deployment decisions, 184–187 deskilling, 192–193 deterministic programming, 38, 40 Didi, 219 disparate impact, 197 disruptive technologies, 181–182 diversity, 201–202 division of labor, 53–69 human/machine collaboration, 65–67 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 machine weaknesses in prediction and, 58–65 prediction by exception and, 67–68 dog fooding, 184 drone weapons, 116 Dropbox, 190 drug discovery, 28, 134–138 Dubé, J. P., 93–94 Duke University Teradata Center, 35 earthquakes, 59–60 eBay, 199 economics, 3 of AI, 8–9 of cost reductions, 9–11 data collection and, 49–50 on externalities, 116–117 New Economy and, 10–11 economies of scale, 49–50, 215–217 Edelman, Ben, 196–197 education, income inequality and, 214 electricity, cost of light and, 11 emergency braking, automatic, 111–112 error, tolerance for, 184–186 ethical dilemmas, 116 Etzioni, Oren, 220 Europe, privacy regulation in, 219–220 exceptions, prediction by, 67–68 Executive Office of the US President, 222–223 experience, 191–193 experimentation, 88, 99–100 AI tool development and, 159–160 expert prediction, 55–58 externalities, 116–117 Facebook, 176, 190, 195–196, 215, 217 facial recognition, 190, 219–220 Federal Aviation Administration, 185 Federal Trade Commission, 195 feedback data, 43, 46 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 experience and, 191–193 risks with, 204–205 financial crisis of 2008, 36–37 flexibility, 36 Forbes, Silke, 168–169 Ford, 123–134, 164 Frankston, Bob, 141, 164 fraud detection, 24–25, 27, 84–88, 91 Frey, Carl, 149 fulfillment industry, 105, 143–145 Furman, Jason, 213 Gates, Bill, 163, 210, 213, 221 gender discrimination, 196–198 Gildert, Suzanne, 145 Glozman, Ron, 53–54 Goizueta, Robert, 43 Goldin, Claudia, 214 Goldman Sachs, 125 Google, 7–8, 43, 50, 187, 215, 223 advertising, 176, 195–196, 198–199 AI-first strategy at, 179–180 AI tool development at, 160 anti-spam team sting, 202–203 bias in ads and, 195–196 China, 219 Inbox, 185, 187 market share of, 216–217 Now, 106 privacy policy, 190 search engine optimization and, 64 search tool, 19 translation service, 25–26 video content algorithm, 200 Waymo, 95 Waze and, 89–90 Grammarly, 96 Greece, ancient, 23 Griliches, Zvi, 159 Grove, Andy, 155 hackers, 200 Hacking, Ian, 40 Hammer, Michael, 123–134 Harford, Tim, 192–193 Harvard Business School cases, 141 Hawking, Stephen, 8, 210–211, 221 Hawkins, Jeff, 39 health insurance, 28 heart disease, diagnosing, 44–45, 47–49 Heifets, Abraham, 135, 136 Hemingway, Ernest, 25–26 heuristics, 55 Hinton, Geoffrey, 145 hiring, 58, 98 ZipRecruiter and, 93–94, 100 Hoffman, Mitchell, 58 homogeneity, data, 201–202 hotel industry, 63–64 Houston Astros, 161 Howe, Kathryn, 14 human resource (HR) management, 172–173 IBM’s Watson, 146 identity verification, 201, 219–220 iFlytek, 26–27 if-then logic, 91, 104–109 image classification, 28–29 ImageNet, 7 ImageNet Challenge, 28–29 imitation of algorithms, 202–204 income inequality, 19, 212–214 independent variables, 45 inequality, 19, 212–214 initial public offerings (IPOs), 9–10, 125 innovation, 169–170, 171, 218–219 innovator’s dilemma, 181–182 input data, 43 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 identifying required, 139 Integrate.ai, 14 Intel, 15, 215 intelligence churn prediction and, 32–36 human, 39 prediction as, 2–3, 29, 31–41 internet advertising, 175–176 browsers, 9–10 delivery time uncertainty and commerce via, 157–158 development of the commercial, 9–10 inventory management, 28, 105 Iowa, hybrid corn adoption in, 158–160, 181 iPhone, 129–130, 155 iRobot, 104 James, Bill, 56 Jelinek, Frederick, 108 jobs, 19.

., 93–94 Duke University Teradata Center, 35 earthquakes, 59–60 eBay, 199 economics, 3 of AI, 8–9 of cost reductions, 9–11 data collection and, 49–50 on externalities, 116–117 New Economy and, 10–11 economies of scale, 49–50, 215–217 Edelman, Ben, 196–197 education, income inequality and, 214 electricity, cost of light and, 11 emergency braking, automatic, 111–112 error, tolerance for, 184–186 ethical dilemmas, 116 Etzioni, Oren, 220 Europe, privacy regulation in, 219–220 exceptions, prediction by, 67–68 Executive Office of the US President, 222–223 experience, 191–193 experimentation, 88, 99–100 AI tool development and, 159–160 expert prediction, 55–58 externalities, 116–117 Facebook, 176, 190, 195–196, 215, 217 facial recognition, 190, 219–220 Federal Aviation Administration, 185 Federal Trade Commission, 195 feedback data, 43, 46 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 experience and, 191–193 risks with, 204–205 financial crisis of 2008, 36–37 flexibility, 36 Forbes, Silke, 168–169 Ford, 123–134, 164 Frankston, Bob, 141, 164 fraud detection, 24–25, 27, 84–88, 91 Frey, Carl, 149 fulfillment industry, 105, 143–145 Furman, Jason, 213 Gates, Bill, 163, 210, 213, 221 gender discrimination, 196–198 Gildert, Suzanne, 145 Glozman, Ron, 53–54 Goizueta, Robert, 43 Goldin, Claudia, 214 Goldman Sachs, 125 Google, 7–8, 43, 50, 187, 215, 223 advertising, 176, 195–196, 198–199 AI-first strategy at, 179–180 AI tool development at, 160 anti-spam team sting, 202–203 bias in ads and, 195–196 China, 219 Inbox, 185, 187 market share of, 216–217 Now, 106 privacy policy, 190 search engine optimization and, 64 search tool, 19 translation service, 25–26 video content algorithm, 200 Waymo, 95 Waze and, 89–90 Grammarly, 96 Greece, ancient, 23 Griliches, Zvi, 159 Grove, Andy, 155 hackers, 200 Hacking, Ian, 40 Hammer, Michael, 123–134 Harford, Tim, 192–193 Harvard Business School cases, 141 Hawking, Stephen, 8, 210–211, 221 Hawkins, Jeff, 39 health insurance, 28 heart disease, diagnosing, 44–45, 47–49 Heifets, Abraham, 135, 136 Hemingway, Ernest, 25–26 heuristics, 55 Hinton, Geoffrey, 145 hiring, 58, 98 ZipRecruiter and, 93–94, 100 Hoffman, Mitchell, 58 homogeneity, data, 201–202 hotel industry, 63–64 Houston Astros, 161 Howe, Kathryn, 14 human resource (HR) management, 172–173 IBM’s Watson, 146 identity verification, 201, 219–220 iFlytek, 26–27 if-then logic, 91, 104–109 image classification, 28–29 ImageNet, 7 ImageNet Challenge, 28–29 imitation of algorithms, 202–204 income inequality, 19, 212–214 independent variables, 45 inequality, 19, 212–214 initial public offerings (IPOs), 9–10, 125 innovation, 169–170, 171, 218–219 innovator’s dilemma, 181–182 input data, 43 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 identifying required, 139 Integrate.ai, 14 Intel, 15, 215 intelligence churn prediction and, 32–36 human, 39 prediction as, 2–3, 29, 31–41 internet advertising, 175–176 browsers, 9–10 delivery time uncertainty and commerce via, 157–158 development of the commercial, 9–10 inventory management, 28, 105 Iowa, hybrid corn adoption in, 158–160, 181 iPhone, 129–130, 155 iRobot, 104 James, Bill, 56 Jelinek, Frederick, 108 jobs, 19.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

For Fukuyama the end of history signalled a world defined by economic calculation and ‘the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’. And yet the present moment, defined by challenges such as rising temperatures, technological unemployment, income inequality and societal ageing – to name just a few – poses questions which extend beyond mere technical competence. If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018.

Underpinning that would be the shrinking space for uniquely human skills, with this limiting any chance for workers to up-skill in response. A year later, the bank’s governor, Mark Carney, repeated those forecasts saying many livelihoods could be ‘mercilessly destroyed’ by technological change, and that ever-higher income inequality could be one of the major consequences. Those findings confirmed the conclusions of an earlier report published by two Oxford University academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. In 2013 they claimed that 47 per cent of all US jobs were at ‘high risk’ of being automated, with a further 19 per cent facing medium risk.

How that is achieved is through municipal protectionism, where local, worker-owned business would be actively favoured over multinationals and industry giants. This would not only offer a swift means of reversing privatisation, but simultaneously help build a more resilient, socially just alternative. Whereas the primary values of the present system are cutting costs and maximising shareholder value, here regional and income inequality would be mitigated and a far broader range of ownership models would emerge. In reality this would mean that the only companies able to bid for specific local contracts would have to meet specific criteria, whether it is being based within a certain distance (perhaps ten kilometres or within a county or state); being a worker-owned cooperative; offering organic products or being powered by renewable energy.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

“Two Major Apple Shareholders Push for Study of iPhone Addiction in Children.” Bloomberg, January 8, 2018. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/jana-calpers-push-apple-to-study-iphone-addiction-in-children. Kay, Ira, and Blaine Martin. “CEO Pay Ratio and Income Inequality: Perspectives for Compensation Committees.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, October 25, 2016. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2016/10/25/ceo-pay-ratio-and-income-inequality-perspectives-for-compensation-committees/. Khanna, Tarun, and Krishna G. Palepu. “Emerging Giants: Building World-Class Companies in Developing Countries.” Harvard Business Review, October 2006. https://hbr.org/2006/10/emerging-giants-building-world-class-companies-in-developing-countries.

In 2009, I published a book on the failure of international development policy that became a best seller, and I subsequently published several books that captured many of the defining dynamics of the world emerging from the 2008 financial crisis—from skepticism about market capitalism, to the disruption of geopolitics, to the rise of China and other emerging markets. In particular, my work has analyzed a number of long-term threats to the world economy: technology and the risk of a jobless underclass, demographic shifts in the quantity and quality of the workforce, worsening income inequality, natural resource scarcity and climate change concerns, unsustainable debts, and marked declines in global productivity. Ultimately, my work helps me form judgments on how best to deploy a corporation’s labor force and allocate its capital. Writing these books more clearly defined for me, as well as for those recruiting, what value I could bring to the boardroom.

This committee makes recommendations to the full board, which then decides among allocating profits to shareholders (through dividends or share buybacks), reinvesting in the company, paying down existing debts, and remunerating staff via bonus payments and salaries. Very often, the committee relies on outside counsel to monitor their executive compensation and track if it is in line with peer companies and industry standards. Today, at a time of widening income inequality in many countries, the board compensation committee is increasingly influenced by public policy surrounding issues such as gender pay equity and gaps between the highest and lowest paid within a company. This has led some companies to explicitly outline fair pay agendas, which will be examined in greater depth in this book.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Steffen at al, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, 2005. Indoor air pollution kills 1.6 million people per year, with outdoor air pollution taking another 800,000 lives each year.8 About one-fifth of the world’s population—more than 1.2 billion people—experience water scarcity, and this resource is becoming increasingly scarce.9 Global income inequality is staggering. Currently, the richest 1 percent of people in the world have as much wealth and Stuff as the bottom 57 percent.10 So what happens when there’s a subsystem like the economy that keeps growing inside of a system of a fixed size? It hits the wall. The expanding economic system is running up against the limits of our planet’s capacity to sustain life.

Too much of what gets counted toward “growth” today—tons of toxic consumer goods, for example—undermines our net safety, health, and happiness. Despite increasing growth and with all of our advances in technology, science, and medicine, more people than ever are hungry, half the world’s people live on less than $2.50 a day,17 and income inequity is growing within and between countries. Our society’s deep, unwavering faith in economic growth rests on the assumption that focusing on infinite growth is both possible and good. But neither is true. We can’t run the expanding economic subsystem (take-make-waste) on a planet of fixed size indefinitely: on many fronts, we’re perilously close to the limits of our finite planet already.

Census Bureau, in 2005 Americans carried approximately $832 billion in credit card debt, a number that is expected to balloon to $1.091 trillion by 2010. This works out to approximately $5,000 in credit card debt per cardholder (projected at nearly $6,200 by 2010).34 Despite the spending beyond our means, our country still faces devastating levels of income inequity, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and the lack of health insurance. According to Knox College professor of psychology Tim Kasser, who has written extensively about materialism, it’s not just that money can’t buy us love and Stuff doesn’t make us happy. According to comprehensive studies of people of all different age groups, class backgrounds, and nationalities, materialism actually makes us unhappy.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Building on the pioneering ideas of the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, whose work in the early 1930s anticipated much of Keynes, the Cambridge school of post-Keynesian economists—Joan Robinson, Geoffrey Harcourt, Nicholas Kaldor, Robin Marris, and Robert Rowthorn—have noted that although workers tend to spend almost all their incomes, the entrepreneurs and investors who benefit from corporate profits save a high proportion of what they receive.12 The post-Keynesians also argued that advanced capitalism generally shifts income distribution in favor of profits and away from wages, partly because of technological progress and monopoly, and partly for political reasons such as restrictions on organized labor. The result of widening income inequalities and rising profitability is that a growing share of national income flows to owners of capital, who spend less than they earn. Meanwhile wage earners are forced to run down their savings and increasingly to rely on debt to maintain their standard of living. The only way to keep the economy growing in these conditions is for government to support demand with deficit financing and for the banking system to expand credit to poorer and less creditworthy borrowers.

As long as this credit expansion creates sufficient demand, the economy can continue to operate with reasonably full employment. But if income distribution continues to move against labor, workers eventually find themselves unable to service further borrowing and a financial crisis becomes inevitable as working-class borrowers begin to default on their loans. The post-Keynesian economy with widening income inequality is therefore always veering between the Scylla of recession due to inadequate consumption and the Charybdis of financial crisis caused by unsustainable debt. Many of the left-wing criticisms of the Obama Administration’s economic policies from U.S. Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, James K.

At the same time, the long period of low interest rates due to excess savings in Asia encouraged Austrian-style malinvestment in low-income housing, as well as the aggressive financial innovation predicted by Minsky. This happened despite the fact that low-income consumers and homeowners were becoming less creditworthy because of the widening income inequality anticipated by Kalecki and the New Keynesians. The boom in finance, meanwhile, interacted with the ideological super-bubble described by Soros and, through the process of reflexivity, created an excessive faith in markets that changed political realities. An extreme form of deregulation that had no chance of working in the long-term did seem to work for a few years in the market fundamentalist America of President Bush.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Our financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself, as the story above and many others in this book, along with copious amounts of data, will illustrate. Our system of market capitalism is sick, and the big-picture symptoms—slower-than-average growth, higher income inequality, stagnant wages, greater market fragility, the inability of many people to afford middle-class basics like a home, retirement, and education—are being felt throughout our entire economy and, indeed, our society. DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM Our economic illness has a name: financialization.

It’s no accident that corporate stock buybacks, which tend to bolster share prices but not underlying growth, and corporate pay have risen concurrently over the last four decades.54 There are any number of studies that illustrate this type of intersection between financialization and the wealth gap. One of the most striking was done by economists James Galbraith and Travis Hale, who showed how during the late 1990s, changing income inequality tracked the go-go NASDAQ stock index to a remarkable degree.55 The same thing happened during the stock boom of the last several years, underscoring the point that commentators like journalist Robert Frank have made, that wealth built on financial markets is “more abstracted from the real world” and thus more volatile, contributing to a cycle of booms and busts (which of course hurt the poor more than any other group).56 As Piketty’s work so clearly shows, in the absence of some change-making event, like a war or a severe depression that destroys financial asset value, financialization ensures that the rich really do get richer—a lot richer—while the rest become worse off.

It’s no accident that the size of the financial sector today as a percentage of GDP is at levels equaled only on the eve of the Great Depression. Like the decade leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, the Roaring Twenties were marked by not only financial boom and technological wonder, but also massive income inequality. Worker wages stagnated and those of the upper classes grew, bolstered in large part by stock prices. Another similarity was a rise in debt, both public and private, which was used to mask the declining spending power of the lower and middle classes and its dampening effect on GDP growth. Then, as now, when people couldn’t afford to buy, they borrowed—Americans in the 1920s bought more than three-quarters of major household items on credit.


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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

., documented that over the last four decades the rising market power of corporations contributed to some of society’s most intractable problems: wage growth stagnated as productivity grew; before-tax profit of U.S. corporations rose sharply as income inequality worsened; and household debt rose as financial instability increased. Even the Business Roundtable in August 2019 reevaluated its position that corporations should serve only shareholder interests—a reflection, McKinsey said, “of tensions that have been boiling over.” With offshoring out of favor with many Washington policy makers, the McKinsey Global Institute defended its support of globalization, saying outsourcing and weaker labor unions had been wrongly cited as leading causes of income inequality. The more likely culprits, McKinsey said, were the “boom and bust cycles in the economy” and technological advances.

As the middle class continued to suffer, and the plight of America’s workers became harder to ignore, even McKinsey began to realize that a corporation’s myopic fixation on shareholder profits might not be good for society. “While shareholder capitalism has catalyzed enormous progress, it also has struggled to address deeply vexing issues such as climate change and income inequality,” McKinsey acknowledged in 2020. The firm even reconsidered its unqualified praise of offshoring. According to a Bloomberg report, Richard Dobbs, a McKinsey senior partner and a member of the McKinsey Global Institute in London, described his firm’s view of globalization as an evolution.

Even so, Nell Geiser, research coordinator for the Communications Workers of America, said the job cuts were made to meet Wall Street’s expectations. “The fastest way to get there is through staff reduction,” Geiser said. * * * — Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant, believes the nation’s failure to address income inequality has turned people against government and against each other. “Many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them,” he wrote in Winners Take All. “Perhaps this is why we hear constant condemnation of ‘the system.’ ” A study by the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., documented that over the last four decades the rising market power of corporations contributed to some of society’s most intractable problems: wage growth stagnated as productivity grew; before-tax profit of U.S. corporations rose sharply as income inequality worsened; and household debt rose as financial instability increased.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Dinesh D'Souza, "The Virtue of Prosperity," Hoover Digest, no. 1 (2001). For an excellent analysis of the conservative defense of economic inequality, and a critique of that defense, see Shelly Arseneault and Donald Matthewson, "Conservative Dilemmas: Problems with the Ideological Defense of Income Inequality," unpublished paper, August 2003. [back] 8. For an overview of recent research on this topic, see Alan Krueger, "The Apple Falls Close to the Tree, Even in the Land of Opportunity," New York Times, 14 November 2002, C2. [back] 9. Much of the research exploring the possible social consequences of inequality has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation.

David Callahan, Kindred Spirits: Harvard's Extraordinary Business School Class of 1949 and How They Transformed American Business (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002). [back] 41. Uslaner, The Moral Foundations of Trust, 181. [back] 42. For evidence that residential segregation has increased along with inequality, see Susan Mayer, "The Effect of Geographic Distribution of Income Inequality on Children's Educational Attainment," Northwestern University/ University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research, 2001. [back] 43. Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1997). See also Haya El Nasser, "Gated Communities More Popular, and Not Just for the Rich," USA Today, 15 December 2002, A1.

Dengler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). [back] 27. On working hard and admiration for the rich, see findings from a variety of surveys in Ladd and Bowman, Attitudes Toward Economic Inequality, 53–57; on blame for failure, see Tamara Draut, New Opportunities: Public Opinion on Poverty, Income Inequality, and Public Policy, 1996–2002 (New York: Demos, 2002), 7. Other surveys on the causes of poverty report similar findings, although these findings are not consistent across all polling. See, for example, surveys reported by Ladd and Bowman, Attitudes Toward Economic Inequality, 52. Daniel Yankelovich's data also underscores what he says is a "trend toward Social Darwinism."


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

The recent 2010 UN Human Development Report concludes that people in poor nations are generally healthier, wealthier, and better educated than they were 40 years ago.40 Surveying human progress in 135 countries — 92 percent of the world’s population — the report shows that average life expectancy rose from 59 to 70 years, primary school enrolment grew from 55 to 70 percent, and per capita income doubled to more than $10,000. The report’s authors do devote a section to discussion of the “weak association between [GDP] growth and quality of life indicators such as health, education, political freedom, conflict and inequality,” and also note that, “Within countries rising income inequality is the norm.” BOX 5.4 Development or Overdevelopment? Development critics place significant emphasis on these latter points. It is relatively easy to measure GDP; it is more difficult to quantitatively assess the integrity of families and communities. Also, much of the measured “progress” of the past few decades has occurred in a few rapidly industrializing nations, while many very poor countries have actually lost ground in terms of most citizens’ access to food, water, and shelter.

Inequality among nations can also be tracked with the Gini coefficient; it turns out that, in recent decades, the richest countries have pulled ahead while the poorest countries fell further behind, with a few in the middle (including China and India) playing a rapid game of catch-up. However, “catching up” has meant increasing wealth inequality within those “developing” nations. Current research shows that global income inequality peaked in the 1970s when there was little overlap between “rich” and “poor” countries. Since then, the rapid industrialization of nations like China, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia has complicated the picture.48 The absolute number of people living in poverty — across a range of definitions — has consistently declined globally during the past 50 years, and the percentage of people living in poverty has fallen even faster.49 Nevertheless, according to a study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University, the richest one percent of adults has continued to pull ahead, owning 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, with the wealthiest ten percent of adults accounting for 85 percent of the world total.

The bottom half of the world adult population owns barely one percent of global wealth.50 The reasons for change in wealth inequality within and among nations are varied: tax policies, capital investment, culture, education, natural resources, trade, and history all play roles. Moreover, there is controversy between those who say inequality within nations is good because it stokes more growth (governments should aim for equality of opportunity, not equality in incomes, according to free-market advocates), and those who say too much income inequality is inherently unfair and tends to become structural and to foreclose economic opportunity for the majority of the world’s people. The end of growth will no doubt alter the prospects of both rich and poor, in both absolute and relative terms. Those with privilege will no doubt struggle to maintain it, while the poor, driven to desperation by generally worsening economic conditions, may in increasing numbers of instances organize or even revolt in order to increase their share of a shrinking pie.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

After all, as Andrew Lo noted in a recent wickedly entitled essay called “Reading about the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review,” the crisis is both overexplained and overdetermined.2 The crisis is overexplained in that there are so many possible suspects who can be rounded up and accused of being “the cause” that authors can construct convincing narratives featuring almost any culprit from Fannie and Freddie to leverage ratios to income inequality—even though the meltdown obviously was a deeply nonlinear and multicausal process.3 The crisis is overdetermined in that, being a nonlinear, multicausal process, many of these supposed causes could be ruled out and the crisis could still have occurred. For example, three excellent books on the crisis stress, respectively, increasing income inequality in the run-up to the crisis, the captured nature of bank regulation, and the political power of finance. Each book certainly captures an important aspect of the crisis.4 But are these factors absolutely necessary to adequately explain it?

President Bush’s former economic advisor Glenn Hubbard thinks that raising top taxes will never raise enough revenue to make a dent in the debt.43 Moreover, 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney found such redistribution to be “un-American,” showing an astonishing ignorance of the policies of Dwight Eisenhower (Republican).44 But there is plenty of room to tax at the top because of the bailouts. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. After the 1929 crash income inequality and financial-sector pay declined sharply relative to ordinary earnings, but this time they did not, so taxing now is simply taking the bailout back to the taxpayer. This idea does not just resonate with progressive circles in the United States. A team of German economists recently calculated that a one-time capital levy of 10 percent on personal net wealth exceeding Euro 250,000 per taxpayer could raise revenue by 9 percent of GDP.

Statistics Iceland, http://www.statice.is/. 29. “Iceland—2012 Article IV Consultation Concluding Statement of the IMF Mission,” http://www.imf.org/external/np/ms/2012/030212.htm. 30. “Iceland—2012 Article IV Consultation.” 31. Stefán Ólafsson and Arnaldur Sölvi Kristjánsson, “Income Inequality in a Bubble Economy: The Case of Iceland 1992–2008,” conference paper for Luxembourg Income Study Conference, June 2010, http://www.lisproject.org/conference/papers/olafsson-kristjansson.pdf. 32. Statistics Iceland, http://www.statice.is/. 33. Statistics Iceland, http://www.statice.is/. 34.


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Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Rates of return in many sectors remain substantially above what they should be in a competitive economy in which new entrants drive rates of returns to a low competitive level.* These incumbents have created entry barriers to discourage other firms from entering and driving down their returns. Furthermore, these high profits accrue naturally to the owners of capital, who are disproportionately the rich, leading to an increase in income inequality. One of the anomalies observed in many sectors is that investment can be weak even when profits are high. Market power provides a persuasive explanation. Monopolists (or more broadly, firms with market power) worry that increased investment, by increasing output, will require lower prices to sell the additional output, thus adversely affecting profits.

Instead, the divides appear greater than ever before, with large fractions of the population seeing incomes stagnate or decline, especially after the euro crisis. Inequality is a big, abstract word that can have economic, racial, and gender dimensions. In the words of former US President Barack Obama, the issue of wealth and income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time.” It is also one we cannot avoid, which is why so much of this book deals with the subject, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. We are calling here for a new approach to the welfare state. The European social model that ensured broadly shared prosperity has been eroded because of numerous misguided changes, especially in the crisis countries, where external powers imposed spending cuts under the banner of austerity.

The unfavorable trends at work before the crisis have continued, and in some cases worsened in the aftermath, as illustrated by a wide variety of statistics showing increasing inequality and growing poverty. In 2016, the richest 10 percent of Europeans received 38 percent of pre-tax national income, while the bottom 50 percent received 19 percent, or half as much.4 As Figure 7.2 shows, over the past 40 years, the steepest rise in income inequalities has occurred in the UK, Germany, and Ireland. By contrast, some of the Nordic countries seem, on the whole, to have succeeded in containing the trend. Spain and a few of the southern EU member states even contained the rise of inequality as the post-2008 recession in these countries affected higher- and lower-income earners alike.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Posner, Eric and Glen Weyl. “Sponsor An Immigrant Yourself.” Politico, February 13, 2018. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigration-visas-economics-216968. 21. Posner, Eric A. and Glen Weyl. “A Radical Solution to Global Income Inequality: Make the U.S. More Like Qatar.” New Republic, November 6, 2014. newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-global-income-inequality-open-immigration-policies. 22. Pethokoukis, James. “Why the US might need those Mexican high-school dropouts.” American Enterprise Institute, June 26, 2013. www.aei.org/publication/why-the-us-might-need-those-mexican-high-school-dropouts/. 23.

They observe that “roughly 70 percent of black families and 71 percent of Latino families don’t have enough money saved to cover three months of living expenses.” The same is true for only 34 percent of white families.10 This contrast between wealth and poverty is particularly pronounced in gentrifying neighborhoods. “Ultimately,” Romano and Franke-Ruta warn, “the fight over gentrification is what the fight over income inequality in America looks like up close today: a clash between the economic forces transforming our cities and a young, diverse, debt-saddled generation that is losing faith in capitalism itself.”11 The activism we’re seeing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other hotbeds of gentrification will spread.


pages: 72 words: 21,361

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

What’s more, this increase in the relative price of educated labor—their wages—comes during a period where the supply of educated workers has also increased. The combination of higher pay in the face of growing supply points unmistakably to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. Because those with the least education typically already had the lowest wages, this change has increased overall income inequality. It’s clear from the chart in Figure 3.5 that wage divergence accelerated in the digital era. As documented in careful studies by David Autor, Lawrence Katz, and Alan Krueger, as well as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane and many others, the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies.

Start by simply paying teachers more so that more of the best and the brightest sign up for this profession, as they do in many other nations. American teachers make 40% less than the average college graduate. Teachers are some of America’s most important wealth creators. Increasing the quantity and quality of skilled labor provides a double win by boosting economic growth and reducing income inequality. 2. Hold teachers accountable for performance by, for example, eliminating tenure. This should be part of the bargain for higher pay. 3. Separate student instruction from testing and certification. Focus schooling more on verifiable outcomes and measurable performance and less on signaling time, effort or prestige. 4.


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China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

The expression goes back to the 1990s, but it gained currency under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, whose government ruled China for the ten years ending in 2012, a period often referred to as “the lost decade.” During Hu and Wen’s time at the helm, the economic liberalization begun by the previous administration stalled, corruption worsened, and the most serious problems that plague China today—environmental degradation, income inequality, and a reliance on investment to drive growth—became entrenched. That’s not to say that the men were either opposed to reform or blind to the emerging problems. Wen in particular—who earlier in his career had served as personal secretary to Zhao Ziyang, one of China’s great reformist premiers—described the economy as being “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable” at the halfway point of his tenure.

China’s economy is only 70% the size of the United States, but it has four times as many people; it has less wealth, and that wealth is spread more thinly. The enviable purchasing power of its tourists is not the natural order of things but rather the result of heavily lopsided income distribution. China suffers from some of the worst income inequality in the world. According to China’s official statistics, its 2012 Gini coefficient—a measure of inequality in which zero represents perfect equality and 1 represents perfect inequality—was 0.47, making it broadly as unequal as the United States (the World Bank says anything above 0.4 signals extreme inequality).

unequal as the United States: Kevin Yao and Aileen Wang, “China Lets Gini Out of the Bottle; Wide Wealth Gap,” Reuters, January 18, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-income-gap-idUSBRE90H06L20130118. between 0.53 and 0.61: Chuin Wei-Yap, “In an Unequal China, Inequality Data Lack Equal Standing,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2016, https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/01/17/in-an-unequal-china-inequality-data-lack-equal-standing/; Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, “Income Inequality in Today’s China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 19 (2014), http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/6928.abstract. living than themselves: Richard Wike and Bruce Stokes, “Chinese Views on the Economy and Domestic Challenges,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/10/05/1-chinese-views-on-the-economy-and-domestic-challenges/.


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Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

See also national identity economic productivity and, 32–33, 192, 203 empathy and, 84 formation of, 70–71 language and, 70, 73 neurological foundations of, 71 role models and, 71, 198, 204 stereotypes and, 71–73 Identity Economics (Akerlof and Kranton), 238 Ignatieff, Michael, 17 immigrant exceptionalism, 117–123, 137 income gap. See income inequality income inequality capital endowment and, 28 capital mobility and, 28–29 factors explaining, 27–28 global aspects of, 28, 37–40, 50 marketization’s impact on, 84, 233 migration and, 38–41, 44–47, 49–50, 166, 251–252, 267, 271 technology’s impact on, 83–84 India brain gain versus brain drain in, 218, 220, 252 economic growth in, 39, 201 education investment in, 200–201 migration study from, 173–174 remittances to, 207 indigenous populations in host countries education competition and, 119–120 emigration by, 128–131 fatalism among, 119 happiness of, 138–139 migration policy and, 245 migration’s impact on housing for, 114–117, 123, 165, 254 migration’s impact on the happiness of, 138–139 migration’s impact on wages for, 111–113, 123, 129, 131, 136, 169–170, 253–254, 258, 261 migration’s impact on worker training for, 126–128 social networks among, 107–108, 242 trust levels among, 74–75, 81, 105, 141 values of, 243–244 individualism, 231–233 Indonesia, 200 international trade, 23, 36, 271 Iraq, 193 Ireland economic boom in, 130 famine in, 94, 215 migration from, 92, 94, 215 Protestants in, 94 Israel, 93, 247–249 Istanbul (Turkey), 216, 221 Italy, 123 Jamaica, 80, 200, 214 Japan, 12, 33, 132 Johnson, Boris, 96–97 Johnson, Simon, 93 Kahneman, Daniel, 6, 14, 78, 175 Kant, Immanuel, 260 Kenya cooperation study from, 76, 239–240 ethnic identity in, 240 remittances and, 206 schooling in, 196–197 Kenyatta, Jomo, 240 Keynes, John Maynard, 30, 198 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 188 Koopmans, Ruud, 107 Kranton, Rachel, 32–33, 192, 204, 238 Labour Party (Great Britain), 15, 21, 103 “ladder of life” metric, 172–174 language assimilation and, 70, 98–99, 107, 242, 264, 270 and cultural distance and, 77 identity and, 70, 73 multiculturalism and, 107 Laos, 200 Latin America.

See also diaspora communities; migrants; migration policy absorption rates and, 41–43, 45–46, 87–88, 90–91, 105–106, 109, 140–142, 242, 258–259, 262, 264–265, 268, 276n14 acceleration principle and, 251–252 boom-bust economic cycles and, 129–131, 254 border controls and, 161, 266 bribery and, 159–160 demographic argument for, 123–125 economic effects of, 6, 22, 24–25, 38–39, 111–139 economic modeling of, 43–50, 140–141 economic skills argument for, 126–128, 131 educational motives for, 158, 191–192, 197, 253, 260 equilibria and, 40, 43, 46–50, 89–90, 106, 109, 140–141, 256, 267–268 ethical values and, 13–16, 53, 58, 150, 165, 246, 260 family support for, 155–156, 196 feedback mechanisms and, 50, 105–106, 182 financial costs of, 38, 40, 92, 153–154, 166 as foreign aid, 225–227 fraud and, 160–161 globalization and, 36, 51, 271 guest worker model of, 131–134, 142 human trafficking and, 161–162 illegal forms of, 159–162, 249–250, 265–266, 268 impact on economic productivity from, 146–147, 149 impact on government services from, 107, 111, 116, 125, 136, 141, 165, 264–265 income inequality and, 38–41, 44–47, 49–50, 166, 251–252, 267, 271 income selection and, 154–155 as investment, 153–157 marginal effects versus total effects of, 218–220 marriage and, 159, 272 nation-shopping and, 148–149 opposition to racism and, 19–20, 22 psychological costs of, 22, 171–172, 174–176, 245 racism and, 21–22, 25–26, 105, 271 role models and, 198, 202, 205 small countries and, 199–203 social capital and, 74–75, 82, 90–91 social effects of, 6, 15, 24, 57–58, 61–70, 72–77, 79–88, 90–109, 135–139 stock-flow model of, 49 as taboo subject, 13–14, 20, 26, 52, 120, 255 trust levels and, 74–75, 78, 91–92, 99, 105–106, 170 wealth as a criterion for, 121 xenophobia and, 25–26, 52, 105, 245, 251, 270–271 migration policy.

See Great Britain United States African Americans in, 204–205 assimilation in, 69, 76–77, 242, 264 attitudes toward economic redistribution in, 85 deportation of migrants from, 134, 161 foreign aid programs in, 224–225 foreign-born prison population in, 122 Hispanic immigrants and community in, 37, 73, 76–77, 98–99, 103, 122, 206–207 illegal immigrants in, 265 immigrant exceptionalism in, 117 immigration visa lottery in, 147 income inequality in, 83–84 migration policy in, 12, 37, 51, 158, 264 national identity in, 17 nineteenth-century migration to, 49–50, 92, 94 political institutions in, 31, 33 social mobility in, 83 social model in, 33–34 utility definition of, 58 global, 25 libertarian approach to, 168, 246 migration and, 6, 25 universalist approach to, 58, 62, 115, 150, 168, 246 Venables, Tony, 6 vendettas, 65 Vicente, Pedro, 184–185 Vietnam, 200 violence Jamaican culture and, 80 language distance’s impact on, 77 media depictions of, 72 national identity and, 19, 237, 240–241 social norms regarding, 31–32, 80, 233, 240 wages, migration’s impact on, 111–113, 123, 129, 131, 136, 169–170, 253–254, 258, 261 Wantchekon, Leonard, 65 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 233–234 Weiner, Mark, 87 Winters, Alan, 133 xenophobia, 25–26, 52, 105, 245, 251, 270–271 Yang, Dean, 210 Zak, Paul, 6 Zambia, 200 Zimbabwe, 182, 200


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

And, everyone’s favorite, ROBOTS,” wrote the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson in 2014 about our increasing concern with the elimination of jobs from the economy.17 As if to mark (or perhaps mourn) the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, it seems as if 2014 is the year that we’ve finally fully woken up to what the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Akst dubs “automation anxiety.”18 The cover of the one business magazine that I’d read on the flight from Chicago to Rochester, for example, featured the image of a deadly tornado roaring through a workspace. “Coming to an office near you . . .,” it warned about what technology will do to “tomorrow’s jobs.”19 Many others share this automation anxiety. The distinguished Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf warns that intelligent machines could hollow out middle-class jobs, compound income inequality, make the wealthy “indifferent” to the fate of everyone else, and make a “mockery” of democratic citizenship.20 “The robots are coming and will terminate your jobs,”21 worries the generally cheerful economist Tim Harford in response to Google’s acquisition in December 2013 of Boston Dynamics, a producer of military robots such as Big Dog, a three-foot-long, 240-pound, four-footed beast that can carry a 340-pound load and climb snowy hiking trails.

“The recorded-music tail is getting thinner and thinner over time,” Elberse concludes about a music industry dominated by fewer and fewer artists.9 In 2013, the top 1% of music artists accounted for 77% of all artist-recorded music income while 99% of artists were hidden under what one 2014 industry report, titled “The Death of the Long Tail,” called “a pervasive shroud of obscurity.”10 This has been caused in part by the increasing monopoly of online music retail stores like iTunes and Amazon and partly by consumers being subjected to the tyranny of an overabundance of choice. This income inequality in the industry is reflected in live music, too, where, between 1982 and 2003, the revenue share of the top 1% of touring acts more than doubled, while the revenue share of the bottom 95% of artists fell in the same period by more than half. As the Guardian’s Helienne Lindvall concludes about these trends, “not only is the wider middle class in society shrinking, so is the musician middle class.”11 The most serious casualty of the digital revolution is diversity.

., p. 67. 24 Thomson Venture Economics, special tabulations, June 2003. 25 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Random House, 1996). 26 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 1997). 27 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 28 Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, p. 156. 29 Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: Free Press, 1995). 30 Ibid., p. 47. 31 Ibid., p. 48. 32 “The Greatest Defunct Web Sites and Dotcom Disasters,” CNET, June 5, 2008. 33 Cassidy, Dot.con, pp. 242–45. 34 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 48. 35 Ibid. 36 Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolities,” AVC.com, July 22, 2014. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Matthew Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit,” Slate, January 30, 2014. 40 Stone, The Everything Store, pp. 181–82. 41 Ibid., p. 173. 42 Jeff Bercovici, “Amazon Vs.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Take the typical forty-year-old male worker with a high school education: today his hourly wage is 8 percent lower than his father’s was in 1980, adjusted for inflation. This means that for the first time in recent American history, the average worker has not experienced an improvement in standard of living compared to the previous generation. In fact he is worse off by almost every measure. On top of this, income inequality is widening. Uncertainty about the future is now endemic. But the economic picture is more complex, more interesting, and more surprising than the current debate suggests. America’s labor market is undergoing a momentous shift. While some sectors and occupations are dying, others are growing stronger, and still others, just born, promise to alter the landscape dramatically.

Over the past thirty years the United States has failed to raise its percentage of college-educated young adults substantially. Companies—especially those in innovative industries—are finding it increasingly hard to hire employees with the right skills. And workers are experiencing a steep increase in income inequality. Both problems reflect a serious imbalance in America between the demand for human capital and its supply. We have heard a lot of talk recently about America’s education crisis. But the argument I am making here is not only a moral one, although I do believe that we should seek to give all our children access to a first-rate education.

In fact, when asked by pollsters, most Americans—those making $20,000 and $300,000 alike—answer that they belong to the middle class. I have always thought that this is one of the fundamental cultural differences between the Old and New Worlds, a difference that could account for the stronger entrepreneurial spirit among Americans and the different attitudes toward income inequality and income redistribution. TABLE 4: HOURLY AVERAGE WAGE OF MEN, BY EDUCATION (2011 DOLLARS) 1980 2010 Percent change Dropout $13.7 $11.8 -14% High school $16.0 $14.8 -8% College $21.0 $25.3 +20% Advanced degree $24.9 $33.1 +32% Note: Data include all full-time workers aged 25–60.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

It will take time for the Fund to institutionalize this kind of approach across all of its lending and country monitoring activities, requiring staff training and, at the same time, educating the countries that borrow from it why the Fund is taking this approach. The Fund accepts today that corruption directly undermines economic growth and increases income inequality.21 Given the Fund’s mandate in the anti-corruption area, it is logical that it be active in providing corruption warnings to the markets as kleptocratic regimes plan new sovereign bond issues, rather than just seeing funds stolen and economies mismanaged, and thereafter having to mount rescue operations after bond payment defaults.

Consequently, voters strongly support a range of concrete steps to end corruption in government, including more transparency of how policymakers benefit from legislation, much tighter campaign finance laws, and even an outright ban on campaign contributions from lobbyists.”13 The far-reaching public distrust of government in much of the West also reflects deep concerns that our governments have failed to keep their promises and secure a better life for most citizens. These concerns crystallize around wealth and income inequality, and many people believe the issue is fundamentally about corruption, about a system where the wealthy have the most influence in politics and gain vast profits at the expense of the great majority of the citizenry. This fosters a sense of resentment and provides a basis for the public appeals by populist politicians.

No wonder citizens are angry with their governments, given that the official data shows the majority of households are in real terms worse off than they were several decades ago. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, was ostensibly all about the greed of the bankers, yet the issue of income inequality was at its foundation. The core arguments that produced so much outrage on Wall Street at that time were captured by the movement’s most publicly well-known protagonist, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, who summed up the issues in an article for Vanity Fair appropriately headed: “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”15 Economist and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has long been as concerned as Stiglitz about the impact on democracy of the vast and widening wealth gaps in our societies.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

This decoupling of productivity and compensation leads directly to increased income inequality. As technology displaces or diminishes the value of labor, a larger share of business profits is captured by capital. This decline in labor’s share of national income has been found over the last two decades in the United States as well as in a variety of other developed countries. Because capital ownership is highly concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, a redirection of income from labor to capital amounts to a redistribution from the many to the few, and this increases income inequality. In the United States the trend has been especially dramatic and is demonstrated vividly by the rise of the Gini coefficient.

Realistic values generally fall between roughly 20 and 50, with a higher number indicating more inequality. In the U.S., the Gini coefficient rose from 37.5 in 1986 to 41.4 in 2016—a level higher than any previously recorded.10 Figure 3. Productivity vs. Compensation This trajectory toward rising income inequality has been driven in part by a general decline in the quality of jobs on offer in the United States. In recent decades, American job creation has been weighted increasingly toward low-wage jobs in the service sector. These jobs, in areas like retail sales, food preparation and serving, security and cleaning or janitorial jobs in offices and hotels, provide minimal incomes and few if any benefits, and are often less than full-time with unreliable hours.

And recent college graduates aged twenty-two to twenty-seven had an unemployment rate of more than six percent even as headline unemployment across the economy as a whole fell to 3.6 percent.14 In other words, even as the conventional wisdom suggests that we need to put more emphasis on education and expand college enrollment, the economy is simply not creating enough skilled job opportunities to absorb the graduates already being produced. The rise in income inequality and the decline in job quality are not just bad news for the individuals directly impacted. Rather, they undermine the market demand required to drive us toward sustained economic vitality. Roughly seventy percent of the U.S. economy is associated directly with individual consumer spending. Even that fraction, however, underestimates the importance of consumer demand because business investment is also tied to consumer demand.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kenney, Catherine. 2006. “The Power of the Purse: Allocative Systems and Inequality in Couple Households.” Gender and Society 20 (3): 354–381. Kenworthy, Lane. 2015. “Is Income Inequality Harmful?” In The Good Society. https://lanekenworthy.net/is-income-inequality-harmful/. Last accessed January 2017. Khan, Shamus. 2011. Privilege. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. “The Sociology of Elites.” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (1): 361–377. Khan, Shamus, and Colin Jerolmack. 2013. “Saying Meritocracy, Doing Privilege.”

Rowling, author of the fantastically successful Harry Potter series.1 In the piece he attributes his interest in her assets to the fact that she is “that all-too-rare commodity in the ranks of the ultrawealthy—a role model.” He continues, “Not only has she made her fortune largely through her own wits and imagination, but she also pays taxes and gives generously to charity. At a time of bitter disputes over rising income inequality, no one seems to resent Ms. Rowling’s runaway success.” What struck me about this piece, first, is that Stewart invokes two of the characteristics of the good wealthy person that I have described: Rowling is hard-working, as indicated by her upward mobility, and she gives back liberally.2 He doesn’t mention her lifestyle, but a 2006 Daily Mail article describes her relatively moderate consumption as “a valuable and uplifting counterpoint to the circus of pointless and continuous spending” of other celebrities, and it seems unlikely that Stewart would think she was such a role model if she were perceived as an ostentatious consumer.3 Even more notable is Stewart’s claim that “no one seems to resent” Rowling’s success, despite widespread critiques of extreme economic inequality, because she acquired her fortune meritoriously and uses it to help others.

Annette Lareau (2011) uses the term in a different way: to describe a sense of belonging in particular environments and the feeling that one has the right to ask questions and receive attention from others. See Sherman 2017. 23.Frank 2008; Freeland 2012. 24.Sengupta 2012. 25.This term is typically defined as describing someone with investable assets of $1 million or more (see Hay 2013, 3). 26.See McCall 2013 for a nuanced discussion of media coverage of income inequality since 1980. 27.McCall 2016. Her data show that the level of concern with inequality was also high in the mid-1990s. 28.Bourdieu 1984; Daloz 2012; Khan 2012; Mears 2014; Schor 1998, 2007; Veblen 1994 [1899]. On the super-rich, see, e.g., Beaverstock and Hay 2016. Given the difficulty of accessing elites, scholars tend to look at what is visible (e.g., Mears 2014; Spence 2016).


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life. And so the dreams proliferate. Education is the competitive advantage that might save our skins as we compete more and more directly with China and Vietnam and the Philippines, the journalists say. Education is what explains income inequality, chime the economists, and more education is what will roll it back. In fact, education is just about the only way we can justify being paid for our work at all; it is the only quantifiable input that makes us valuable or gives us “skills.” Quantifiable, yes, but only vaguely. No one really knows the exact educational recipe that is supposed to save us.

The news stories seemed to go out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which of course don’t pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing my candidate. A New York Times article greeted the Sanders campaign in December 2015 by announcing that the public had moved away from his signature issue of the crumbling middle class. “Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality,” the paper declared—nice try, liberal, and thanks for playing. In March, the Times was caught making a number of postpublication tweaks to a news story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa headline: “Hillary Clinton Made History, but Bernie Sanders Stubbornly Ignored It.”

It’s been decades since the United States had a progressive economic strategy, and mainstream economists have forgotten what one can deliver. In fact, Sanders’s recipes are supported by overwhelming evidence—notably from countries that already follow the policies he advocates. On health care, growth and income inequality, Sanders wins the policy debate hands down. It was a striking departure from what nearly every opinionator had been saying for the preceding six months. Too bad it came just eleven days before the Post, following the lead of the Associated Press, declared Hillary Clinton to be the presumptive winner of the Democratic nomination


pages: 173 words: 54,729

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America by Writers For The 99%

Bay Area Rapid Transit, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, desegregation, feminist movement, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, intentional community, it's over 9,000, McMansion, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, We are the 99%, young professional

News that 80 protesters had been arrested in a peaceful march to Union Square, and shocking video of four young women being casually and pointlessly pepper sprayed while corralled in a police pen, was what finally pushed Occupy Wall Street into the national news cycle. The media was left grappling with how to explain what had happened and why; why hundreds of young students were willing to brave aggressive policing and rough living conditions to march around Wall Street and camp in a park. They listened to occupiers talk about income inequality and corporate greed; they had no choice but to absorb and relay at least chunks of OWS’s core message. The media immediately felt compelled to evaluate the movement, to attempt to create a neat, overarching storyline out of its disparate elements. Pundits and opinionators began puzzling over the occupation, about who was behind, who were its spokespeople, what were its demands?

News organizations eagerly dug in for angles, and dispatched reporters to Zuccotti to find answers to questions that continued to nag: How were they organizing? How did they eat, sleep, go to the bathroom? How could there be no leaders? Were there still no demands? While a bewildered mainstream media sought to make sense of the notion that, yes, a diverse coalition of people could protest income inequality and the rampant Wall Street greed without a specific policy platform, “Occupy” became a full-throttle cultural meme. The word pervaded national discourse, and metastasized into a modern riff on “protest.” Clean energy advocates launched ‘Occupy Rooftops’ to promote a solar power action, for instance, and environmentalist groups tapped into the “Occupy” aesthetic to help gather 12,000 for a protest at the White House.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that “All totaled, the Occupy Wall Street story accounted for 13 percent of the overall news during the week of November 14-20.” It wasn’t just coverage of the evictions and the police confrontations that came across in these news items. OWS was also one of the primary drivers for economic coverage that week stories dealt with the movement’s messages concerning income inequality and corporate greed too. Operating an approach that eschewed the conventional media’s demand for top-down, ontopic, sound bites, the Occupy movement nevertheless managed to broadcast around the nation and the world a powerful message about the way the economic system no longer adequately serves the 99%.


pages: 75 words: 22,220

Occupy by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, Martin Wolf, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, union organizing

Even the terminology is accepted. That’s a big shift. Earlier this month, the Pew Foundation released one of its annual polls surveying what people think is the greatest source of tension and conflict in American life. For the first time ever, concern over income inequality was way at the top. It’s not that the poll measured income inequality itself, but the degree to which public recognition, comprehension and understanding of the issue has gone up. That’s a tribute to the Occupy movement which put this strikingly critical fact of modern life on the agenda so that people who may have known of it from their own personal experience see that they are not alone, that this is all of us.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Only within the OECD countries has income redistribution had noticeable effects in raising incomes of unskilled persons. The greatest income inequalities have been observed among jurisdictions. Income redistribution has done little to alievate them. In fact, we believe that foreign aid and international development programs have had the perverse effect of lowering the real incomes of poor people in poor countries by subsidizing incompetent governments. This is an issue we consider in more depth in analyzing the impact of the Information Revolution on morality. A Century of Rising Income Inequality During the industrial period, the factor that contributed most to determining the ordinary person's lifetime income was the political jurisdiction in which he happened to reside.

A Century of Rising Income Inequality During the industrial period, the factor that contributed most to determining the ordinary person's lifetime income was the political jurisdiction in which he happened to reside. Contrary to the common impression in rich economies today, income inequality rose rapidly during the industrial period. An estimate cited by the World Bank suggests that average per capita income in the richest countries ballooned from eleven times that in the poorest countries in 1870 to fifty-two times in l985. While inequality increased dramatically on a global basis, it often appeared otherwise to the fraction of the world inhabiting the wealthy industrial countries. Income inequality rose among jurisdictions rather than within them. For reasons we have already explored, the character of industrial technology itself helped assure that income gaps would narrow within jurisdictions where halfway 175 competent governments mastered the exercise of power on a large scale.

Equal Opportunity in the Information Age In the Information Age, familiar locational advantages will rapidly be transformed by technology. Earnings capacity for persons of similar skills will become much more equal, no matter in what jurisdiction they live. This has already begun to happen. Because institutions that have employed compulsion and local advantage to redistribute income are losing power, income inequality within jurisdictions will rise. Global competition will also tend to increase the income earned by the most talented individuals 178 in each field, wherever they live, much as it does now in professional athletics. The marginal value generated by superior performance in a global market will be huge.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

.† Instantaneous global communication has failed to stop war, genocide, or famine; women remain second-class citizens in large parts of the world; authoritarian propaganda travels as easily online as human rights reports (in some countries, more easily); smartphones have become the preeminent surveillance tool for corporations and governments alike. While many once foresaw digital capitalism as the harbinger of an era of widespread prosperity, legacy industries such as newspapers have crumbled, and income inequality is now higher than ever—particularly in San Francisco, home to many technology-industry employees who are shuttled daily on private buses to and from massive suburban campuses, where they’re showered with amenities and services and never have to interact with residents of the surrounding communities.

Anonymous online speech mitigates some of the obligations that come with digital publishing: incessant promotion, worries about audience composition, appeals to the whims of advertisers and members of one’s peer group or professional network. In a time of precarity—widespread unemployment, record income inequality, rapid technological change, looming environmental calamities—identity has become ever more fixed. One would think that it should be the opposite—that with society, and job markets in particular, in such a state of flux, people should have more flexibility to define themselves as they wish. Perhaps you are a Muslim immigrant living in a midsize American city and wouldn’t mind posting background information on your Facebook profile.

But as Terranova goes on to explain, we shouldn’t “mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence.” Or, as another scholar describes it, these companies are engaged in a “variable scale of labor relations,” and some of them can be considered wrong, if not illegal. We see this in the fantastic wages and lifestyles afforded to programmers, and in the record income inequality and urban stratification to which these companies have contributed, as huge sums accrue to a small class of elites while legacy businesses are disrupted out of existence. Because once you achieve scale as a platform owner, it’s enormously lucrative. Craigslist, whose free classified ad model decimated the newspaper classifieds industry, is privately held, but its revenue per employee is estimated to be more than $3 million, tops in Silicon Valley.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.61 While there has been progress since the Great Society—in, for example, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Affordable Care Act, expansions of Medicaid, and the creation of and major increases in the earned income tax credit that have lifted millions out of poverty—we’ve also seen deterioration on many fronts: increasing polarization in the workforce, accelerating wealth and income inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, and devastating deficiencies of the employer-based benefit model. These trends have all rightly led to a growing push for more sweeping policies that would close the positive dignity gap. In a moment when the very capacity of modern capitalism to provide economic security for the majority of workers and prevent growing inequality and winner-take-all results is being seriously questioned, the completion of this positive economic dignity agenda is perhaps the work of our time.

African American men have for generations, and still do have, lower life expectancy than white men.94 Recent research found that by 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, again largely caused by deaths of despair.95 Within fifty-six cities in the United States, there are life expectancy gaps between neighborhoods—separated by just a few miles—of twenty to thirty years, with the largest gaps where we see the highest rates of racial segregation.96 African American, Native American, and Alaskan Native women die from pregnancy-related causes at rates that are about three times higher than those of white women.97 A major contributor is thought to be the severe impact of chronic stress stemming from a host of societal disadvantages and discrimination that takes a toll on minority women’s bodies—what public health scholar Arline Geronimus calls “weathering.”98 Shorter lives due to worse-quality health care, exposure to gun violence, and intergenerational poverty, or factors that stem from structural race-related inequities, are every bit as worthy of the label of deaths of despair. Issues of income inequality and lack of first and second chances are life-and-death issues. At midlife, those in the top 10 percent have a life expectancy of thirteen to fourteen years greater than those in the bottom 10 percent.99 It is crucial that we explore the relationship of this second pillar of economic dignity—the capacity to pursue potential and purpose—and the pain that leads to deaths of despair.

Sections of the business community have attacked unions by funneling millions of dollars into the campaigns of politicians who support so-called right-to-work laws, which allow employees who benefit from union contracts to free ride and not contribute to the union’s costs of representation.18 Economists including Joseph Stiglitz, Jason Furman, and Peter Orszag are also increasingly highlighting the degree that growing economic concentration is exacerbating income inequality through monopoly’s close cousin, monopsony—when firms exploit their market power as buyers of goods and services to gain advantage over suppliers or their own workers.19 Furman has focused on monopsony in labor markets, in particular, and how employers in concentrated industries can also push down wages by implicitly or explicitly colluding, which can affect workers ranging from nurses in cities with few hospitals to software engineers in Silicon Valley.20 As Stiglitz notes, “Even if a firm with monopsony power passes on some of the gains to consumers, there’s extortion in the economy and societal welfare is lowered.”21 While laws that prevent discrimination and abuse—and set basic rules and minimums for pay, safety, and benefits—are vital for economic dignity, they will never be detailed enough or forward-looking enough to foresee all constantly evolving issues of dignity, domination, and humiliation.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

It was the revolution of a post-Nehruvian youth bubble that refused to settle anymore for its assigned role or station in life. That is what makes this Indian people’s revolution so powerful and that is what makes it, as Nandan tells us, “irreversible.” To be sure, this book does not ignore India’s massive income inequalities and challenges in job creation. It simply says that to get there will “require the courage and optimism to embrace good ideas and not remain imprisoned by bad ones.” It is all about execution. It is not enough, Nandan insists, to get the ideas right; they have to be adopted. And it is not enough to adopt them; they have to be implemented correctly.

Even the United States, a country that supposedly holds the values of the free market close to its heart, saw anticapitalist sentiment soar during the New Deal years with rising poverty and unemployment, when Franklin Roosevelt condemned businesses as “fascist” and seeking “the enslavement for the public.” The United States is seeing a return to such rhetoric and anger against big business as income inequalities and unemployment rise across the country, and as lax regulation allows the financial sector to run amok. It shows how easily a country’s economic mood can change—since the U.S. financial crisis reached a head in September 2008 and near $1 trillion of taxpayer money has been set aside to bail out failing banks, even the staunchest free-market believers are expressing hostility against Wall Street.

India within A microcosm of India’s challenges with globalization lies in the experience of a Tamil Nadu fishing village near Tiruchendur and its brush with globalization. In 2001 the villagers here found that a new fiber-reinforced plastic boat based on foreign know-how was available in the market. It was more durable and could go into deeper water than the timber ones they had, but only the rich fishermen could buy it. Income inequality rose as fishermen with the fiber boats saw fish hauls that were one and a half times those of the others. This continued for a long time, till the poorer villagers were able to save enough to buy the new boats. Once they did, inequality dropped to levels lower than ever before. The key here was access.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Offset Inequality The president of the United States declared in 2013 that economic inequality has become “the defining challenge of our time,” one that poses “a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for.” Barack Obama was referring to statistics showing a large and growing gap in wealth and income between the richest Americans—the so-called 1%—and the rest of us. The phenomenon that the president was talking about is not limited to the United States; income inequality has been increasing sharply in almost every industrialized democracy. “Redistribution of wealth” has become a controversial concept in the United States in recent years. Obama got himself in hot water during his 2008 presidential campaign when he told a voter named Joe Wurzelbacher (aka “Joe the Plumber”) that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

In fact, this trend towards growing inequality is not unique to America’s market economy. Across the developed world, inequality has increased. But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people. Understand, we’ve never begrudged success in America. . . . In fact, we’ve often accepted more income inequality than many other nations for one big reason—because we were convinced that America is a place where even if you’re born with nothing, with a little hard work you can improve your own situation over time and build something better to leave your kids. The problem is that, alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent years.

In the Times of London, the Conservative Party parliamentarian Matt Ridley called on his colleagues to “start spreading the good news on inequality.” The good news, he said, is that everybody is getting better off; it just happens at different rates. “Any increase in wealth inequality or pre-tax income inequality in Britain or America is caused by the rich getting disproportionately richer, not by the poor getting poorer.”4 With all the talk of inequality, some of the 1% began moaning out loud about the focus on their wealth, giving birth to a curious new American species: the whining billionaire.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Yet, however the numbers are done, they invariably reveal that there has been an astonishing increase in the gap between CEO pay and that of the average worker. Only a CEO could believe that CEOs’ productivity has been so remarkable over this period as to justify the extraordinary increase in income inequality in the workplace. The US probably constitutes an extreme case, but similar trends in inequality are apparent in Britain and much of the rest of the English-speaking world. Even in continental Europe, income inequality is creeping up in countries such as Germany and Sweden where equality has hitherto been regarded as integral to the social ethos. All of this reflects a deep imbalance of power in the structure of modern capitalism.

This logic also holds in the aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2007–08. With central banks in the developed world abandoning their mission to curb inflation in order to prop up debt-laden economies, the fear of monetary chaos has induced renewed interest in real assets. So despite the beginnings of a retreat from income inequality and a reduction in the level of bankers’ bonuses, the fact that art prices still looked frothy five years after the crisis may partly be the result of twitchy investors searching for insurance against runaway inflation. Inequality is also a fundamental feature of the artistic labour market.

in the New York Review of Books, 7 November 2013. 207 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House, 2007. 208 http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview 209 Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising, OECD, 2011. 210 See Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, ‘Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from US Tax Return Data’, Department of Economics Working Paper, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, 2012. 211 Figures from Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute of the US, see http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-231-times-greater-average-worker 212 ‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism’, New Left Review, September–October 2011. 213 Remarks at THEARC, Washington DC, 4 December 2013. 214 ‘What did QE achieve, apart from boosting the price of Warhols?’


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

It has had a relatively low level of income inequality (making it a ‘good country’, THE PRECARIAT 9 according to Wilkinson and Pickett (2009)). But inequality runs deep in terms of status hierarchy and has been intensified by the proliferating precariat, whose economic plight is underestimated by conventional measures of income inequality. Higher status positions in Japanese society entail a set of rewards providing socio-economic security that is worth far more than can be measured by monetary incomes alone (Kerbo, 2003: 509–12). The precariat lacks all those rewards, which is why income inequality is so seriously understated.

They might fit the image of an industrial proletariat, but they are treated as a disposable itinerant labour force. Pressure to raise wages has grown. But they are so low that they will long remain a small fraction of wages in rich industrialised countries, as will unit labour costs, especially as productivity is rising sharply. China has contributed to global income inequality in several ways. Its low wages have put downward pressure on wages in the rest of the world and widened wage differentials. It has kept its own wages remarkably low. As growth accelerated, the share of wages in national income fell for 22 consecutive years, falling from a low 57 per cent of GDP in 1983 to just 37 per cent in 2005.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But US federal spending for the poor, the working poor, the lower middle class, the disabled, and the retired is more substantial than generally understood. That federal entitlement spending is backed by two sources—taxes on the affluent and borrowing from the young through the national debt. Both are income-transfer mechanisms. Yet income inequality still is high. The Belarus-born economist Simon Kuznets, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971, showed that industrial development first increases and then decreases inequality. This formula has held since 1971 in most nations: if Kuznets continues to be correct, inequality in China soon will moderate.

The result was the present situation: aristocratic profligacy at the top; most people, including the middle class and the poor, somewhat better off; and everybody in a foul mood, even the wealthy, who feel themselves ill used. The economies of contemporary developed nations value information and intellectual property a lot more than resources or labor. Perhaps some future condition will change this, but for the moment, America, China, and parts of Europe are generating income inequality. YET BROADLY ACROSS THE WORLD, inequality is decreasing, not rising. Milanovic calculates that beginning in 1988—roughly when China and India liberalized and free-market international trade began to surge—the overall inequality of the world has declined about 10 percent. Economists measure inequality using the Gini coefficient, a scale on which the lower the number, the better.

(Assume for the sake of argument there’s a loophole-resistant way to establish the cap—pro sports leagues have shown that salary caps can be enforced—and set aside for another day whether private corporations could be so regulated.) This would be healthy for democracy and for the reputation of market economics, eliminating the dander caused when capitalists game the system to screw average people. But this reform would do little to ameliorate income inequality. If the top CEO pay average had been capped at $1 million, with the savings uniformly distributed, each American household would have received $25. In 2015, Honeywell CEO David Cote paid himself $36 million. Suppose he’d earned $1 million, with the yield evenly distributed to Honeywell employees.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

The "city" of Austin falls almost entirely within one county. The Austin metropolitan area includes five counties—a far more accurate description of the Austin economy than the antiquated and more arbitrary political designation. [back] *** *Income inequality increased not only regionally but also among individuals. Beginning in 1969, the most common measure of family income inequality increased steadily. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2006), p. 6. [back] *** *There are wheels within wheels in the Big Sort.

Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 90. See the various measures of congressional voting devised by Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, including their unpublished paper "Political Polarization and Income Inequality" (January 27, 2003), p. 3, http://www.wws.princeton.edu/research/papers/01_03_nm.pdf. 5. The Beginning of Division: Beauty and Salvation in 1974 1. Alice Moore, quoted in Catherine Candor, "A History of the Kanawha County Textbook Controversy" (PhD diss., Virginia Tech University, March 1976), P. 54. 2.

"Textual Reproduction of Ethnicity in the Kanawha Valley: The 1974 Textbook Controversy Revisited." Unpublished research paper, 2002. McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. Polarized America The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ———. "Political Polarization and Income Inequality." Unpublished paper, January 27, 2003. http://www.wws.princeton.edu/research/papers/01_03_nm.pdf. McGavran, Donald. The Bridges of God. New York: Friendship Press, 1968. ———. Understanding Church Growth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970. McGavran, Donald, and Win Am. How to Grow a Church.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In support of this view, one could point to the Easterlin paradox: although higher income is correlated with greater happiness both within and across countries at a specific point in time, over time, people and countries do not get happier as they get richer.28 In this view, it’s relative income within a country that determines a person’s happiness; our absolute level of income is irrelevant because we get accustomed to whatever level of income we have. In this view, then, insofar as income inequality within countries is generally increasing over time, we might expect people to get less happy over time. However, though Easterlin’s paradox continues to be influential, it doesn’t actually exist. Easterlin first published his findings back in 1974, when the data we had about levels of happiness around the world was much more sparse than it is today.29 From the fact that we could not, at the time, show that countries get happier as they get richer, he concluded that there was no relationship between absolute level of income and happiness and that happiness was instead determined by one’s income relative to one’s peers.30 But more recent work with better data strongly supports the view that countries get happier as they get richer.31 It may well be that your relative level of income within your country influences how happy you are, but it’s also true that your happiness increases with your absolute level of income.

For example, Figure 9.3 shows how the global distribution of income has changed over time.36 And Figure 9.4 shows life expectancy at birth for the world as a whole and for the six most populous low- and middle-income countries. One study found that in countries experiencing sustained economic growth, happiness inequality has been decreasing over time, even in countries which have also experienced rising income inequality.37 This is true across socioeconomic classes and across different races. The authors of the study suggest that as countries get richer, their governments spend more on things like health, infrastructure, and social protection, which affect incomes and happiness differently. Figure 9.4. Life expectancy has more than doubled in many countries since the nineteenth century.

Both for the world as a whole and for the six most populous low- and middle-income countries, it has increased almost every year for decades. Similarly, in the United States the Black-White happiness gap has closed by two-thirds since the 1970s, although today White Americans remain happier on average, even after controlling for differences in education and income. Inequality between self-reported happiness scores has also decreased between genders. But this might not be for the reason you think: surprisingly, it’s because women have gotten less happy over time. They used to report being happier than men, but now they are similar in happiness to men. It’s not currently known why this trend has occurred.38 These broad improvements in human wellbeing are an important corrective to the widespread belief that the world is getting worse and will continue to do so.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Experts say gains from growth in India and China should be better channeled into areas that most uplift the rural poor, such as spending on health, education, and infrastructure. Yet sharply tighter credit conditions and weaker growth are likely to cut into governments’ abilities to invest to meet education, health, and gender goals, hitting the poor the hardest, says the World Bank. An October 2008 report on global income inequality by the International Labour Organization [ILO] says income inequality, on the rise in most regions of the world, is expected to increase due to the global financial crisis. Social unrest could spike if China’s annual growth rate falls below 8 percent. China, with its current account surplus [trade surplus] and nearly $2 trillion in foreign reserves, is better placed than India to continue long-term investments in infrastructure and social-welfare initiatives.

The 2008 Global Hunger Index of the International Food Policy Research Institute says India already suffers from alarming levels of hunger, and is one of three countries with the highest prevalence—more than 40 percent—of underweight children under five. Inequality in China and India May Increase The financial crisis could worsen the existing high levels of inequality in China and India, say experts. . . . Despite unprecedented levels of economic growth in India and China, there is increasing geographic, sector-based, and income inequalities within each country. Benefits from growth have failed to trickle down to significant segments of each population, especially in rural areas. Biplove Choudhary of the UNDP’s trade 138 Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Developing Nations program says growth does not directly translate into poverty alleviation.


pages: 230 words: 61,702

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Cheap labor, good enough results. It is enough to make Sam Walton smile. In short, the globalization of the economy of knowledge may be having some of the same effects as the globalization of the economy generally. One of the worst consequences of an unfettered, deregulated global economy is gross income inequality. This phenomenon isn’t simply a matter of some people making more than others. It concerns a structural fact: that only a few control half of all global resources. It is part of a larger pattern of financial injustice But the unfettered global economy is not only increasing economic inequality, it is also encouraging epistemic inequality.7 To understand what I mean by epistemic inequality, let’s think first about the value of equality itself.

And that in turn can affect people’s ability to filter out bullshit—simply because their filtering is so one-sided. Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things can be forces for democratic values. But we must not let our enthusiasm blind us to the existence of epistemic inequality, and the fact that its causes—racism, income inequality—pollute the infosphere just as much as they pollute the minds that make it up. Walmarting the University Standard procedure for university exams these days involves prohibiting the use of smartphones. As I was reminding my students of this recently, one of them joked that the university better come up with policies on wearable tech like smart watches ASAP.

., 102 French Revolution, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 184 Fricker, Miranda, 146–48, 201 Galileo, 34, 68 Galton, Francis, 120 games, gaming, 20, 191 gatekeeping, 128, 134, 146 gender, 162 in marriage, 53–54, 72 in problem solving, 137 Georgetown University, 77–78 Gilbert, Margaret, 117–19, 200 Glass, Ira, 78 Glaucon, 54 Glauconian reasoning, 54–55, 56–58 global economy, 139, 142, 152 global warming, 56, 100, 124, 144, 185, 198 Goldberg, Sandy, 115 Goldman, Alvin, 194 Google, 5, 23, 30, 113, 128, 130, 135, 163, 174, 182, 203 business model of, 9 data collection and tracking by, 90, 155–56, 158, 161 as hypothetical “guy,” 24 monopolization by, 145–46 propaganda disseminated on, 66 in reinforcement of one’s own beliefs, 56 Google Complete, 155 Google Flu Trends, 158, 183 Google Glass, 149, 186 Google-knowing, xvi, 21–40, 25 defined, 23 limitations of, 174, 180 reliance on, 6–7, 23, 25–26, 30–31, 36, 113, 116, 153, 163, 179–80 Google Maps, 116 Google Street View, 23 Gordon, Lewis, 148 gorilla suit experiment, 30 government: autonomy limited by, 109 closed politics of, 144–45 data mining and analysis used by, 9, 90–91, 93, 104, 107 online manipulation used by, 81 purpose of, 38 transparency of, 137–38 Greece, classical philosophy of, 13, 47, 166–67, 171–72 Grimm, Stephen, 164 Guardian, 81 Gulf of Mexico, oil spill in, 118 H1N1 flu outbreak, tracking of, 158 Haidt, Jonathan, 51–54, 56, 57, 60, 196–97 Halpern, Sue, 106 Harvard Law Review, 89 Hazlett, Allan, 49 HBO GO, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 177 Hemingway, Mark, 46 Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), 61 Hippocrates, 13 hive-mind, 4, 136 HM (patient), 168–69 Hobbes, Thomas, 38, 109 holiness, logical debate over, 166–67 homosexuality, changing attitudes toward, 53–54 Houla massacre, 83 Howe, Jeff, 136 Huffington Post, 43 human dignity: autonomy and, 58, 59–60 information technology as threat to, 187 interconnectedness and, 184–88 privacy and, 101–9 human rights, 54, 60 digital equality as, 142–48 protection of, 145 Hume, David, 48 hyperconnectivity, 184–88 identity: digital reshaping of, 73–74 manufactured online, 80–81 “scrubbing” of, 74 illegal searches, 93 illusion, distinguishing truth from, 67–74 incidental data collection, 95–96, 99 inclusivity, 135–37 income inequality, 142 inference, 29, 60, 172 information: accuracy and reliability of, 14, 27–30, 39–40, 44–45 collected pools of, 95–100, 107–9 distribution vs. creation of, 24 immediate, unlimited access to, 3–4, 23, 30, 42, 56, 113–16, 135–36, 141, 149, 153, 180 as interconnective, 184–88 vs. knowledge, 14 sorting and filtering of, 12, 26–29, 44–45, 127–28 information age, 111 information analysis, techniques of, 8–9 information cascades, 36, 66, 121 defined, 32 information coordination problem, 38–39, 56 information “glut,” 9–10, 44 information privacy, 94–100 and autonomy, 102–7 information sharing, coordination in, 4–5 information technology: costs of, 145 data trail in, 9 democratization through, 133–38, 148 devices and platforms of, xvii–xviii, 3, 7–8, 10, 41–43, 69, 70, 77–78, 90–91, 106–7, 144, 148–49, 156, 180, 185–87 disquieting questions about, 6 in education, 148–54 experience vs., 173–74 hypothetical loss of, 5 paradox of, 6, 12, 179 pool of data in, 95–100 surveillance and, 89–109 typified and dephysicalized objects in, 69 unequal distribution of, 144–45 see also Internet of Things information theory, 12 infosphere: defined, 10 feedback loop of social constructs in, 72–73 network of, 180 pollution of, 148 vastness of, 128 InnoCentive, 136–37, 141 institutions, cooperative, 60–61 intellectual labor, 139–40 International Telecommunications Union, 135 Internet: author’s experiment in circumventing, 21–24, 25, 35 in challenges to reasonableness, 41–63 changes wrought by, xv–xviii, 6–7, 10–11, 23, 180, 184–88 as a construction, 69 cost and profit debate over, 145 as epistemic resource, 143–45 expectations of, 80–83 as force for cohesion and democracy, 55–63 freedom both limited and enhanced by, 92–93 international rates of access to, 135, 144–45 monopolization and hegemony in, 145–46 as network, 111–13 “third wave” of, 7 see also World Wide Web; specific applications Internet of Everything, 184 Internet of Things: blurring of online and offline in, 71 defined, 7–8 integration of, 10 shared economy in, 140–41 threat from, 107, 153, 184–88 Internet of Us, digital form of life as, 10, 39, 73, 83–86, 106, 179–88 interracial marriage, 54 interrogation techniques, 105 In the Plex (Levy), 5–6 Intrade, 122–23, 136 intuition, 15, 51–53 iPhone, production of, 77–78, 80, 139, 144 IQ, 52 Iraq, 83 Iraq War, 137 ISIS, 128 isolation, polarization and, 42–43 I think, I exist, 127 James, William, 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 143 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 137 joint commitments, defined, 117–18 journalism, truth and, 84 judgment, 51–55, 57 collective vs. individual, 117, 120–25 justice, 54 “just so” stories, 27–28 Kahneman, Daniel, 29, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 58–60, 62, 85 Kitcher, Philip, 182 knowing-which, as term, 171 knowledge: in big data revolution, 87–190 changing structure of, 125–32 common, 117–19 defined and explained, xvii, 12–17 democratization of, 133–38 digital, see digital knowledge; Google-knowing distribution of, 134–35, 138, 141 diverse forms of, 130 economy of, 138–45 hyperconnectivity of, 184–88 individual vs. aggregate, 120–24 information vs., 14 Internet revolution in, xv–xviii minimal definition of, 14–15 as networked, 111–32 new aspects in old problems of, 1–86, 90 personal observation in, 33–35 political economy of, 133–54 as power, 9, 98–99, 133, 185–86 practical vs. theoretical, 169, 172 procedural, 167–74 recording and storage of, 127–28 reliability of sources of, 14, 27–31, 39–40, 44–45, 114–16 as a resource, 38–39 shared cognitive process in attainment of, 114–25 three forms of, 15–17 three simple points about, 14–17 truth and, 19, 126 understanding vs. other forms of, 6, 16–17, 90, 154, 155–73, 181 value and importance of, 12–13 knowledge-based education, 61 Kodak camera, 89 Koran, 48, 61 Kornblith, Hilary, 194 Krakauer, John, 169 Kuhn, Thomas, 159–60 Lakhani, Karim, 137 Larissa, Greece, 13, 15, 182 Leonhardt, David, 122–23 Levy, Steven, 5–6 liberals, 43 libraries, 22, 134, 153–54 of Alexandria, 8 digital form of life compared to, xvi, 17, 20, 44–45, 56, 63, 128 as epistemic resource, 145 Google treated as, 24 “Library of Babel” (Borges), 17 “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking’: The Liberal Media’s Latest Attempt to Control the Discourse” (Hemingway), 46 Lifespan of a Fact, The (D’Agata), 79 literacy, 35, 134 literal artifacts: defined, 69 social artifacts and, 71, 72 lobectomy, 168 Locke, John, 33–36, 39, 60, 67–70, 85, 127, 143 “Locke’s command,” 33–34 London Underground, mapping of, 112–13 machines, control by, 116 “mainstream” media, 32 censorship of, 66 majority rule, 120 manipulation: data mining and, 97, 104–6 of expectations, 80–82 persuasion and, 55, 57–58, 81–83, 86 manuals, 22 manufacturing, 138–39 maps, 21–22 marine chronometer, 137 marketing: bots in, 82 Glauconian, 58 targeted, 9, 90, 91, 105 marriage: changing attitudes toward, 53–54 civil vs. religious, 58–59 as social construct, 72 martial arts, 170 mass, as primary quality, 68 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 150–53 mathematics, in data analysis, 160, 161 Matrix, The, 18–19, 75 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 8, 158–59 measles vaccine, 7, 124 Mechanical Turk, 136, 141 media, 134 diversity in, 42 opinion affected by, 53 sensationalist, 77 memory: accessing of, 114, 115 in educational models, 152 loss of, 168–69 superceded by information technology, xv–xvi, 3, 4, 6, 94, 149 trust in, 28, 33 Meno, 13 merchandising, online vs. brick and mortar, 70 Mercier, Hugo, 54 metrics, 112 Milner, Brenda, 168–69 mirror drawing experiment, 169 misinformation, 6–7, 31–32 in support of moral truth, 78–80, 82 mob mentality, 32–33 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 150–53 moral dumbfounding, 52 morality, moral values, xvii, 6, 44, 53–54, 195 “Moses Illusion,” 29–30 motor acuity, mastery of, 170–71, 173 motor skills, 167–74 Murray, Charles J., 147 music, as dephysicalized object, 69–70 Nagel, Thomas, 84 naming, identification by, 94 narrative license, truth and falsehood in, 78–79 National Endowment for the Humanities, 61 National Science Foundation, 61 Nature, 158, 161 Netflix, 69, 145 Net neutrality, defined, 145 netography, 112–13 of knowledge, 125–32 networked age, 111 networks, 111–32 collective knowledge of, 116–25, 180 knowledge reshaped and altered by, 125–32, 133, 140 in problem solving, 136 use of term, 111–12 neural system, 26 neural transplants, 3, 5 Neurath, Otto, 128–29 neuromedia, 3–5, 12, 17–19, 113–14, 132, 149, 168, 180–82, 184 limitations of, 174 as threat to education, 153–54 Newton, Isaac, 175 New Yorker, 25, 26 New York Times, 122, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111 Nobel laureates, 149 noble lie, 83, 86 nonfiction, 79–80 NPR, 78, 80 NSA: alleged privacy abuses by, 98–100, 138 data mining by, 9, 91, 95–96, 108, 167 proposed limitations on, 109 Ntrepid, 81 nuclear weapons technology, xvii nullius in verba (take nobody’s word for it), 34 Obama, Barack, 7, 100 administration, 109 objectivity, objective truth, 45, 74 as anchor for belief, 131 in constructed world, 83–86 as foundation for knowledge, 127 observation, 49, 60 affected by expectations, 159–60 behavior affected by, 91, 97 “oceanic feeling,” 184 “offlife,” 70 OkCupid, 157 “onlife,” 70 online identity creation, 73–74 online ranking, 119–21, 136 open access research sharing sites, 135–36 open society: closed politics vs., 144–45 values of, 41–43, 62 open source software, 135 Operation Earnest Voice, 81 Operation Ivy, ix opinion: knowledge vs., 13, 14, 126 in online ranking, 119–20 persuasion and, 50–51 truth as constructed by, 85–86 optical illusions, 67 Oracle of Delphi, 16–17, 171 Outcome-Based Education (OBE), 61–62 ownership, changing concept of, 73 ox, experiment on weight of, 120 Oxford, 168 Page, Larry, 5–6 Panopticon, 91, 92, 97 perception: acuity of, 173 distinguishing truth in, 67–74 expectations and, 159–60 misleading, 29–30, 67 as relative, 67–68 perceptual incongruity, 159–60 personal freedom, 101 persuasion, 50–51, 54–55, 56–58 by bots, 82 phone books, 22 phone data collection, 95, 108 photography: privacy and, 89, 93 sexually-explicit, 99 photo-sharing, manipulation in, 82–83 Plato, 13–14, 16–17, 54, 59, 83, 126, 165–67 polarization, 7 herd mentality in, 66 isolated tribes in, 43–46 politics, 162, 196 accessibility in, 23 activism in, 66, 67 bias in, 43–46 closed, 144–45 elections in, 120–23 of knowledge, 133–54 opposition to critical thinking in, 61–62 persuasion in, 57–58, 82–83 power in, 86, 133 prediction market in, 122–23 Politifact, 46 Popper, Karl, 41–43 Postman, L.


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Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

On weekends, the food court is crowded with young families from nearby residential buildings, but on weekdays this court is the dominion of the old. And in contemporary China, this is a common plague, the plague of being old and lonely. As younger generations leave villages, hometowns, even the country itself to chase after careers and jobs, and the tightening noose of income inequality squeezes leisure time, the elderly are left to their own devices. This is unusual for a culture so focused on family and filial piety. I do not know the language of famine, but under fluorescent lights at a table of spicy, numbing vegetables, dumplings, and noodles on plastic dishes, it’s clear that my great-uncle is well acquainted with it.

The sociopolitical upheaval in China after the Great Leap Forward and the wild uncertainty of the current U.S. political climate both stand as lessons to China’s current lawmakers: agrarian transition is enormously tricky and the consequences are huge, especially in an era of global agricultural trade. Although China harbors dreams of becoming an AI superpower, the question of the countryside will have to be resolved in order for China to garner enough knowledge workers. China has one of the largest rates of income inequality in the world, due to the rural-urban income gap. Rural migrants work for little pay in cities but are unable to actually stay in urban areas. Yet hukou system reform is beginning, although there are new signs that rural hukou holders are less enthusiastic about switching to urban hukous.5 China’s land reform has continued by allowing farmers to lease out their land or transfer land rights to another, enabling an extra source of income.

One researcher, Yang Yuting at Beijing Normal University, has studied the culture of shehui ren in depth. Yuting explains that the Peppa Pig livestream meme was a culture developed around shared experiences throughout the country. With promises of middle-class stability unmet and increasing income inequality, young people rallied around the cry of “Shehui, shehui!” or “Society, society!” In everyday Chinese parlance, to be part of society (rong dao shehui, 融到社会) is what a moral, upstanding citizen desires. Online shehui ren culture parodied and mocked this normative sentiment. Yuting says that self-declared shehui ren are united against all the conventionally defined markers of being a good citizen.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 251.   38   “we’re way closer … people’s brains” : Matthew Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change,” Wired , February 15, 2021, https:// www .wired .com /story /billionaires -use -vr -avoid -social -change /.   38   “It is not possible … you wanted” : Gault, “Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change.”   39   “Yes, we are in a pandemic” : David Zweig, “$25,000 Pod Schools: How Well-to-Do Children Will Weather the Pandemic,” New York Times , July 30, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /30 /nyregion /pod -schools -hastings -on -hudson .html.   41   legions of Amazon workers : Joey Hadden, “Amazon Delivery Drivers Share What It’s Like to Be on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Including Not Having Time to Wash Their Hands and Uncleaned Vans,” Business Insider , April 2, 2020, https:// www .businessinsider .com /why -amazon -delivery -workers -feel -exposed -and -vulnerable -to -coronavirus -2020 -3.   41   Amazon avoids taxes : Matthew Gardner, “Amazon Has Record-Breaking Profits in 2020, Avoids $2.3 Billion in Federal Income Taxes,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, February 3, 2021, https:// itep .org /amazon -has -record -breaking -profits -in -2020 -avoids -2 -3 -billion -in -federal -income -taxes /.   41   anti-competitive practices : Mark Chandler, “Amazon Accused of Anti-Competitive Practices by US Subcommittee,” Bookseller , October 8, 2020, https:// www .thebookseller .com /news /amazon -accused -anti -competitive -practices -us -subcommittee -1222115.   41   abuses labor : Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “Power and Peril: 5 Takeaways on Amazon’s Employment Machine,” New York Times , June 15, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /06 /15 /us /politics /amazon -warehouse -workers .html; Casey Newton, “Amazon’s Poor Treatment of Workers Is Catching up to It during the Coronavirus Crisis,” Verge , April 1, 2020, https:// www .theverge .com /interface /2020 /4 /1 /21201162 /amazon -delivery -delays -coronavirus -worker -strikes.   42   more people opened online trading : Annie Massa, “Pandemic-Fueled Day Trading Is Overwhelming Online Brokers—and the Traders Are Fuming,” Fortune , December 9, 2020, https:// fortune .com /2020 /12 /08 /day -trading -online -brokers -tech -failure -crashes -outages /.   42   Shares of Zoom went up : Shanhong Liu, “Price of Zoom shares traded on Nasdaq Stock Market in 2020 and 2021,” Statista , August 9, 2021, https:// www .statista .com /statistics /1106104 /stock -price -zoom /.   42   Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose : Chase Peterson-Withorn, “How Much Money America’s Billionaires Have Made During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Forbes , April 30, 2021, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /chasewithorn /2021 /04 /30 /american -billionaires -have -gotten -12 -trillion -richer -during -the -pandemic.   42   five biggest U.S. tech companies : The staff of the Wall Street Journal , “How Big Tech Got Even Bigger,” Wall Street Journal , February 6, 2021, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /how -big -tech -got -even -bigger -11612587632.   42   Netflix’s share price : Jonathan Ponciano, “5 Big Numbers That Show Netflix’s Massive Growth Continues during the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Forbes , October 20, 2020, https:// www .forbes .com /sites /jonathanponciano /2020 /10 /19 /netflix -earnings -5 -numbers -growth -continues -during -the -coronavirus -pandemic /.   43   “Many creatives, startups, and techies” : Jen Murphy, “Remote Workers Flee to $70,000-a-Month Resorts While Awaiting Vaccines,” Bloomberg , February 15, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -02 -15 /remote -workers -flee -to -luxury -beach -resorts -while -awaiting -vaccines.   43   “It’s been great here” : Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home into a Primary Home,” New York Times , July 24, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /07 /24 /realestate /coronavirus -second -homes - .html.   43   Each 1 percent increase : Mary Van Beusekom, “Race, Income Inequality Fuel COVID Disparities in US Counties,” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota, January 20, 2021, https:// www .cidrap .umn .edu /news -perspective /2021 /01 /race -income -inequality -fuel -covid -disparities -us -counties; Tim F. Liao and Fernando De Maio, “Association of Social and Economic Inequality with Coronavirus DISEASE 2019 Incidence and Mortality across US Counties,” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 1 (2021), https:// doi .org /10 .1001 /jamanetworkopen .2020 .34578.   43   people processing pork : Tina L.

The dependably wealth-apologist New York Times was busy running non-ironic photo spreads of families “retreating” to their summer homes—second residences worth well more than most of our primary ones—and stories about their successes working remotely from the beach, or retrofitting extra bedrooms as offices. “It’s been great here ,” one venture fund founder explained. “If I didn’t know there was absolute chaos in the world … I could do this forever.” That chaos in the world was real. While the wealthy retreated, the poor were clobbered. Each 1 percent increase in a county’s income inequality was associated with a 2 percent increase of Covid infection and a 3 percent rise in related deaths. By nearly every metric, the poorer a region or country, the more Covid and death. Likewise, the people processing pork and beef suffered over 100 percent greater transmission rates than the people to whom all that meat was delivered.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

McGee (2004), The Philosophy of Taxation and Public Finance, Springer-Verlag. these reasons interact Edgar L. Feige and Richard Cebula (2011), “America's Underground Economy: Measuring the Size, Growth and Determinants of Income Tax Evasion in the U.S.,” Munich Personal RePEc Archive, MPRA Paper No. 29672 (Jan 2011). blamed income inequality Kim M. Bloomquist (2003), “Tax Evasion, Income Inequality and Opportunity Costs of Compliance,” Paper presented at the 96th Annual Conference of the National Tax Association. carried-interest tax Nicholas Kristof (6 Jul 2011), “Taxes and Billionaires,” New York Times. Laura Saunders (6 Aug 2011), “'Carried Interest' in the Cross Hairs,” Wall Street Journal.

Cries that taxation equals theft, that the tax system is unfair, and that the government just wastes any money you give it gives people a different morality, which they use to justify underpayment. This weakens the original moral pressure to pay up. All of these reasons interact with each other. One study looked at tax evasion over about 50 years, and found that it increases with income tax rates, the unemployment rate, and public dissatisfaction with government. Another blamed income inequality. Despite all of this, the U.S. government collects 81% of all taxes owed. That's actually pretty impressive compared to some countries. There's another aspect to this. In addition to illegal tax evasion, there's what's called tax avoidance: technically legal measures to reduce taxes that run contrary to the tax code's policy goals.

According to one study conducted in 23 countries, people have a higher risk tolerance in cultures that avoid uncertainty or are individualistic, and a lower risk tolerance in cultures that are egalitarian and harmonious. Also—and this is particularly interesting—the wealthier a country is, the lower its citizens' tolerance for risk. Along similar lines, the greater the income inequality a society has, the less trusting its citizens are. Creating a dilemma that encourages deception. Think back to the two prisoners for a minute. Throughout this entire book, we've assumed that Alice and Bob are both actually guilty. What if they're not? Now, what is Alice's best strategy? Disturbingly, it may still be in her best interest to confess and testify against Bob.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Harvey Jones, the former chairman of ICI, was one of Britain’s most successful and (thanks to a television show) best-known businessmen, but he belonged to the era of relatively normal pay levels for senior executives and before the internationalisation of top jobs. Britain remains one of the most unequal of the rich countries but income inequality has fallen since 2007, as it often does in periods of recession or slow growth, partly because bonuses and high returns fall in the financial sector and other high pay sectors while benefits and pensions rise more quickly than earnings. Indeed, according to the World Bank the UK has seen the biggest decline in inequality of any industrial country since the financial crisis.38 Since 2007 the poorest 20 per cent of households have seen disposable incomes rise by 5 per cent while the richest 20 per cent have seen them fall by the same amount.

The end of mobility thesis was established in the public mind by a 2005 LSE paper, funded and publicised by the Sutton Trust (another effective social mobility think tank) which found a decline in upward mobility between the cohort of children born in 1958 and those born in 1970. The paper attributed this fall to growing income inequality in the 1980s and the expansion of higher education being monopolised by the better off.6 Social mobility is not only hard to measure—and requires good data on income and occupations going back over many decades—it is also conceptually quite complex. The mobility debate overlaps with, and is often conflated with, related but distinct debates about inequality, meritocracy and access to elite jobs.

Most economists connect the 1980s slowdown in mobility to the sharp rise in inequality in that decade, which seems logical because as the income spectrum widens you have to get a much better paying job to move up from one quartile to another. Yet this does not show up in the sociologists’ occupational analysis, perhaps because a lot of the increase in income inequality was happening within occupations, especially at the top end—a humble conveyancing solicitor versus a top City lawyer. Both forms of analysis are perfectly valid, with income acting as a useful ‘sanity check’ against the vagaries of occupational groups. Moreover, lots of other things have been going on—socially and politically—in recent decades that are not necessarily picked up by these big aggregate analyses and could be affecting mobility both for better and worse.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

The persistence of high unemployment levels in Western economies might mean that the dislocation caused by the last wave of skill-biased technical change is permanent. Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand have done research on the total demand for workers in the United States who are highly skilled.5 They say demand peaked around the year 2000 and has fallen since, even as universities churn out an ever-growing supply. Income inequality is a growing concern in an economy that has fewer good jobs to allocate. There is already evidence that the big payoffs in today’s economy are going not to the bulk of knowledge workers, but to a small segment of “superstars”—CEOs, hedge fund and private equity managers, investment bankers, and so forth—almost all of whom are very well leveraged by automated decision-making.

It isn’t only that people become disgruntled when they lack the income that flows from a good job. They miss having the job itself. This was what economics Nobel laureate Robert Shiller had in mind when he called advancing machine intelligence “the most important problem facing the world today.” He elaborated: It’s associated with income inequality, but it may be more than that. Since we tend to define ourselves by our intellectual talents, it’s also a question of personal identity. Who am I? Intellectual talents are being replaced by computers. That’s a frightening thing for most people. It’s an issue with deep philosophical implications.9 Jobs bring many benefits to people’s lives beyond the paycheck, among them the social community they provide through having coworkers, the satisfaction of setting and meeting challenging goals, even the predictable structure and rhythm they bring to the week.

., 61–63, 128–29, 204–8, 223–24 cutting both ways, 70–74 defined, 64–65 example, spreadsheets, 69–70 example, underwriting, 77–84, 218–19 five options for, 76–77, 218 forms of, 65–69, 209 as goal, 228–29 in governance, 249–51 government policies and, 229–43 human-machine partnership, 68, 203, 234, 235, 237, 239, 250, 251 implementing, steps for, 208–23 key capabilities of humans and, 71–73 less work not likely with, 69–70 “moon shots,” 210, 215–16 as organizational priority, 203–4 preparing employees for, 219 proofs of concept or pilots, 220–21 reasons for augmentation, 204–8 smart machines and job security, 59–61 Stepping Aside, 77, 81, 85, 87, 108–30 Stepping Forward, 77, 83–86, 88, 176–200 Stepping In, 77, 81–82, 85, 87, 131–52 Stepping Narrowly, 77, 82, 85, 87–88, 153–75 Stepping Up, 76–77, 80, 84–86, 89–107 three forms, for specialization, 166–69 as wheels for the mind, 63–65 Augmentation Research Center, 64 “Augmenting Human Intellect” (Engelbart), 64 Automated Insights, 22, 97 Wordsmith, 96 automation, 1, 3–4, 5, 6, 8, 12–13 augmentation vs., 61–63, 128–29, 204–8, 223–24 business process management, 40 codified tasks and, 12–13, 14, 27–28, 30 content transmission and, 19–20 eras of, 2–5 government policies and, 229–43 income inequality and, 228–29 “isolation syndrome,” 24 job losses and, 1–6, 8, 30, 78, 150–51, 167, 223–24, 226, 227, 238 jobs resistant to, 153–75 process automation, 48–49 “race against the machine,” 8, 29 reductions in cost and time, 48, 49 regulated sectors and legal constraints on, 213–15 repetitive task, 42, 47–48, 49, 50 robotic process, 48–49, 187, 221, 222–23 “rule engines,” 47 sectors using, 1, 11–12, 13, 18, 74, 201–3 (see also specific industries) signs of coming automation, 19–22 Stepping Forward with, 176–200 Stepping In with, 134–52 Stepping Up and, 91–95 strategy of, as self-defeating, 204–8 strongest evidence of job threat, 19 Automation Anywhere, 48, 216 automotive sector, 1 Autor, David, 70–71 Balaporia, Zahir, 189–91 Bankrate.com, 96 Bathgate, Alastair, 156, 157 Baylor College of Medicine, 212 Beaudry, Paul, 6, 24 Belmont, Chris, 209 Berg company, 60–61 Berlin, Isaiah, 171 Bernanke, Ben, 28, 42, 73 Bernaski, Michael, 79, 80, 81, 82, 187 Bessen, James, 133, 233 Betterment, 86–87, 198 big-picture perspective, 71, 75, 76–77, 84, 91, 92, 99, 100, 155 Stepping Up and, 98–100 Binsted, Kim, 125 “black box,” 95, 134, 139, 148, 192, 198 Blanke, Jennifer, 7 Blue Prism, 49, 156, 216, 221 Bohrer, Abram, 159 Bostrom, Nick, 226, 227 Brackett, Glenn, 128 Braverman, Harry, 15–16 Breaking Bad (TV show), 172 Brem, Rachel, 181–82 Bridgewater Associates, 92–93 Brooks, David, 241 Brooks, Rodney, 170, 182 Brown, John Seely, 237 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 6, 8, 27, 74 Bryson, Joanna J., 226 Buehner, Carl, 120 Buffett, Warren, 244 Bush, Vannevar, 64, 248 Bustarret, Claire, 154 BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), 13 Cameron, James, 165–66 Carey, Greg, 154, 156, 172–73 Carr, Nick, 162 CastingWords, 168 Catanzaro, Sandro, 179–80, 193 Cathcart, Ron, 89–91, 95 Cerf, Vint, 248 Chambers, Joshua, 250 Charles Schwab, 88 chess, 74–76 Chi, Michelene, 163 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 11–12 Chilean miners, 201–2 China, 239 Chiriac, Marcel, 217 Circle (Internet start-up), 146 Cisco, 43 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 238 “Claiming our Humanity in the Digital Age,” 248 Class Dojo, 141 Cleveland Clinic, 54 Clifton, Jim, 8 Clinton, Bill, 108 Clockwork Universe, The (Dolnick), 169–70 Codelco/Codelco Digital, 40, 201–3 Cognex, 47 CognitiveScale, 45, 194, 209 cognitive technologies, 4–5, 32, 33–58.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

And with personal savings disappearing and debt rising, that wilting standard of living means the majority of families cannot experience even small setbacks without falling further behind or even into bankruptcy and homelessness. Many Americans do not see a problem with this kind of wealth and income inequality in the abstract, even when it is pointed out that the United States is now a more unequal nation than India and is an outlier from most other modern industrial countries such as Japan or France. In part, this is because, as one poll showed, a large number of them believe they got the lucky end of the stick: forty percent of Americans either think they are in the richest one percent or expect to be there in a few years.3 Almost as if they are choosing to believe that the nation still enjoys the relative equality of its past, the majority of other citizens label themselves middle class, including some people whose incomes put them either far above or far below the median.4 The real story of a tiny upper class and a majority struggling to meet expenses5—and of how the last decades’ massive transfer of wealth up the class ladder is tied into the car system—is barely understood.

In a car system, people begin to build and live in sprawling style and feel free to live far from their families and jobs: they believe the car allows them a quick return whenever they like. But in so doing, the car actually creates the physical distances (and the subsequent social distances) that only it is then able to shrink. And, given income inequality, the car shrinks those distances for some much more readily than others, particularly the carless. A car culture is a society built around private modes of transportation, but with massive public investment in the infrastructure that allows those private uses. Those without the financial means to own a vehicle are dependent on an underfunded mass transit system.

Ian Parry, Margaret Walls, and Winston Harrington, “Automobile Externalities and Policies,” Resources for the Future Discussion Paper No. 06–26, January 2007. CHAPTER 6 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Sarah Anderson et al., Executive Excess: 14th Annual CEO Compensation Survey (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2007); Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States,” 1913–2002 (updated to 2007 at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/). In A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty, eds., Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Jane Collins, “America in the Age of Wal-Mart,” in Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman, eds., The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Accelerating growth – if necessary at the cost of increasing inequality and possibly some increase in poverty – was the proclaimed goal of neo-liberal reform. We have been repeatedly told that we first have to ‘create more wealth’ before we can distribute it more widely and that neo-liberalism was the way to do that. As a result of neo-liberal policies, income inequality has increased in most countries as predicted, but growth has actually slowed down significantly.22 Moreover, economic instability has markedly increased during the period of neo-liberal dominance. The world, especially the developing world, has seen more frequent and larger-scale financial crises since the 1980s.

The rich countries experienced the so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ (1950–73).50Per capita income growth rate in Europe shot up from 1.3% in the liberal golden age (1870–1913) to 4.1%. It rose from 1.8% to 2.5% in the US, while it skyrocketed from 1.5% to 8.1% in Japan. These spectacular growth performances were combined with low income inequality and economic stability. Significantly, developing countries also performed very well during this period. As I pointed out in chapter 1, during the 1960s and the 1970s, when they used nationalistic policies under the ‘permissive’ international system, they grew at 3% in per capita terms. This is way above what they had achieved under old liberal policies during ‘first globalization’ (1870–1913) and twice the rate they have recorded since the 1980s under neo-liberal policies.

Lower investment slows down growth and job creation. This may not be a huge problem for rich countries with already high standards of living, generous welfare state provision and low poverty, but it is a disaster for developing countries that desperately need more income and jobs and often are trying to deal with a high degree of income inequality without resorting to a large-scale redistribution programme that, anyway, may create more problems than it solves. Given the costs of pursuing a restrictive monetary policy, giving independence to the central bank with the sole aim of controlling inflation is the last thing a developing country should do, because it will institutionally entrench monetarist macroeconomic policy that is particularly unsuitable for developing countries.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

This feedback loop hypothesis can help explain why Europe and the US, though they have very similar populations, can go in such different directions with their equality of opportunity policies. Researchers from the London School of Economics tested the theory empirically. They analyzed the answers to British opinion polls regarding questions of fairness and responsibility for one’s own fate and found evidence that people’s attitudes do indeed change with alterations in income inequality the way Benabou and Tirole hypothesized. After the reforms under Margaret Thatcher, the demand for state enforcement of minimum incomes as stated in opinion polls collapsed. Britons became on average more and more convinced that generous benefits for the poor and unemployed would make those who received them lazy and that large income differentials were required to motivate people to study and work hard (Georgiadis and Manning 2007).

They believe that the experience of the Great Depression greatly affected the public’s views and social norms regarding inequality. This fits with data from the famous empirical study by Bourguignon and Morrison (2002) which found that global inequality in life expectancy peaked around 1920, thereafter falling steeply while global lifetime income inequality, having risen inexorably from 1820, fell during the period between 1950 and 1970 before resuming its upward climb. This period of inequality retrenchment led to the introduction of high marginal tax rates at the top and the adoption of large-scale THE POWER OF THE CORPORATE ELITE 139 redistributive programs as well as a strong role for trade unions.

This period of inequality retrenchment led to the introduction of high marginal tax rates at the top and the adoption of large-scale THE POWER OF THE CORPORATE ELITE 139 redistributive programs as well as a strong role for trade unions. Corporation income taxation and payroll taxation were set to high rates, and the ability to avoid them was highly restricted. These norms and institutions restrained CEO pay, especially as fear of communism made high-income inequalities socially unacceptable lest they give support to revolutionaries. With the Great Depression fading in memory, communism defeated and social norms changing, these restraints lost importance. This made it possible for the pay-for-performance cult could take hold in the 1990s. According to the theory of Piketty and Saez, the idea that it was okay to make many millions a year if you created commensurate value would not have been accepted so widely in the 1950s, and would not have been implicitly endorsed by the government, which carved out huge exemptions from taxation both for the companies doing the paying and the employees receiving that pay.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Accelerating growth – if necessary at the cost of increasing inequality and possibly some increase in poverty – was the proclaimed goal of neo-liberal reform. We have been repeatedly told that we first have to ‘create more wealth’ before we can distribute it more widely and that neo-liberalism was the way to do that. As a result of neo-liberal policies, income inequality has increased in most countries as predicted, but growth has actually slowed down significantly.22 Moreover, economic instability has markedly increased during the period of neo-liberal dominance. The world, especially the developing world, has seen more frequent and larger-scale financial crises since the 1980s.

The rich countries experienced the so-called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ (1950–73).50Per capita income growth rate shot up from 1.3% in the liberal golden age (1870–1913) to 4.1% in Europe. It rose from 1.8% to 2.5% in the US, while it skyrocketed from 1.5% to 8.1% in Japan. These spectacular growth performances were combined with low income inequality and economic stability. More importantly, developing countries also performed very well during this period. As I pointed out in chapter 1, during the 1960s and the 1970s, when they used nationalistic policies under the ‘permissive’ international system, they grew at 3% in per capita terms. This is way above what they had achieved under old liberal policies during ‘first globalization’ (1870–1913) and twice the rate they have recorded since the 1980s under neo-liberal policies.

Lower investment slows down growth and job creation. This may not be a huge problem for rich countries with already high standards of living, generous welfare state provision and low poverty, but it is a disaster for developing countries that desperately need more income and jobs and often are trying to deal with a high degree of income inequality without resorting to a large-scale redistribution programme that, anyway, may create more problems than it solves. Given the costs of pursuing a restrictive monetary policy, giving independence to the central bank with the sole aim of controlling inflation is the last thing a developing country should do, because it will institutionally entrench monetarist macroeconomic policy that is particularly unsuitable for developing countries.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

What would the world look like by the end of the 2030s? By day I would study, write, and talk about future technologies and trends. Everything I learned would influence the game I was playing in my predawn dreams. Gradually, it became clear to me that AI creates a winner-take-all economic system, and the result is income inequality. One could say that income inequality is AI’s “pollution,” analogous to the way carbon dioxide and ocean plastic are the externality created by industry. And fake news (or propaganda) was also a kind of pollution—an idea pollution. The externality created by the genetic revolution could be any number of potential hazards—biosecurity, ecosystem accidents, eugenics—though those were speculative.

College enrollment is down 5 percent this decade. The birth rate is down 15 percent. This is perhaps one of the most wincing details of our times. People with tons of time available to parent kids but too little money to feel safe having them. 5. CHANGING IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, BUT IMPROVING IT IS EASY Income inequality in the United States is obscene. There are a lot of suggestions to remedy it. They all take money from the prosperous and give it to the less fortunate. But among these options, are some better than others? Absolutely. Huge medical bills destroy lives. (Medicine can solve this, and we address it in Chapter 28.)

China is ahead of the U.S. in using AI—largely because they have national, centralized control of all their data, such as every citizen’s health data. In the United States, the data isn’t centralized, and health data is protected. China is not equal to the U.S. in genetics, but some things are legal there that aren’t here, such as putting human genes in monkeys. Income inequality is now just as bad in China as it is in the U.S., but it’s communist with a social welfare system, of sorts. Their rate of poverty is less than 1 percent. China has the stomach to do things on a national level that few other countries have. When COVID-19 infected Wuhan, the national government shut down the city of 11 million more aggressively than any other country later.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

If the U.S. economy were a patient, you would say we looked healthy on some levels—our stock market prices were a very nice tan—but we had a disease building up beneath the surface that had been weakening us for more than a generation. We were rife with preexisting conditions: rampant financial insecurity and income inequality; racial disparities; a cumbersome, expensive, and inaccessible health-care system; a depressed, anxious, and drug-ridden population; and a dysfunctional government bureaucracy, among others. Then we got a virus that ripped through our immune system as if it weren’t there. We are in very bad shape.

These meetings were recorded so the entire event would be available for the public to view them. After some pleasantries and introductions, Bilodeau kicked things off. “Your best-known position would be the universal basic income. To what extent does the government have a duty to address income inequality?” I settled in for an hour-long conversation about technology, the economy, and my policy proposals; the exchange would eventually be seen by more people on YouTube than the population of Keene. I spoke about my years living in New Hampshire and what I saw coming down the pike, and how northern towns in the state had already been blasted by the closing of paper mills and other industries.

Here we are celebrating being the richest society in the history of the world. Meanwhile, people are routinely dying because of a system that doesn’t prioritize their health or well-being so much as whether there is money to be made from their care. In the United States, GDP has exceeded $22 trillion even as income inequality has reached unprecedented levels. Meanwhile, life expectancy and mental health are declining, and stress levels are through the roof. NEW MEASURES FOR A NEW ECONOMY We rely upon the market to tell us how much things are worth. But the market misses the mark all of the time. For the past several years, my wife, Evelyn, has been at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Besides the explosion in the number of temporary and contract jobs, nearly half of the new jobs created in the so-called “recovery” pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Three-fourths of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with little to no emergency savings to rely on if they lose their job. Income inequality is now as bad as it was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Incredibly, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent is no higher today than during our grandparents’ time. It’s as if the New Deal had never existed. RACE TO THE BOTTOM IN THE FREELANCE SOCIETY Now a new and alarming mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic trend: the so-called sharing (or gig) economy.

The platform cooperative Loconomics uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cap employee pay at 3.5 times the median wage for all occupations in the region where the employee works. In the Bay Area, the cap would be $165,000. Among tech CEOs, that might sound like poverty. But to an average person, that might sound like, well, a whole 3.5 times better than life as it is. It’s all relative, and the notion of “enough” is completely lost in a society with such dramatic income inequality. When decisions are no longer driven by the desire to maximize gain, I think that a desire to ensure that everyone has enough is the ethic that steps in to replace it. True, a company won’t be able to attract the kind of talent that thinks of everything in terms of commodities and maximizing monetary profit.

As we transition from concept to product, we are actively seeking more developers to contribute to the codebase as well as legal experts to help us navigate the complex regulatory landscape (particularly with respect to digital currencies). Financially, the organization is bootstrapped with a small pool of funding from the community and is committed to forgoing traditional investment in favor of voluntary funding from the network. In May 2015, the ERS was just an idea born out of frustration with fundraising and income inequality, but under the mentorship of Gary Chou at Orbital NYC we were able to validate some early assumptions and raise money via Kickstarter to bring together a seed community for the Weird Economics Summit in NYC in November 2015. In 2016, we hope to develop a minimum viable product of the platform and pilot it in partnership with like-minded organizations.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Wired, September 2012. http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy. Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Harper Business, 2010. Bowles, Nellie. “Tech Titans on Income Inequality and Their ‘Stingy, Stingy’ Industry.” Re/code, May 31, 2014. http://recode.net/2014/05/31/tech-titans-on-income-inequality-and-their-stingy-stingy-industry/. Bradshaw, Tim. “Lunch with the FT: Brian Chesky,” December 26, 2014. http://www .ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fd685212-8768-11e4-bc7c-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition =intl#axzz3UxDunrnM. Brooks, David. “The Evolution of Trust.”

38 Swisher, “Man and Uber Man.” 39 “Craig,” “An Uber Impact.” 40 McFarland, “Uber’s Remarkable Growth Could End the Era of Poorly Paid Cab Drivers.” 41 CNBC.com staff, “Uber’s $90K Salary Could Disrupt the Taxi Business.” 42 Weiss, “The Median Income of an Uber Driver in NYC Is Nearly $100,000.” 43 Bowles, “Tech Titans on Income Inequality and Their ‘Stingy, Stingy’ Industry.” 44 Salmon, “Why Cab Drivers Should Love Uber”; Salmon, “The Economics of ‘Everyone’s Private Driver.’” 45 Salmon, “How Well uberX Pays, Part 2.” 46 Slee, “Uber Drivers Earning $90K/year?” 47 Hall and Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States.” 48 Bhuiyan, “What Uber Drivers Really Make (According To Their Pay Stubs)”; Griswold, “In Search of Uber’s Unicorn.” 49 Soper, “Uber Now Charging Drivers $520 per Year to Lease Company iPhone.” 50 Huet, “Uber Now Taking Its Biggest UberX Commission Ever---25 Percent.” 51 Lopez, “Billionaire Hedge-Fund Manager Says Uber Told Him It Might Cut Driver Pay ‘Because We Can.’” 52 “Andrew,” “Three Septembers of uberX in New York City.” 53 “Andrew,” “What Does a Typical New York uberX Partner Earn in a Week?”


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

Caring Another political choice came into focus as I met with Adam Seth Litwin, an ILR associate professor who spoke with me about the people that technological change leaves behind, and how we should care for them. Technology that takes over human work tends to concentrate the gains in the hands of those who develop it, a precursor to income inequality, Litwin said. When TurboTax, for instance, replaced accountants for many people with straightforward tax returns, it cut a swath of well-paying jobs out of the economy. “Instead of the money going to thousands and thousands of accountants across the country, the money is going to Intuit,” Litwin said, referring to TurboTax’s owner.

As automation rolls through our economy, it’s inevitable that some will be left behind, even if there’s a net increase in jobs. Our leaders, both present and future, will need to look out for these people. And there’s a lot of work ahead. On the West Coast, the home of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, income inequality is already at a crisis point. “A homeless crisis of unprecedented proportions is rocking the West Coast,” a 2017 AP investigation found, “and its victims are being left behind by the very things that mark the region’s success: soaring housing costs, rock-bottom vacancy rates and a roaring economy that waits for no one.”

See invention “disagree and commit” principle, 24 Dorsey, Jack, 212 Downey, Allen, 200 Dweck, Carol, 185 Dyer, Lee, 210–13 dystopian technological scenarios, 191–205 education system, 213–15 Eichenwald, Kurt, 189–90 Elamiri, Abdellah, 164, 165, 189 Element.ai, 13 Elison, Meg, 193 eMarketer, 73, 111, 114, 147, 195 employment, technology’s impact on, 35–36, 201–2, 204–5, 215–16, 223–24 Engineer’s Mindset about, 14–18, 17 and Apple, 17, 131, 143, 151, 161 at aQuantive, 163 general adoption of, 18, 211, 213, 225 tech leaders with (see Bezos, Jeff; Nadella, Satya; Pichai, Sundar; Zuckerberg, Mark) three applications of, 15–17, 17 (see also collaboration; hierarchies; invention) execution work, 8–10, 11–14, 226 Facebook, 55–91 abuses of power by, 195–96 addressing feedback failures at, 83–89 advertising revenues of, 195–96 algorithmic compensation model of, 81–82 artificial intelligence/machine learning at, 75–81, 88 and Cambridge Analytica, 83, 84, 158 and congressional investigations, 83–84, 85–86 content moderation at, 77–81, 86 contractors’ wages at, 155 dominance of, 3 Engineer’s Mindset at, 16 and Facebook Groups, 69–70, 201 and Facebook Live, 77 feedback culture at, 1–2, 16, 55–57, 60–62, 66, 68 and feedback from staff, 65–68, 70–74 and feedback from users, 59, 59n, 68–70 Friday Q&As at, 62–63 idea pathways at, 62–63 invention at, 58–60, 101 leadership team at, 63–64 mobile app of, 65–68 and News Feed, 68–69 and Oculus Connect (virtual reality), 89–90 optimism evident at, 85–86 and presidential election of 2016, 16, 59, 64, 83 and privacy emphasis of Apple, 157–58 reinventions of, 7, 74, 89–90 and Sandberg, 64–65 Stories feature of, 70–74 suicide-prevention tool of, 79–80 training on feedback delivery, 55–57 vulnerability of, 58 See also Zuckerberg, Mark face-recognition technology, 75–76 factories, 207–8 Farestart, 217 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 155–59 Federighi, Craig, 129, 134 feedback and feedback cultures addressing gaps/failures in, 85–89 and Apple’s Siri, 144 Facebook’s culture of, 1–2, 16, 55–57, 60–62, 66, 68 and hierarchy, 55, 213 at Microsoft, 181 from the public, 59, 59n receiving, 57 training on delivery of, 55–57 VitalSmarts’ method of, 56 Firefox by Mozilla, 104, 106–7 Fitzpatrick, Jen, 114–15 Fong-Jones, Liz, 119 Fox, Nick, 116 General Motors (GM), 9 Gershgorn, Dave, 188 Ghonim, Wael, 193 Giannandrea, John, 134 Giridharadas, Anand, 217 Give and Take (Grant), 63 Gizmodo, 94 Gleit, Naomi, 62, 63 Go grocery store of Amazon, 21–22, 25, 53 Goldstein, Robin Diane, 132, 138 Goler, Lori, 62, 81, 82 Google, 93–128 abuses of power by, 195–96 advertising revenues of, 195–96 and AI Principles, 122 and Alphabet restructuring, 110–11 and Amazon Echo, 109, 111 and Android, 96, 108 and artificial intelligence/machine learning, 13, 109, 111–12, 114, 119–23 and Chrome, 7, 96, 102–8 communication tools enabling collaboration at, 96–99, 115–16, 123, 125, 128 cross-company collaboration at, 17, 96–97, 114–16, 118–19 and Damore memo, 93–95 dissent at, 119–28 dominance of, 3 empowerment of employees at, 105–6 Engineer’s Mindset at, 17 and Gmail, 102–4, 112 and Google+, 115 and Google Assistant, 7, 17, 96, 113–19 and Google Home, 116–17, 118, 147 invention encouraged at, 101 and Microsoft, 96, 100, 102, 103–4 and partnerships for Toolbar distribution, 100–102, 107 and Pentagon’s Maven project, 119–23, 127 productivity apps of, 103 products developed by, 7 reinventions of, 95–96, 110–11, 114 transparency at, 96, 115–16, 121, 127, 128, 138 Walkout at (2018), 123–28, 154–55 See also Pichai, Sundar government, change needed in, 226 Graham, Don, 60–62, 64 Grant, Adam, 63, 214 Green, Cee Lo, 11 Green, Diane, 120 growth, productivity, 197, 225 growth mindset cultures, 185–86 Hardesty, Ken, 160 Hartman, Marty, 216, 219 Henry, Alyssa, 212 Herbrich, Ralf, 38–39, 42, 52, 220 hierarchies, 184 at Apple, 17, 131, 136 at aQuantive, 163 and Engineer’s Mindset, 16, 17 at Facebook, 55, 62 and hardware operations, 116–17 at Microsoft, 166, 180–83, 190 See also feedback and feedback cultures Hill, Ned, 9 Hired (Bloodworth), 33 Hirsch, Gil, 75 Hit Refresh (Nadella), 165, 180, 183, 184 Hoefflinger, Mike, 65 homelessness, 216–17 HomePod of Apple, 129–31 Honan, Mat, 2 housing, lack of affordable, 216–17 Human Side of Enterprise, The (McGregor), 208–9 Hyman, Louis, 213 IBM, 13 idea work, 8–10, 14, 15 income inequality, 215–19 independent-thinking skills, 214 initiative, value of, 215 “innovator’s dilemma,” 9 Instagram Stories, 73 Internet use, social effects of, 200 introverts, 212 invention Amazon’s culture of, 16, 22–26, 45, 51 Amazon’s system of, 26–30, 36, 101 at Apple, 131, 136–37, 160–61 at aQuantive, 163 and copying other products, 74 cultivation of, 211 democratic invention, 15–16, 17 enabled by technological advances, 9–10 and Engineer’s Mindset, 15–16, 17 exercising thoughtfulness in, 224 at Facebook, 58–60, 101 at Google, 101 incentivizing, 212 at Microsoft, 164, 166, 172–73, 179–80, 190 and reinvention, 7–8, 74 in smaller companies, 225 stymied by tech giants, 196 systems that support, 211–12 Isilon Systems, 18 Ive, Jony, 134, 135 Jassy, Andy, 45 Jobs, Steve death of, 142–43 and iPhone, 7, 142 on values represented in marketing, 159 vision of, 132–33 Judah, Norm, 177, 178 Kiva Systems, 31 knowledge economy, 9 Kumar, Dilip, 45–46 Kwon, Elaine, 40, 41, 45, 49, 52 language translation, automation of, 43 Larson-Green, Julie, 173, 181, 182, 183, 188 Lavin, Carl, 86–88 lay-offs, 221–22 LeCun, Yann, 76 Lee, Kai-Fu, 74 Leo, Michael, 223 Li, Fei-Fei, 120–21 Lin, Sandi, 28, 48, 52 LinkedIn, 186–87 Litwin, Adam Seth, 215, 216, 218 Lobe, 179 loneliness epidemic, 199–200 Lynn, Barry, 195–96 machine learning.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

As for myself, I can simply attest that I went into my examination of Walmart the same way I’ve always sized up a subject: with an open mind and a penchant for discerning the gray in things. I sit shoulder to shoulder with progressive activists and union leaders on the boards of a farmworker trust and a publication called Capital & Main, which specializes in covering the scourge of income inequality. But I’ve also spent more time around business executives than many of my fellow travelers. At the Drucker Institute, where I was the founding executive director, we’ve held workshops and consulted with many big companies—Macy’s, eBay, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and others—to help them become more innovative and better-managed from a holistic and humanistic standpoint.

“We referred to what we were doing as an air war,” said Janet Shenk, who helped raise funds for the campaign. “We’re not organizing workers on the ground. This is an air war.” Part of what the SEIU wanted to accomplish by going after Walmart so publicly was to raise people’s consciousness about larger issues of economic justice that the union’s president, Andy Stern, was increasingly upset about: income inequality, wage stagnation, and a dearth of good healthcare coverage for working people and their families. “This was a great way to get out there and say, ‘Big corporations are screwing America,’” explained Stern, who led the SEIU from 1996 to the middle of 2010. Walmart Watch also wanted to “make other businesses realize that if they act in the same irresponsible manner they will be attacked as well,” according to an internal memo.

And many workers, despite the gains in pay, were still not quite able to make it. Detroit-area Ford workers earned about $1,712 in 1929. Yet it now cost $1,720 a year for a family to live with even modest comforts in the Motor City. Given this, 44 percent of Ford workers who were surveyed said their expenses outstripped their income. Income inequality also escalated during the 1920s. “Prosperity to the extent that we have it is unduly concentrated and has not equitably touched the lives of the farmer, the wage earner, and the individual businessman,” said Al Smith, the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 1928. Then came the Great Depression, and then World War II.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

We must reward success, not only because that is fair in the eyes of most Americans but also because it is best for all of us in the long run. Rich Americans are not the problem (as populist Democrats would have us believe). They are the solution. This is a crucial point as America confronts the very real phenomenon of rising income inequality. Americans at the bottom of the income ladder are not struggling because the top 1 percent are getting fabulously rich; they are struggling despite the fact that the top 1 percent are getting fabulously rich. The Republicans are rightfully skeptical of what government can accomplish. Not every social problem has an elegant government fix.

These problems turn out to be shockingly difficult to solve, and traditional Democratic solutions are not necessarily as effective as they might be, but the Democrats have their hearts in the right place—and that matters. Caring about social problems is a precondition for solving them. More recently, the Democrats have been correct to engage on the issue of income inequality. Again, many of the solutions are half-baked; this is not a situation that can be addressed with redistribution alone. Still, the Democrats are correct in thinking that the social fabric of the country will be corroded if the people on Main Street come to believe that the system is rigged in favor of the elites on Wall Street (and elsewhere).


pages: 112 words: 30,160

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

To protect the high quality of public schools in rich, well-educated neighborhoods, it is necessary to keep others out. A deep dive into the American psyche is beyond the scope of this book. Yet the problematic nature of this dynamic should be clear. America has long opted for a small welfare state relative to its advanced-economy counterparts, and (in policy terms, anyway) it is less concerned with income inequality per se. The American justification for big gaps between rich and poor was and continues to be the economy’s famous economic mobility. America’s poor don’t begrudge the rich their wealth because they hope to be and often enough do become rich. Only, American mobility is now more myth than reality.

America faces significant challenges: economic, climatic, social, and otherwise. Given the scope of the country’s difficulties and the tenor of the debate in Washington, we can’t afford to ignore the truly simple solutions. Just by making it easier to build in our richest cities, America can boost its growth potential, slow growth in income inequality, reduce per capita carbon emissions, and cut its dependence on oil. It won’t eliminate problems overnight, of course. But there are few policy opportunities that offer as good a return on action and expense. * My argument will read to some like an attack on the low-cost Sunbelt cities that have attracted so many people in recent years.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

No, the middle class is in decline primarily because we’re counting Berlin, the old GDR, where the old industries that propped up the Soviet Union have disappeared. Even so, the decline is small; and for a long-term comparison, the best evidence I can find is from a 2007 study by Thomas Harjes, an economist at the International Monetary Fund. One can look it up online: “Globalization and Income Inequality: A European Perspective.” Generally, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, Harjes found that on the Continent—in contrast to the U.S. and the UK—“inequality rose modestly or even declined.” The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, has actually dropped in many advanced European countries as globalization of production has increased.

Army strikes union resorts/ex-spas unionization rates in the manufacturing sector wage-setting and works councils youth membership The Germans (Craig) Gerschenkron, Alexander Ghilarducci, Teresa Gibbon, Edward Gibbons, James Gini coefficient Giscard d’Estaing, Valery Glass-Steagall Act globalization and German capitalism and labor market flexibility “Globalization and Income Inequality” (Harjes) “Glühwein Festival” (Hamburg) Goethe-Institute Goldman Sachs Gordon, Robert Gramm, Phil Grass, Günter Green Party and European social democracies German coalition government and Agenda 2010 German coalition government and wages/unemployment German coalition government and welfare German coalition government and works councils Germany green technology Greenspan, Alan Guardian (UK) gun ownership Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Diamond) Gutteres, António Habermas, Jürgen Halliburton Hamburg, Germany Harjes, Thomas health care spending Heine, Heinrich Heinz (retired German labor leader) Hemingway, Ernest Herodotus Hesbaugh, Ted Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen) Hobsbawm, Eric Holocaust hours worked and GDP leisure time and standard-of-living How to Lie with Statistics (Huff) Huff, Darrell human capital Humboldt University (Berlin) IBZ Guest House (Berlin) IG Metall (German union) and CDU’s 2009 victory over SDP foreign-born members Frankfurt May Day parade (2001) works councils youth membership “Incentive for Working Hard” (Conference Board, May 2001) income equality/inequality An Inconvenient Truth (film) International Labor Organization (ILO) International Monetary Fund Iraq war Jesuits and papal social democracy jobs/employment artists big business employees cross-subsidies European social democracies and German unemployment Germany high-skill jobs and high-end precision goods manufacturing workforce and percent of adults holding an associate degree public employees (public-sector civil service jobs) self-employment skilled-labor shortage small business employees types of jobs available unemployment rates for college graduates U.S.

See jobs/employment Unhealthy Societies: The Affliction of Inequality (Wilkinson) unification and German model of social democracy East/West horizontal/vertical unification moving of capital from Bonn to Berlin Right/Left divisions unions, German. See German model of social democracy (unions and labor movement) United Kingdom (UK) income inequality Internet reading voting rates wage and industry United States banking model children in poverty college tuition costs comparisons/contrasts with European socialist democracies consumption and access to public goods/private goods consumption (“producer” wants and “consumer” wants) elderly poor English-language and global competition ethnic/cultural diversity and European model (as necessary and possible) foreign language education/requirements GDP per capita German ethnic group and Americans as surrogate Europeans government-provided benefits/entitlements gun ownership higher education system/percentage of people going to college hours worked income inequality jobs/employment labor market flexibility labor markets land-use planning and commuting/suburban sprawl mobility and public transportation net external debt and foreign creditors percent of adults holding an associate degree plutocracy postwar Army and German labor movement “producer” wants and “consumer” wants purchasing power reading retirement benefits and pension plans standing army taxes television-viewing temp workers unemployment rates for college graduates U.S. model and global financial meltdown U.S. model and manufacturing/mass production U.S. model and no sense of “team” U.S. model and the new Europe voting rates wages and labor welfare reform women’s equality and benefits universal health care University of Chicago University of Kansas U.S.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

They will become much cheaper thanks to the employment of AI. The result will be increased use of such services. The beneficial effect will fall disproportionately among the less well-off who, on the whole, currently find legal services prohibitively expensive. Accordingly, it is by no means obvious that the AI revolution is bound to increase income inequality. Indeed, it is possible that, at least across some parts of the income distribution, the effect of the AI revolution will be to reduce it. After all, the thrust of preceding chapters is that many manual jobs will not readily succumb to automation. Meanwhile, many skilled but essentially routine white-collar jobs will.

Clearly, all these things are interactive, and it is extremely difficult to tell how things will pan out. But it is likely that the balance of the factors listed above will enable the mass of people to enjoy increasing incomes even as robots and AI start to proliferate. And it is perfectly plausible that there will not be a significant increase in income inequality. If there is, it may well be a temporary phenomenon. The great economist Simon Kuznets argued that economic development would at first increase inequality but that subsequently this widening would be reversed. Moreover, this story fits in with the history of the Industrial Revolution. As I showed in Chapter 1, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century the real incomes of workers fell.

It cited postal services and telecommunications, financial intermediation and wholesale and retail distribution. The study concluded that “skipping” a traditional industrialization phase need not be a drag on economy-wide productivity growth for developing countries.30 Conclusion In the earlier discussion about the impact of the AI revolution on income inequality I argued that it is too soon to be sure of the overall effect and we need to keep an open mind. We should be similarly agnostic about the impact of the AI revolution on regional disparities. But we can probably be more confident about the effects of robots and AI on income disparities between countries.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

And in the US in recent decades, as the government deficit has increased, dollars have flowed disproportionately into the pockets of the wealthy, creating vast distances between them and the rest of America. Such economic inequality is hardly new to America, but in recent years, it’s risen to heights not seen since the Gilded Age and the robber barons. Consider the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality that economists often rely on. A Gini coefficient of zero would mean a perfectly egalitarian economy, while a coefficient of one means that one person literally gets all the income generated. No country experiences either extreme. But the World Economic Forum reports that, among the advanced and long-term developed countries, none has a higher Gini coefficient than the United States.

At the same time, the myth that Uncle Sam’s deficit is cause for concern helps drive our very real democracy deficit: if our elected leaders believe they must either go begging to the rich before they can spend money on the public good—or that they must fight the rich for that same money—then of course the foibles and ticks and quixotic political desires of our richest citizens will become the primary obsession of our government. But taxes are important in other ways. As the World Inequality Report notes, “the income-inequality trajectory observed in the United States” is partially explained by “a tax system that grew less progressive.”78 Taxes can be used to curb astronomical accumulations of wealth. That’s important precisely because the wealthy use their money to amass power and influence over the political process: they’ve rigged the tax code in their favor; they’ve rewritten labor laws, trade agreements, rules governing patents and protections, and much more.

Particularly after 1980, a yawning gap has opened up between productivity and wages. Productivity continues on its steady upward trend, but wages do not—they grow modestly if at all. If the hourly pay rate had followed the same growth trend as productivity from 1973 to 2014, there would have been no rise in income inequality during that period.84 Where has all that increased productivity gone? It was skimmed off at the top. Back in 1950, the average S&P 500 CEO made 20 times as much as the average worker. By 2017, the average CEO at an S&P 500 corporation was making 361 times as much as the average worker.85 Since 1980, the global 1 percent has captured twice as much growth as the bottom 50 percent.86 Twenty-five people have as much wealth as 56 percent of the country’s population.87 Just three people—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans, some 160 million people.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

Yet the harm wrought by the filibuster is not an artifact of a bygone era. Today, it stops us from addressing a range of pressing problems that do not lack for pragmatic solutions. On climate change, filibuster-induced paralysis has pushed us to the brink of missing our last chance to act before warming trends become irreversible. Income inequality and the racial wealth gap persist at unsustainable levels as the filibuster blocks remedies. After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the crown jewel of civil rights–era legislation, efforts to restore it have been quashed by the threat of filibusters. The little harm thesis and the self-congratulatory school of thought it represents are elaborate attempts to avoid reckoning with the reality that the Senate is broken, the consequences of its failure are vast, and those responsible are the senators themselves.

In the Sunbelt, for example, the populations that are driving the region’s growth are at odds with their representatives in the Senate; the growth is being driven primarily by nonwhite residents who, on balance, are not casting ballots for the mostly white, conservative Republican senators who dominate the region.47 The minority of voters putting Republican senators in office are not representative of a rapidly diversifying America riven by income inequality and stagnant wages. They are predominantly white, anti-choice conservatives serving wealthy interests, whom I will call WWACs for efficiency’s sake. They are out of step with the direction of the country, and they spend year after year watching their status and power erode. But because the modern Senate empowers them far beyond their numbers, they are consistently able to impose their will on the majority.

One factor in the discrepancy between the large nonwhite populations in these states and their predominantly white, conservative representation in the Senate is that states represented by Senate Republicans tend to rank high on measures of voter suppression: Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia make up five of the six worst offenders in a 2018 study of voter-suppression efforts, with Florida and Alabama also high on the list.49 In his 2018 book The Turnout Gap, political scientist Bernard Fraga found that if turnout rates had been the same across racial and ethnic groups, “the Democratic Party would have held the presidency and Senate from 2008 through at least 2018.”50 Wealthy interests. Senate Republicans represent plutocratic interests, and many of them are plutocrats themselves. With the country facing levels of income inequality not seen since the Great Depression, senators are growing richer than ever before. In 2018, the total wealth of all members of Congress was $2.43 billion, a 20 percent increase from the previous Congress. Republican senators are the wealthiest of the wealthy, averaging a personal net worth of $1.4 million, 48 percent more than their Democratic colleagues.51 Recent studies have shown that politicians of both parties are more responsive to the concerns of the rich than to those of poor or middle-class Americans, but Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to represent the interests of the wealthy.52 Their voters are wealthier, too.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Equality has increased in Cuba, Colombia, and Morocco, while diminishing in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Mexico during the 1980s, and Russia during the 1990s. Distribution hinges on other factors, such as a country’s initial position and domestic policy. The World Bank sums up the state of affairs by saying, ‘‘The available data show no stable relationship between growth and inequality. On average, income inequality within countries has neither decreased nor increased over the last 30 years.’’15 Studying equality in 70 countries, the economist G. W. Scully found that incomes were more evenly distributed in countries with a liberal economy, open markets, and property rights. This was, above all, because the middle class had more and the upper class less in free than in unfree economies.

This development toward greater equality will be even faster in coming decades, with the world’s work-force growing older and thus earning more equally; see Tomas Larsson, Falska mantran: globaliseringsdebatten efter Seattle (Stockholm: Timbro, 2001), p. 11f, http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pejling/pdf/75664801.pdf. 25. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, ‘‘The Disturbing ‘Rise’ of Global Income Inequality,’’ National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 8904, http://www.nber.org/papers/w8904. 26. Bhalla. 27. World Bank, Making Transition Work for Everyone: Poverty and Inequality in Europe and Central Asia (Washington: World Bank, 2000). 28. Larsson, Falska mantran: globaliseringsdebatten efter Seattle, p. 11f. 29.

Olinto, Asset Distribution, Inequality, and Growth, World Bank Policy Research Paper no. 2375 (Washington: World Bank, 2000). For the connection with democracy, see Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, ‘‘New Ways of Looking at the Old Issues: Asset Inequality and Growth,’’ Journal of Development Economics 57 (1998): 259–87. 14. Simon Kuznets, ‘‘Economic Growth and Income Inequality,’’ American Economic Review 45 (March 1955): 26. 15. World Bank, Income Poverty: Trends in Inequality (Washington: World Bank, 2000), http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/data/trends/inequal.htm. The data refuting Kuznets are presented in Deininger and Squire, pp. 259–287. For a review of the research, see Arne Bigsten and Jo¨rgen Levin, Tillva¨xt, inkomstfo¨rdelning och fattigdom i u-la¨nderna (Stockholm: Globkom, September 2000), http://www.globkom.net/rapporter.phtml. 16.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

But taken together, education and health services, along with leisure and hospitality—two big industries where bargain-basement jobs dominate—match the former heft of manufacturing. That’s basically what’s behind the transformation of working-class jobs in America. As companies shuttered factories in the United States and income inequality began its steady ascent, jobs for home health aides, child-care workers, fast-food workers, janitors, and waiters swelled to accommodate major cultural and social trends, including the growing disposable income of the upper echelon and the time crunch facing all workers, but especially those who have young children or aging parents to care for.

People are sick of wealth at the top and no accountability for corporations.”8 I spoke with Scott Courtney, assistant to the president for organizing, about why the SEIU decided to support the campaign. He told me that when Mary Kay Henry became president of the SEIU in 2010, she asked the question “not how do we just rebuild unions and have a bigger union, but how do we make income inequality the issue that politicians in our country have to deal with?” The answer to that question over time became the Fight for $15. The ability of the leader of the nation’s fastest-growing union to ask that kind of question, one that reaches beyond the parochial goal of fighting only for its members, is the result of over a decade of work by leaders organizing people who had been excluded from traditional union membership (sometimes by laws and sometimes by the practice of labor unions).

Bryce Covert and Josh Israel, “What 7 States Discovered After Spending More than $1 Million Drug-Testing Welfare Recipients,” Center for American Progress Action Fund, February 26, 2015, at http://think​progress.​org/​economy/​2015/​02/​26/​3624447/​tanf-​drug-​testing-​states/; Jason Stein, “Scott Walker’s Light-on-Details Drug-Testing Plan a Hit on the Stump,” Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, March 17, 2015, at http://www.​jsonline.​com/​news/​statepolitics/​scott-​walkers-​light-​on-​details-​drug-​testing-​plan-​a-​hit-​on-​the-​stump-​b99461974z1-​296580231.​html. 22. Tamara Draut, “New Opportunities? Public Opinion on Poverty, Income Inequality and Public Policy: 1996–2002,” Demos, 2002, at http://www.​demos.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​New_​Oppor​tunities.​pdf. 23. Covert and Israel, “What 7 States Discovered.” 24. Adam Taylor, “Chart: The World’s Most Generous Countries,” Washington Post, November 19, 2014. 25. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham, Md.: Roman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 8. 26.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

So low income, slow growth, and primary commodity dependence make a country prone to civil war, but are they the real causes of civil war? I hear the phrase “root causes” a lot. It is bandied about at many of the conferences on conflict to which I am invited. Surprisingly frequently, a hypothesized root cause turns out to be predictable if you already know the hobbyhorse of the speaker. If the individual cares about income inequality, he or she imagines that that is what rebels are concerned about; someone strongly engaged with political rights assumes that rebels are campaigners for democracy; if someone’s great-grandparents emigrated to escape from some oppressive regime, the person imagines that the descendants of those who did not emigrate are still being oppressed in the way that folk memory tells them once happened.

They found no relationship between whether a group was politically repressed and the risk of civil war. Ethnic minorities are just as likely to rebel with or without discrimination. Fearon and Laitin did the same for intergroup hatreds and again found no relationship to the risk of civil war. Anke Hoeffler and I investigated the effect of income inequality, and to our surprise we could find no relationship. We also investigated the colonial history of each country. We could find no relationship between the subsequent risk of civil war and either the country that had been the colonial power or how long the country had been decolonized. I even came to doubt the apparently incontestable notion that today’s conflicts are rooted in history.

The production of primary commodities is basically land-using, and exporting them is most likely to benefit the people who own the land. Sometimes the land is owned by peasant farmers, but often the key beneficiaries are mining companies and big landowners. So trade based on primary commodity exporting is likely to generate quite a lot of income inequality. And its scope is inherently limited by the size of the market: as exports grow, prices turn against exporters. By contrast, manufactures and services offer much better prospects of equitable and rapid development. They use labor rather than land. The opportunity to export raises the demand for labor.


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The structure of the adjustable rate mortgage, intended to shield lenders from interest rate risk, only exposed them to another, worse possibility. Who were the speculators? They were from a generation that had few other ways to make money. If asset prices were going up, incomes weren’t. Though everybody could now get credit cards and mortgages, Americans’ income inequality was rising, making fewer people able to pay back what they borrowed. The Internet economy of the 1990s accelerated the growing wealth and income inequality of the 1980s. A 1996 study by Standard & Poor’s found that over the past ten years, 20 percent of workers had been laid off, and though 90 percent had found jobs, 40 percent of the new jobs paid less.40 Every year good jobs were harder and harder to find, particularly for those without a college education.

Whether that inflated value came from corrupt inspectors or easy-credit mortgages is, in the end, immaterial to those home buyers’ lives. The program to help the inner city lasted only a few years, plagued, as it was, by fraud and corruption. At the most basic level, policy makers avoided the underlying problem of income inequality by focusing on the apparent easy fix of housing credit. Though Section 235 failed, the mortgage-backed security succeeded. Fannie Mae continued to bundle mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and sell them to investors. Fannie Mae confused public and private like no other institution. Though it still acted in the “public interest” during market downturns, liberally buying mortgages and supporting the housing industry, it did not dampen expansions, pushing growth even in the face of inflation.58 Though ostensibly private, Fannie Mae remained subject to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, particularly through HUD’s control over Fannie’s debt ceiling.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

The lower the Gini coefficient the lower the inequality and vice versa. Figure 9: Wealth distribution in a population of 10 people The levels of income (as opposed to wealth) inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, for some of the leading countries in the world are shown in the table below. Figure 10: Income inequality by country Country Gini Coefficient USA 0.39 UK 0.351 Greece 0.34 Spain 0.335 Italy 0.327 France 0.306 Germany 0.289 Switzerland 0.285 Sweden 0.274 Finland 0.26 Norway 0.253 Denmark 0.249 Source: OECD8 Clearly no country has perfect income equality – which would correspond to a Gini coefficient of zero.

Figure 10: Income inequality by country Country Gini Coefficient USA 0.39 UK 0.351 Greece 0.34 Spain 0.335 Italy 0.327 France 0.306 Germany 0.289 Switzerland 0.285 Sweden 0.274 Finland 0.26 Norway 0.253 Denmark 0.249 Source: OECD8 Clearly no country has perfect income equality – which would correspond to a Gini coefficient of zero. In fact, almost all countries have a Gini coefficient of above 0.25. Equally, no country has perfect inequality – which would correspond to a Gini coefficient of 1.0 and mean that one person had all the wealth. Of the countries listed, the US has the highest levels of income inequality, with a Gini coefficient just below 0.4. ECONOMIC CHOICES In the US and the UK (and almost every other country), we have a mixed economy, which combines capitalism with state-run activities and uses a fiat currency. This is not the only conceivable way to run an economy. If we chose to, we could change our system and step back in time to return to the gold standard – some people do want to turn the clock back in this way – or even to a barter economy.

This is critical, in order to shape our collective future to reflect our common objectives and values.24 Among the agenda points for the meeting at Davos 2016 was the following question: ‘How can technology be deployed in ways that contribute to inclusive growth rather than exacerbate unemployment and income inequality?’ Currently, for example, around 13 per cent of the US population are employed in the Retail and Transportation industries.25 There are signs that many of these jobs will not exist in a few years’ time – we have self-service checkouts in supermarkets; some fast food restaurants have introduced screen-based ordering; driverless trains are a reality today; driverless cars have already reached a high level of technical proficiency, and cars with some degree of autonomy (e.g. motorway driving) are already on the market; warehouses increasingly use automated picking and packing technologies.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

In 1965, a Senate subcommittee predicted that by the year 2000, Americans would work fourteen-hour weeks and take nearly two months of vacation time. Instead, the average American gets ten days of paid vacation and nearly one in four gets no paid holidays at all. Sadly, two things occurred that prevented a drop in working hours: a rise in consumerism and a steep rise in income inequality. First, many workers started using their extra income not to work less but to buy more. Because the economy is dependent on growth, officials told the populace, it is patriotic to buy more things. Marketing became a major industry, creating a desire for things that were unnecessary but attractive.

Many of the companies that have revolutionized retail sales were founded decades ago. Walmart, for example, first opened its doors in July 1962. “One of the great things about Walmart,” Lichtenstein told me, “is that productivity in retail increased dramatically, but the benefits were not shared with workers. Income inequality is a function of power inequality. That gap is a function of the power differential.” The United States has more private wealth than any other nation in the world, for example, but the fourth highest gap between rich and poor of any country studied by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

If you’re working an hourly job and need every cent of your paycheck in order to make ends meet, working less is probably not possible. Sadly, there are far too many people in that situation in the industrialized world. Under our current system, because we have so slavishly followed the dictums of corporate culture, income inequality is so high in the United States that working full-time is not enough to support two people, let alone a family. “Our economies [haven’t] been shaped by our idea of fairness,” writes Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. “It was the other way around.”


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

But what many are failing to do is ask, ‘What have I done that may be drowning out any of the do-gooding I’m doing?’” He cited the 2017 US tax bill, supported by the Business Roundtable, as an example. The lion’s share of the benefits, he argued, ended up in the hands of the top 1 percent, increasing the income inequality underlying many social problems. “What I see are well-meaning activities that are virtuous side hustles,” he argued, “while key activities of their business are relatively undisturbed.… Many of the companies are focused on doing more good, but less attentive to doing less harm.” It’s an understandable argument.

By the middle of 2021, its same-store sales had fully recovered in its key markets of the US and China. Going forward, Johnson believes, people will return to in-store service. “We are on the cusp of the great human reconnection,” he said. “As human beings we were meant to connect, to socialize… and Starbucks was built for this moment.” A LIVING WAGE Income inequality became a rallying cry in the last decade that in part inspired corporations to move toward stakeholder capitalism. It’s a huge challenge, but many people believe that one way to begin tackling it is to raise the minimum wage. While I was writing this, the debate about raising the minimum wage was once again heating up in Congress, as it regularly does.

I was interviewing Joly on the occasion of the publication of his book, The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism. In it, Joly described how in the course of his time at the helm of several companies he had started to see shareholder primacy as the root cause of some overwhelming problems society was facing, from climate change to income inequality. “Although making money is of course vital and a natural outcome of good management, considering profit as the sole purpose of business is wrong for four fundamental reasons: (1) profit is not a good measure of economic performance; (2) an exclusive focus on it is dangerous; (3) this singular focus antagonizes customers and employees; and (4) it is not good for the soul.”2 Joly’s perspective on shareholder primacy is unapologetic, and he speaks truth in ways you seldom hear out loud.


pages: 113 words: 37,885

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Or is what Wall Street does in its many guises—and as we can see by all the questions just asked, there are a variety of different aspects to what gets lumped together as “Wall Street” these days—a monumentally important, utterly irreplaceable way that capital gets allocated in the most efficient, fairly priced manner from the people who have it to the people who want it? How can it be, as the British economist, money manager, and writer Felix Martin observed, that high finance is “at one and the same time something so completely mysterious and so utterly banal”? To be sure, there are many crucial challenges facing the world today—among them climate change, income inequality, suppression of human rights, nuclear proliferation, and political unrest—but our collective failure to decide whether Wall Street is a force for good or one for evil, whether it should be celebrated or dismantled, certainly ranks high among them and effectively precludes us from having a much-needed debate about what Wall Street does right, and should be encouraged, and what Wall Street does wrong, and should be eliminated.

Marshall Lux and Robert Greene, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found that while community banks accounted for 22 percent of outstanding bank loans, they accounted for more than 75 percent of agricultural loans and half of small business loans, but they also found that the number of community banks fell 14 percent between 2010, when the Dodd-Frank law was passed, and 2014. Just when growing income inequality has made the need for lending to small and local businesses an imperative, community banks are playing less of a role than they had previously in extending credit, in taking deposits, and in facilitating commerce. Most top bank executives are terrified to speak out about this situation, for the obvious reason that federal and state regulators control their bank charters.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Capital’s victory in the 1980s brought a surge of profitability and bolstered the power of the elite through massive tax cuts, probusiness legislation, and the gutting of the welfare state. But in capitalism halcyon days are always fleeting. As geographer David Harvey says, “Capital doesn’t solve its crisis tendencies, it merely moves them around.”5 The booming mid-1990s brought massive income inequality, increased poverty, environmental degradation, skyrocketing levels of consumer debt, persistent gender divides, and widespread anxiety about the future. The 2007/2008 financial meltdown heightened the sense of crisis, and once again questions about the future of capitalism are on the table. According to a 2013 Gallup Poll, 80 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the nation is handling poverty and more than half of the middle class names financial insecurity as their chief concern.6 In this moment, a new generation of storytellers has emerged to tell us what’s wrong with society and how to fix it.

.; see also Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s piece on the Freelancers Union in Dissent, Winter 2012. 39C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959], p. 6. 40Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in J. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241–58. 41Miles Corak, “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility,” Discussion Paper No. 7520, Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, July 2013. 42Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. 43Jennifer Silva, “Becoming a Neoliberal Subject: Working-Class Selfhood in an Age of Uncertainty,” 2011, blogs.sciences-po.fr; Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.” 44Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, “Changing the Subject: A Bottom-up Account of Occupy Wall Street,” Murphy Institute, City University of New York, 2013. 45Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979), 130–48.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

The deeper question that leaps from these numbers is: Where are the millions of good-paying private sector jobs that are needed to sustain a large middle class? The Labor Department doesn’t say. Nor does anyone else. Education. About a year before the financial meltdown, President George W. Bush told a friendly Wall Street audience, “Income inequality is real—it’s been rising for more than twenty-five years. And the reason is clear: we have an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills because of that education.”11 The solution, he argued, was for young people to study harder and schools to teach better. Education—by which I mean both academic and vocational—is a worthy endeavor in its own right, so there’s every reason for America to invest more in it than we now do.

pli=1. 10. figure 2.3 is adapted from C. Brett Lockard and Michael Wolf, Occupational Employment Projections to 2020, US Labor Department, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 3 (Washington, DC, 2012), http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/01/art5full.pdf. 11. Michael Abramowitz and Lori Montgomery, “Bush Addresses Income Inequality,” Washington Post, February 1, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013100879.html. 12. Lawrence Mishel, “The Overselling of Education,” American Prospect, January 2011, A21. 13. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Economic growth by itself is not sufficient to create democratic stability if it is not broadly shared. One of the greatest threats to China’s social stability today is its rapid increase in income inequality since the mid-1990s, which by 2012 had reached Latin American levels.7 Latin America itself had reached middle-income status well before East Asia but continued to be plagued by high levels of inequality and the populist policies that flowed from it. One of the most promising developments for the region, however, has been the notable fall in income inequality in the decade of the 2000s, as documented by economists Luis Felipe López-Calva and Nora Lustig.8 There have been significant gains to the Latin American middle class.

In the developing world, new middle classes have enhanced democracy in Indonesia, Turkey, and Brazil, and promise to upset the authoritarian order in China. But what happens to liberal democracy if the middle class reverses course and starts to shrink? There is unfortunately a lot of evidence that this process may have begun to unfold in the developed world, where income inequality has increased massively since the 1980s. This is most notable in the United States, where the top 1 percent of families took home 9 percent of GDP in 1970 and 23.5 percent in 2007. The fact that so much of the economic growth in this period went to a relatively small number of people at the top of the distribution is the flip side of the phenomenon of the stagnation of middle-class incomes since the 1970s.10 In the United States and other countries, this stagnation was hidden from view by other factors.

China’s Gini index was 42.5 in 2005 (World Bank). 8. López-Calva and Lustig, Declining Inequality in Latin America. 9. This figure quoted in Francesca Castellani and Gwenn Parent, Being “Middle Class” in Latin America (Paris: OECD Development Centre Working Paper No. 305, 2011), p. 9. 10. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39; see also Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States,” Politics and Society 38, no. 2 (2010): 152–204; Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 11.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

Mauritius is commandeering market share by offering better deals. At the moment, Indian policy makers are hustling to rewrite tax laws. This is how tiny islands alter the course of great nations. Now imagine if Mauritius were mobile. Raise All Boats Let’s defy another economic stereotype. Income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient. If your Gini coefficient is 0, every resident owns the same amount. If your Gini coefficient is 1, one resident owns everything, and everybody else owns nothing. In many cases, extremely speedy growth in developing nations corresponds to extremely inequitable income distribution.

For instance, Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient reached 0.50 in 2011, well above the 0.40 level used by analysts to measure the potential for social unrest—and, indeed, labor strikes in Hong Kong have been increasing. Mauritius utterly defies this pattern. At the same time that the nation experienced stellar growth, its income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, fell from 45.7 in 1980 to 38.9 in 2006. Richer and more equal? Mauritius is a new political experiment that educates nations on the other side of the Earth. Consider this 2010 report from Dr. Satish Chand, adjunct professor of economics at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, who visited Mauritius to research lessons that could be applied to the island nation of Fiji: The sugarcane fields, the mountains in the backdrop, the greenery, and the people look deceptively similar to Fiji . . .

See also World Bank, African Development Bank, and Mauritius Board of Investment 2009. “Investment Climate Assessment: Mauritius 2009.” World Bank, Washington, DC, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/MAURITIUSEXTN/Resources/ica-mauritius-0110.pdf. At the same time that the nation experienced stellar growth, its income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, fell from 45.7 in 1980 to 38.9 in 2006: Vandemoortele and Bird, “Progress in Economic Conditions in Mauritius,” 10. “The sugarcane fields, the mountains in the backdrop”: Satish Chand, Pacific Could Learn From Prosperous Mauritius, Pacific Islands Report, October 19, 2010, http://archives.pireport.org/archive/2010/October/10-20-ft.htm.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

He showed that while there was certainly an increase in the absolute number of people enjoying upward mobility, the relative chances, or odds, of someone born into a working-class family making it into the professions (ahead of someone from a privileged background) remained consistently low throughout 6 Introduction the 20th century.21 Nonetheless, the shifts in absolute mobility were very important to people’s perception of openness.22 Many saw or knew others who had experienced upward mobility, and this fed a sense that the old mechanisms of class reproduction were gradually unravelling. This post-war expansion of ‘room at the top’ also coincided with a period of decreasing, and historically low, income inequality: the share of income going to the top 1% of earners declined from upwards of 15% before the war to as low as 6% in 1980.23 The rich, of course, remained far richer than everyone else, but not by nearly as much as they had been. But, slowly, both the increases in absolute mobility and income equality fizzled.

Social mobility, through this lens, is therefore a key means of justifying inequality, imbuing inequality with what Goldthorpe has called ‘meritocratic legitimacy’.33 But there are signs that this consensus is shifting. Landmark texts on inequality, such as those by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,34 Thomas Piketty35 and Danny Dorling,36 as well as hardhitting reports by high-profile organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF)37 and the World Bank,38 have convinced many that vast income inequalities are actually a more pressing dimension of fairness. There are also many politicians – mainly on the left but also some on the right – who are increasingly making the argument that however justly people access jobs, there is no reason for one person to be earning millions while others scrape by on ten thousand or less.39 Nonetheless, these politicians also support increasing social mobility, and see it as an important metric of societal openness.

Adding education to our understanding of the earnings slope makes our estimate of the slope due to class smaller, because some of the class slope was actually due to educational differences between the groups – the east-west slope. In Chapter Three we attempt to disentangle potential sources of class-origin income difference. To do this we conduct a series of nested linear regressions that control for four sets of factors that we identified from previous research as key sources of income inequality. We use the LFS variable indicating weekly earnings, multiplied by 52, for an estimate of annual earnings as the dependent variable. In the demographics model, we include controls for gender, ethnicity, disability and age, as well as the 268 Methodological appendix quarter in which the respondent gave earnings information.


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Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Sometimes inequality is egregious and simple to resolve, like ending slavery or racial discrimination in law. But we have picked this low-hanging fruit. Today’s cultural disadvantages rarely consist of a simple injustice requiring immediate restitution by whatever means necessary. Like measures to reduce income inequality, there is a downside to redistribution. One cost is efficiency: Somerville College at Oxford University moved to unisex bathrooms in January 2018, which is fairer as it doesn’t discriminate against non-binary individuals. But it means fewer people are processed, so queues are longer for all.

Unobtrusive measures such as anonymizing CVs or abolishing interviews are less costly than imposing quotas – though I would not rule the latter out if equity gains from these measures were repeatedly demonstrated to be large. We cannot expect racial equality to occur overnight, but it can remain an important social goal, much like reducing income inequality. By contrast, if racial inequality is a sacred value, anything less than perfect equality is a profane, deviant outrage – not subject to policy tradeoffs and rational discussion. This is especially problematic when those making the case for inequality eschew a scientific method based on measurement and variable-centred logic in favour of ethereal concepts such as structural oppression or ‘systemic’ racism.

Asians and Hispanics may feel fewer obligations to blacks than whites. Casual observation would suggest that being black in diverse San Francisco is not necessarily better than being black in white-majority Fargo. I speculate, so let’s look at some evidence. Figure 7.8 examines the relationship between white share and black–white income inequality in American states and Puerto Rico. Diverse Washington, DC, Louisiana and Puerto Rico have high racial inequality, as do non-diverse Minnesota and Wisconsin. On the other hand, white–black inequality is low in both diverse Hawaii and non-diverse Vermont. The change in racial inequality over 2000–2015 is similarly uncorrelated with the decline in white share over that period.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism.

Energy Innovations Engels, Friedrich entitlement spending entrepreneurs, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 10.1 short-term growth focus of entrepreneurship, serial Epicurus equity compensation Eroom’s law ethics euro Europe, 2.1, 6.1 European Central Bank Evergreen Solar, 13.1, 13.2 evolution exploration extinction, bm1.1, bm1.2 Facebook, prf.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 11.1, 14.1 Fairchild Semiconductor Fanning, Shawn Faust Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 8.1, 12.1, 14.1 Fermat, Pierre de Fermat’s Last Theorem finance, indefinite financial bubbles, 2.1, 8.1 first mover advantage flatness Fleming, Alexander Forbes, 12.1, 12.2 Ford fossil fuels foundations co-founders compensation structure equity ownership, possession and control startups founders, 14.1, bm1.1 origins of traits of Founders Fund, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 11.1, 13.1 Fountain of Youth fracking fraud detection free marketeers free trade fundamentalists future: challenge of controlling of four possible patterns for Gaga, Lady, 14.1, 14.2 Gates, Bill, prf.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 14.1 General Motors, 9.1, 13.1 genius Gladwell, Malcolm, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 globalization, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 12.1, bm1.1 substitution as technology and global warming goals Golden Gate Bridge Google, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2 as monopoly, 3.1, 3.2 motto of Google Translate Gore, Al government, indefinite Great Depression Greenspan, Alan, 2.1, 8.1 Gross, Bill Groupon Guardian, 12.1 Hamlet Harrison, Brian, 13.1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hendrix, Jimi Hewlett, Bill Hewlett-Packard hipsterdom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hoffman, Reid horizontal progress housing bubble, 2.1, 8.1 Howery, Ken HP Services Hughes, Howard Hurley, Chad Hyundai IBM, 3.1, 12.1 Igor incentive pay income inequality incrementalism, 8.1, 14.1 indefinite finance indefinite life indefinite optimism, 6.1, 6.2 indefinite pessimism, 6.1, 6.2 India Indonesia information technology, 1.1, 6.1, 12.1 Informix innovation, prf.1, 3.1 insider trading Instagram Intel internet, 2.1, 2.2 internet bubble, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 8.1, 13.1 Interstate Highway System Intuit investment iPad, 5.1, 14.1 iPhone, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 iPod, 6.1, 14.1 irrational exuberance Italy IT startups Ivan, Hurricane Jackson, Michael Japan Jennings, Ken Jennings, Peter Jeopardy!


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The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

This means understanding the difference between, say, ‘despair’ and ‘sadness’, and the ability of the person using those terms to do so deliberately and meaningfully. Were, for instance, someone to describe themselves as ‘angry’, a response focused on making them feel better might entirely miss the point of what they were saying. It might even be deemed insulting. Were someone to be unhappy about the fact that income inequality in Britain and the United States has reached levels not seen since the 1920s, the advice – as given by some happiness economists – that one is best off not knowing what other people earn would seem like a form of hopelessness.20 In a monistic world, there is merely sentiment, experiences of pleasure and pain that fluctuate silently inside the head, with symptoms that are discernable to the expert eye.

And as recently as 1980, Americans still consumed tranquilizers at more than twice the rate of antidepressants. What changed? From ‘better’ to ‘more’ The sixteen-year-old Hague had taken the conference platform at a turning point in the history of economic policy-making in the Western world. According to the most respected measure of income inequality, Britain has never been more equal than it was in 1977.7 But at the same time, the case for market deregulation was becoming increasingly credible, urged on by corporations that felt that they had become victimized by regulators, unions and consumer pressure groups.8 Persistently high inflation had led a number of governments, including Britain’s, to experiment in ‘monetarism’, an attempt to control the amount of money in circulation but which also threatened economic growth and jobs.

., 28, 30 The Hidden Persuaders (Packard), 73, 74 Hilton, Steve, 191 homo economicus, 61–2 Hoover, Herbert, 100 HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement) programme, 235 Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, 175 Hsieh, Tony, 113 Hudson Yards real estate project (NYC), 233–4, 235, 237 human capital, 126, 151, 160 human existence, ideal form of, 112 human optimality/optimization, 5, 129, 274 human resource management, 189, 238, 276 human resources profession, 108, 133 Hume, David, 14 Hyde Park (Chicago), 148 idealism, 27, 181 Ignite U, 134 imipramine, 162 income inequality, 34, 144. See also economic inequality Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme, 111 indices, 176 individual choice, theory of, 59 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Cialdini), 238 Infoglut (Andrejevic), 260 Ingeus, 110, 112 insurance fraud, 42, 44, 45, 46 intangible assets, 126 internet addiction, 204–5, 207 internships, 274 interventions, 17, 20, 35, 108, 111, 265 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham), 22 introspection, 22, 48, 63, 64, 78, 86 iPhone 6, 26, 135 iproniazid, 162 J.


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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4 per cent.4 In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1 per cent rose by 270 per cent.5 In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12 per cent between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest tenth rose by 37 per cent.6 The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from twenty-six in 1979 to forty in 2009.7 In his book The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived.8 Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy.

The Self-Attribution Fallacy 1Daniel Kahneman, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, p. 216. 2Belinda Jane Board and Katarina Fritzon, March 2005, ‘Disordered Personalities at Work’, Psychology, Crime and Law, vol. 11, no. 1, tandfonline.com. 3Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, 2007, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, HarperBusiness, London. 4Robert Reich and Bill Marsh, 4 September 2011, figure in ‘The Limping Middle Class’, nytimes.com. 5The figures here have been calculated from Dave Gilson, 10 October 2011, ‘Charts: Who Are the 1 Percent?’, motherjones.com, which shows the average income of the top 1 per cent rising from just over $400,000 in 1980 to $1,138,000 in 2008, measured in 2008 dollars; the income of the bottom 90 per cent flatlined during the same period. 6The Poverty Site, 2009, ‘Income Inequalities’, poverty.org.uk 7Ibid. 8Branko Milanovic, 2011, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, Basic Books, New York. 9The debate was organised by Reclaim the City: reclaimthecity.org. 33. The Lairds of Learning 1The data in this essay are from the time of publication.

See soil subsidies for, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 276 in Turkey, 140, 142 in Wales, 121 yields from, 140–1 in Zimbabwe, 139 The Farming Forum, 126 Farming Regulation Task Force, 127 Farrar, Frederick, 234 Ffos-y-fran (South Wales), 147, 148 finance, jobs in, 48, 49 financial sector, and the illusion of skill, 189 Financial Times, 20, 223 Fiorina, Carly, 186 Fire Brigades Union (FBU), 267 flood defence, 130, 132–8 Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN), 142 food security, 139 Food Summit (2008), 139, 142 Forest Industries, 177 Forsyth, Michael, 215 Forty-Two Reasons to Support Scottish Independence (Ramsay), 273 fossil fuels absence of official recognition of role of in causing climate change, 155 economic growth as artefact of use of, 175 exploration and extraction of, 153, 157 impact of unchecked consumption of, 87 lack of talk about constraining production of, 153 leaving them in the ground, 147–51 silence about, 154–6, 158 Four Lions (film), 238 Fox News, 212 Fraser, Stuart, 192 freedom acting as if we don’t enjoy greater freedom than preceding generations, 23 as championed by neoliberals, 4 deprivation of, 26 market freedom, 45, 198, 218 negative freedom, 4 political freedom, 5 surrender of, 12 think tank freedoms, 24 as use it or lose it, 26 Free Enterprise Group, 215 free market, 3, 198, 199–200, 213, 224 free-range production, 114 Friedman, Milton, 220 Friel, Howard, 200 Fritzon, Katarina, 189 Frum, David, 213 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, 164, 168, 169–70 G Galton, Francis, 234 General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union (GMB), 264, 266 genocide, 227–31 ghost psyche, 89, 111 Gillis, John, 59, 60, 61 Gini coefficient, 191 global agreements, 102 global consumption, 177 global economy, 177 global food market, 143 global growth rate, 178 global warming, 86, 101, 104, 105–6, 155, 159 global wealth, 12, 176 Glooskap, 90 Gloucester, 132 Godhaven, Merrick, 261 godly household, 59 Goldsmith, James, 213, 214 Google, 205 Grantham, Jeremy, 175 Great Leap Backwards, 141 green consumerism, 288 green energy production, 167 greenhouse gases attention paid to, 153 emissions of, 87, 104, 159 grazing animals as increasing production of, 86 impact of wildlife protection on, 87 as topic of official interest in global meetings, 154 Greenpeace, 169, 171, 260 Green Revolution, 140 Greenwald, Glenn, 56 Griffiths, Jay, 43 grouse estates, subsidies for, 137, 275 Guantanamo Bay, detainees in, 256 Guardian, 33, 62, 68, 224, 230, 250 guiding intelligence, belief in, 19 Guttmacher Institute, 74 H Harbin, particulate concentrations in, 171 Harbour, Peter, 258, 260 hard work, outcomes as based on (or not based on), 16, 188 Hare, Robert, 190 Harvey, David, 218, 220 Hastings, Max, 222, 235 The Haves and the Have-Nots (Milanovic), 191 Hayek, Friedrich von, 218, 220 Health and Environment Alliance, 171 heating fuel, 165, 167 Heritage Foundation, 219 heroin use, 33, 34–5 Hewlett-Packard, 186 Heywood, Colin, 60 hill farming, 121, 122, 131, 133, 134 Hispaniola, 228 A History of Childhood (Heywood), 60 Hitler, Adolph, 234 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 13 Holder, Eric, 255 Holocaust, 230, 233 homosexuality, 59 Hoover Institute, 219 Household, Geoffrey, 211 housing estates, play spaces for children in, 44–5 HSBC, 238 Human Plant (BBC series), 90 humans ability of to compartmentalise, 91, 92, 93, 94 hunting/gathering of early humans, 91 impact of development of farming on, 92 as wired to respond to nature, 89 Humphreys, Margaret, 64 Hunger Games (film), 90 Hunter’s Pride, 110 hunting/gathering, of early humans, 91 I I=CAT, 104 I=PAT, 104 imperialism, 233, 235 Imperial University, 50 income inequality, 191, 205, 209–10 incomes, rise and fall of, 191 Independent, 282 Independent Age, 10 individual effort, 16 individualism, 10 Infrastructure Act, 155 infrastructure of persuasion, 1, 2 Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance (IPNAs), 29–30 Innospec, 163 Institute of Economic Affairs, 214 Institute for Public Policy Research, 281 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 148 International Assessment of Agriculture Knowledge, 142 international conferences, 154, 158.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The areas in which the left has made the most significant progress—gay rights, inclusion of women in higher education, the end of de jure racial discrimination—are the battles it has fought or is fighting in favor of making the meritocracy more meritocratic. The areas in which it has suffered its worst defeats—collective action to provide universal public goods, mitigating rising income inequality—are those that fall outside the meritocracy’s purview. The same goes for conservatives. Those who rail against unions and for reduced taxes on hedge fund bonuses have the logic of meritocracy on their side, yet those who want to keep gay men and women from serving openly in the military do not.

America now features more inequality than any other industrialized democracy. In its peer group are countries like Argentina and other Latin American nations that once stood as iconic examples of the ways in which the absence of a large middle class presented a roadblock to development and good governance. So: income inequality has been growing. What about mobility? While it’s much harder to measure than inequality, there’s a growing body of evidence that at the same time inequality has been growing at an unprecedented rate, social mobility has been declining. In a 2012 speech, Alan Krueger, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, coined the term “The Gatsby Curve” to refer to a chart showing that, over the past three decades, “as inequality has increased … year-to-year or generation-to-generation economic mobility has decreased.”

Since World War II, we’ve seen two distinct eras of equality in which a whole host of deeply embedded, overwhelmingly powerful systems of inequality were dramatically weakened, and in some cases all but destroyed. The first era of equality, from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s, represented a period of historically unprecedented growth, mass affluence, and middle-class expansion that has not been duplicated since. Income inequality markedly declined, even as the economy posted a nearly unmatched level of annual GDP growth. Union density rose as high as 34 percent (the highest it’s ever been), while the ratio between average CEO compensation and average production worker compensation hovered around 25 (by 2009 it was 185), and people up and down the income scale saw remarkable material gains.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

But cheap services are also enabling a social class dynamic that economists’ analyses ignore: the new servant economy I mentioned in the last chapter. The merely well-off who want, but can’t afford, a full-time housekeeper, cook, driver, or “Man Friday” can now purchase slices of these workers at very affordable prices. The buyers are whiter, richer, and more highly educated than the average American.13 Income inequality plus technology is yielding a more pernicious division of labor. On the supply side, another effect is on legacy businesses. I’ve already mentioned that the taxi industry has been badly affected, with drivers facing reduced wages and medallion owners saddled with debt.14 The hotel industry has not suffered the same degree of adverse impact, largely because Airbnb has mainly been catering to personal travel, while hotels take the business segment.

The “average” Airbnb listing in this example is an entire unit up for rental that cannot be instantly booked, is located in New York City, with all other listing properties (distance to city center, number of people accommodated, number of days the unit was available to be booked, average nightly price, number of listings by the same host, number of listings in the same area) and neighborhood properties (number of Airbnb listings in the area and population of the area) at the sample mean. When further area characteristics are introduced (per capita income, income inequality, median age, homeownership rate, housing values, and educational attainment) the gap in the probabilities attributed to the racial makeup of the area decreases but remains significant. These are also the controls we use in our subsequent analysis. 33. Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers (2015). 34.

See platforms, for-profit Foster, Natalie, 37, 39 France, 153 Frank, Thomas, 23 Freecycle, 26, 146 free market, 23 free riders, 71–72 Fremstad, Anders, 120 Frenken, Koen, 151, 191–92 Friedman, Thomas, 115 From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 21 game theory, 69, 159 Gates, Bill, 95 gender discrimination, 87, 142 gentrifying neighborhoods, 94–95 George, 155 Germany, 152–53 Getaround, 83, 85–86 ghost hotels, 106 Gideon, 57 gig economy, 192 Gigged, 13 goods sharing, 34–35, 112, 119–20 Google, 151, 158 Gothenburg, 173 Great Recession, 3, 101 Green, Logan, 25 Green Taxi, 170 green-washed convenience, 146 Hall, Jonathan, 190 Handy, 27 Hector, 166 Helen, 50–51 Hill, Steven, 12, 34 Hochschild, Arlie, 130 HomeAway, 160 HomeJoy, 35 home sharing, 108 Hope, 29 Horan, Hubert, 35 hosting. See Airbnb hotel industry, 102, 109, 115 housecleaners, 97, 102 housing market, 107, 160 Hustle and Gig, 13 idealist discourse, 5, 11, 27–31, 39; and environmental impacts, 115; and technology, 162; tenets of, 21; and trust, 24 identity conflicts, 100–101 income inequality, 95, 104, 109 independent contractors, 33, 47, 60, 70 induced travel effect, 119 Industry (makerspace site), 136–42 inequality, 83–86, 173. See also discrimination; income, 95, 104, 109; social class, 95–96; structural, 85, 92 informal sharing, 146 Instacart, 57, 161 interviews, 177, 182–83 investment, 35–36 Isabelle, 59–60, 63–64 iStock, 148–49 Jason, 20–21, 28, 107, 120 Jen, 128 Jerry, 112 job loss, cost of, 69–70 job security, 3 John, Nicholas, 191 Johnston, Josée, 134 Josephine, 38 Josh, 58–59, 97 Juan (Romero), 40, 48–49 Junkyard Wars, 139 Kalamar, Anthony, 193 Kalanick, Travis, 9, 25, 38, 95, 156 Kalleberg, Arne, 70 Karim, 32, 89 Kassi, 145–46 Katie, 100 Kelly, 112–13 Kendrick, 61–62 Kenney, Martin, 151, 194 Kent, 138–39 Kessler, Sarah, 13 Kitchensurfing, 27 Kozaza, 172 labor conditions, 161 labor control, 66–67 labor platforms, 27, 35, 86–87, 96 Ladegaard, Isak, 14, 52, 182–83 Landshare, 35 Las Indias, 168 Leah, 7, 29, 108–9 Lee, 144 legacy businesses, 72, 77, 83, 97, 109 Lessig, Lawrence, 191 Lily, 112 Lisa, 168 Livingstone, Bruce, 148–49 Liz, 140–41 lodging platforms, 116, 160.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

These are difficult tensions to resolve. 6 World Cities and Nation States The future imperatives for world cities World cities face a number of similar or overlapping challenges that require facilitation and support from national governments. They have little choice but to adapt to increased competition for mobile firms, jobs, people, goods, capital and services (Herrschel, 2014). They face demands to address the externalities that accompany intense demand, such as housing supply constraints, income inequalities and over‐burdened infrastructure. Most have to operate in a context of constrained public investment and cuts to intergovernmental transfers and grants. Sub‐national public investment declined by up to a fifth within the OECD in the five years after the financial crisis, and evidence from non‐OECD countries indicates this drop is even more stark (Allain‐Dupre, 2015).

Osaka residents, in particular, widely feel that Tokyo drains their economic vitality, and the capital has to counter a widespread view in Japan that it has an over‐concentration of functions and activities, rendered all the more acute as Osaka used to be the economic engine of Japan. Attempts by the central government to disperse ­economic clusters have largely been ineffective, although redistributive policies did manage to contain severe income inequalities (Child Hill and Fujita, 1993; Sorensen, 2002; Hill and Fujita, 2009; OECD, 2011; Chan and Boland, 2012; Kakiuchi, 2013; Moore, 2014). Many others, however, argue that the clustering of economic activity benefits the country as a whole, as it raises productivity and allows secondary cities to support Tokyo in the supply chain (Sorensen, 2002).

New York is also prominent within the US Conference of Mayors (and, to a lesser extent, the National League of Cities), which offers a collective voice for cities to make the case for the federal government to retain its existing financial responsibilities. In 2014, Mayor de Blasio was at the forefront of the organisa­ tion’s issue of a report on income inequality and the founding of a Cities of Opportunities Task Force to address the issue. New York has recently supported efforts in cities to introduce an enhanced minimum wage, better broadband and improved pre‐school services, as the city leadership senses a window of oppor­ tunity to achieve policy breakthroughs despite federal government inaction.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Installment Debt Extended and Repaid by Year in the Postwar United States 133 Figure 5.2. Household Assets by Race 139 Figure 5.3. Debt Use and Debtor Liquid Assets by Race 140 Figure 5.4. Mortgage Interest Rates by Race 144 Figure 5.5. Interest Rates of Conventional and Federally Insured Mortgages 144 Figure 7.1. Median Male Wages 222 Figure 7.2. Income Inequality 222 Figure 7.3. Consumer Credit Outstanding 223 Figure 7.4. Charge Account Volume by Year 259 This page intentionally left blank DEBTOR NATION This page intentionally left blank An Introduction to the History of Debt It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be that impossible thing in history, something that has existed forever.

Consumers of the 1980s increasingly borrowed to deal with unexpected job losses and medical expenses as much as to live the good life, returning to a credit world that had more in common with the 1920s than with the 1950s.5 A credit system premised on rising wages and stable employment was reappropriated to shore up uncertain employment and income inequality. Though credit could be used to grapple with short-term unemployment and decreased income, in the longterm loans still had to be repaid. Credit could dampen the swings of short-term fortunes, but it could not change long-term fates. Buoyed by a long-boom in housing prices, Americans used asset-growth to substitute for wage-growth, which worked fine as long as house prices continued to rise.

Margo, “Median earnings of full-time workers, by sex and race: 1960–1997,” Table Ba4512 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, eds. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In 1994 dollars. Gini Coefficient .50 .45 .40 .35 1947 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 Year Figure 7.2. Income Inequality. Source: Peter H. Lindert, “Distribution of money income among households: 1947–1998,” Table Be1-18 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, eds. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Even in the first decade of the century, indiscriminate and unfair land acquisition from households prompted thousands of protests across the country. China also has a problem with inequality. Many households in rural communities have not benefited from development since employment growth has been unevenly distributed, with the best and most numerous jobs in cities, especially in the coastal areas. China has to address growing income inequality by creating good jobs in rural areas and in the internal provinces, a problem we have seen that developed countries also grapple with. Finally, as a result of its one-child policy, and because it allows very little immigration, China is one emerging market that is aging rapidly. As labor-force growth has slowed, wages are rising rapidly, forcing some industries to shift to cheaper countries.

The competitive market targets those who benefit the most from it since the profits these entities make are most worth disrupting. Therefore, even as the quality and quantity of health care expands significantly, and even as countries grow older and richer, the need for doctors could moderate, normalizing their wages and reducing income inequality. Similarly, the abundance of machine-made or foreign goods, and the fall in local wages, could also prompt a shift in taste toward goods with more human and local content. We already see some of this. The more accurate but cheap quartz or digital watch has been displaced by painstakingly handcrafted and intricate mechanical watches at the high end of the luxury scale.

“Academic Ranking of World Universities, 2017,” Shanghai Rankings (website), accessed August 7, 2018, http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2017.html. 30. “Table 326.10,” Digest of Education Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, accessed August 7, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_326.10.asp. 31. See Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–41; Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 1 (2011): 3–71; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). 32.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

In 1979, under Carter, the inequality of income distribution after taxation was 10.2 percent smaller than the inequality of income distribution before taxation. The Reagan tax cuts substituted a much smaller bulldozer. By 1986, the inequality of income distribution after taxation was just 5.1 percent smaller than the inequality before taxation.86 After-tax income inequality in the United States rose faster during the mid-1980s than during any other period in the postwar era.87 The gulf between the wealthy and everyone else was yawning wider — and the federal government was no longer fighting back. Other developed nations emulated America, though few went as far.

Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform (New York: Vintage, 1988), 111. 86. “The Distribution of Household Income, 2015,” November 8, 2018, Congressional Budget Office. 87. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, rose by 5.17 percent between 1983 and 1988, the largest increase over any five-year period since World War II. See Wojciech Kopczuk, Emmanuel Saez, and Jae Song, “Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data Since 1937,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1 (February 2010). 88.

Conditions vary and details matter. The Brazilian government sent scientists to RCA at the same time as Taiwan, but Brazil did not succeed in creating a semiconductor industry. 112. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Taiwan’s Embarrassment of Riches,” New York Times, December 21, 1986. 113. One measure of income inequality is the ratio of the top income quintile and the bottom income quintile. This ratio fell from 20.5 in 1952 to 4.4 by the early 1980s. It has since climbed to around 6, which remains lower than much of the developed world. In the United States, the ratio was 8.5 in 2016. In Chile, it was 10. 114.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

But, while it is possible for people to stay in the same income bracket for life, though they seldom do, it is not equally possible for them to stay in the same age bracket for life. Because of the movement of people from one income bracket to another over the years, the degree of income inequality over a lifetime is not the same as the degree of income inequality in a given year. A study in New Zealand found that the degree of income inequality over a working lifetime there was less than the degree of inequality in any given year during those lifetimes.{298} Much discussion of “the rich” and “the poor”—or of the top and bottom 10 or 20 percent—fail to say just what kinds of incomes qualify to be in those categories.

Many “trends” reported in the media or proclaimed in politics likewise depend entirely on which year has been chosen as the beginning of the trend. Crime in the United States has been going up if you measure from 1960 to the present, but down if you measure from 1990 to the present. The degree of income inequality was about the same in 1939 and 1999 but, in the latter year, you could have said that income inequality had increased from the 1980s onward because there were fluctuations in between the years in which it was about the same.{555} At the end of 2003, an investment in a Standard & Poor’s 500 mutual fund would have earned nearly a 10.5 percent annual rate of return (since 1963) or nearly a zero percent rate of return (since 1998).{556} It all depended on the base year chosen.

That is, there were more heads of households in absolute numbers—4.3 million versus 2.2 million—working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent of households compared to the bottom 20 percent.{304} At one time, back in the 1890s, people in the top 10 percent in income worked fewer hours than people in the bottom 10 percent, but that situation has long since reversed.{305} We are no longer talking about the idle rich versus the toiling poor. Today we are usually talking about those who work regularly and those who, in most cases, do not work regularly or at all. Under these conditions, the more that pay for work increases the more income inequality increases. Among the top 6 percent of income earners in a survey published in the Harvard Business Review, 62 percent worked more than 50 hours a week and 35 percent worked more than 60 hours a week.{306} The sizes of families and households have differed not only from one income bracket to another at a given time, but also have differed over time.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

It is, in the long run, a good thing that machines or robots take over activities they can do, freeing humans for the things only they can do. This makes work much more intrinsically rewarding for very many people. I don’t think, however, that we understand how to think about what increasing productivity means, or how its benefits will be shared, when there is no “product.” Increased income inequality has accompanied the productivity increases linked to digital technologies, indicating that the gains have not been all that widely shared so far. This accounts for the confusing debate under way among economists about the implications for jobs and incomes, including income distribution, of the current wave of capital investment in digital equipment and machines.

See developed/high-income countries Hitler, Adolf, 41 Holland, 8, 17, 20 Hoover, Herbert, 13 household production/services, 38, 39, 106, 108–9, 140 human capital, 134, 135 Human Development Index (HDI), 72–74, 115, 136, 137 IMF. See International Monetary Fund imputed bank service charge (IBSC), 102–3 income, as GDP measure, 25, 26t income inequality. See inequality, economic/income Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), 116, 137 India, 53, 74, 94, 96 Indonesia, 94 Industrial Revolution, 12, 84, 96, 128 inequality, economic/income, 5, 51, 93–94, 129 infant mortality, 61, 74, 117 inflation, 30–31, 65. See also stagflation informal economy, 2, 105–8, 137 information, measuring consumption of, 130–31 infrastructure, 134, 135 innovation and invention: customization of goods and services, 123–25; GDP measures in relation to, 35, 86–91, 116–17, 124; investment in, 132; postwar, 44–45, 62–63; time frame for impact of, 79–81; variety of goods and services, 87, 91, 122–24; war as stimulus for, 7; well-being in relation to, 116–17.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In his 2019 letter he conceded that “a big chunk of [Americans] have been left behind” and that “forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour, 40%…can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car; 15% of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids.” In 2018 he told JPMorgan’s shareholders that “middle class incomes have been stagnant for years. Income inequality has gotten worse….More than 28 million Americans don’t have medical insurance at all. And, surprisingly, 25% of those eligible for various types of federal assistance programs don’t get any help.” He cautioned that “no one can claim that the promise of equal opportunity is being offered to all Americans through our education systems, nor are those who have run afoul of our justice system getting the second chance that many of them deserve.

Rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.” In 2016, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. In other words, racism and xenophobia were proximate causes of Trump’s 2016 victory, and they continue to contribute to his support. But racism was not, and is not, the underlying cause. However much the oligarchy may want Americans to believe that racism was responsible for Trump, in fact it was anti-establishment fury


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Some countries—India and China—continue to do extraordinarily well, with India’s annual growth exceeding 8 percent and China’s exceeding 10 percent.1 Although in both countries, discontent simmered over growing income inequality, and governments in both were trying actively to improve the plight of those in the rural sector, the divide continued to grow between these countries, which somehow had learned to manage globalization well enough that they could grow rapidly and stably, and other developing countries. Not surprisingly, the persistent high level of income inequality in developed countries continued to feed those who favored trade protectionism. The major victim was perhaps the development round of trade talks, which had begun in Doha, Qatar, with so much promise in November 2001.

Attitudes toward globalization, and the failures and inequities associated with the way it has been managed, provide a Rorschach test for both countries and their people, revealing their fundamental beliefs and attitudes, their perspectives on the role of government and the market, the importance they attach to social justice, and the weight they put on noneconomic values. Economists who place less importance on reducing income inequality are more prone to think that the actions governments might take to reduce that inequality are too costly, and may even be counterproductive. These “free market” economists are also more inclined to believe that markets, by themselves, without government intervention, are efficient, and that the best way to help the poor is simply to let the economy grow—and, somehow, the benefits will trickle down to the poor.

(Interestingly, such beliefs have persisted, even as economic research has undermined their intellectual foundations.) On the other hand, those who, like me, think that markets often fail to produce efficient outcomes (producing too much pollution and too little basic research, for instance) and are disturbed by income inequalities and high levels of poverty, also believe that reducing that inequality can cost less than the conservative economists predict. Those who worry about inequality and poverty also see the enormous costs of not dealing with the problem: the social consequences, including alienation, violence, and social conflict.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

FIVE - Help Wanted White-Collar Indian White-Collar American Green-Collar American Blue-Collar American Carlson’s Law SIX - Homework x 2 = The American Dream We Have a “More” Problem Teachers and Principals Colorado, Here We Come No Teacher Is an Island Home Alone SEVEN - Average Is Over The Three C’s The Good News Creative Crimson Tide An Idealab Yes, And “I Kill Jobs” PART III - THE WAR ON MATH AND PHYSICS EIGHT - “This Is Our Due” NINE - The War on Math (and the Future) Paint by Numbers Present at the Creation Young Republicans Hey, Big Spender The Return of Gravity TEN - The War on Physics and Other Good Things Honk If You Believe in Climate Change Honk If You Think Like Dick Cheney Of Science and Political Science Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Hungry, Thirsty, and Unstable PART IV - POLITICAL FAILURE ELEVEN - The Terrible Twos If 2 Plus X Equals 4, What Is the Value of X? Bridges Brain Drain Million? You Must Mean Billion? No. Million! Rules Income Inequality Chasing the Losers Crazy Heart TWELVE - “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” The Great Disjunction The Way We Were A Broken System Mount Rushmore Meet Me in the Lobby Show Me the Money Media Madness California, Here We Come THIRTEEN - Devaluation Jerry Maguire The Decline of Authority Service Envy PART V - REDISCOVERING AMERICA FOURTEEN - They Just Didn’t Get the Word Far Too Dumb to Quit Ride, Mister?

Historically, America has educated its people up to and beyond the technological demands of every era. Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin demonstrate in their book The Race Between Education and Technology that as long as our educational system kept up with the rate of technology change, as it did until around 1970, our economic growth was widely shared. And when it stopped keeping up, income inequality began widening as job opportunities for high school dropouts shrunk while employers bid for a too-small pool of highly skilled workers. Today’s hyper-connected world poses yet another new educational challenge: To prosper, America has to educate its young people up to and beyond the new levels of technology.

There is no magic formula for this, and we surely do not wish to stifle all innovation in this area. But finding that balance is crucial because, as we saw in 2008 and thereafter, a major failure in this sector of the economy can inflict massive and long-lasting damage on the economy as a whole. Income Inequality A critical reason that America has failed to update its formula by reinvesting in education, infrastructure, and research and development, and hasn’t adjusted our immigration policy to promote economic growth or implemented appropriate economic regulations, is that all these require collective action—America as a whole has to act—and lately we have lost our capacity for collective action.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Indian government data also often focused on consumption, a measure that gave the country a middling position in global rankings of inequality, rather than income or wealth. More recent research has proved beyond doubt the depths of India’s social divide. Churning through new data in 2016, Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, found India had higher income inequality levels than America, Brazil, and Russia, leaving it “more egalitarian than only South Africa,” a country famous for its jarring stratification.43 Other surveys found similar results.44 An IMF working paper from the same year showed that India had one of the highest and fastest-growing inequality rates in Asia.45 Its score on the Gini index—a measure of inequality where 0 means total equality and 100 total inequality—rose from 45 in 1990 to 51 in 2013.

“What the World Thinks about Globalisation,” The Economist, November 18, 2016. 16. Dasgupta, Capital, p. 44. 17. Drèze and Sen, An Uncertain Glory, p. ix. 18. Raghuram Rajan, “Is There a Threat of Oligarchy in India,” University of Chicago, September 10, 2008. 19. Global Wealth Report 2016. 20. Chancel, L. and Piketty, T., “Indian income inequality, 1922–2014”; Global Wealth Databook 2016, p. 148. 21. S. Sukhtankar and M. Vaishnav, “Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options,” India Policy Forum 11, July 2015, pp. 193–261. 22. CMS Transparency, “Lure of Money in Lieu of Votes in Lok Sabha and Assembly Elections,” p. 7. 23.

The ADB paper concluded: “Had inequality not increased, India’s poverty headcount would have been reduced from 32.7% to 29.5% in 2008.” Kang, “Interrelation between Growth and Inequality.” 49. Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphaphiphat, Frantisek Ricka, and Evridiki Tsounta, “Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective,” International Monetary Fund, June 15, 2015. 50. James Crabtree, “Gautam Adani, Founder, Adani Group,” Financial Times, June 16, 2013. 51. “Gautam Adani Kidnapping Case: Underworld Don Fazl-Ur-Rehman Produced in Ahmedabad Court,” DNA, August 11, 2014. 52.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Even though religion is heavily regulated in China, Xi Jinping himself has called for China to return to its roots as an “ecological civilization.”37 Recent surveys suggest that all across Asia there is a strong willingness to pay more for sustainably sourced products.38 Young Chinese are no longer fond of shark-fin soup. Raising the Floor, Leapfrogging the Ladder If Asia were a single country of nearly 5 billion citizens, its income inequality would be far worse than in any other region. Yemenis earn scarcely $2,000 per capita per year, while Qatar’s per capita annual income has reached $125,000.39 A similar disparity exists between the citizens of Myanmar and Singapore. But for Asians, poverty remains so extensive that it is a far greater concern than inequality.

You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Notes Introduction: Asia First 1 Only the African Group in the United Nations has more members with fifty-four. Asia is home to 2,301 spoken languages, and Africa ranks second with just over 2,100 languages. 2 Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now—An Overview,” World Bank Policy Research Paper no. 6259, November 2012, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/959251468176687085/pdf/wps6259.pdf. 3 Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West (New York: Steerforth Press, 2001). 4 Asian Development Bank, Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific, 2015 (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2015), https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/175162/ki2015.pdf. 5 Homi Kharas, “The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class: An Update,” Global Economy & Development Working Paper no. 100, Brookings Institution, February 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf. 6 Since most ancient cultures thought of themselves as the center of the world, Asian civilizations had names for one another but no word for “Asia.”

., 49, 265, 316 Ganges region, 29, 32 Ganges River, 33, 35, 46 “Gangnam Style” (music video), 343 Gates, Bill, 317 Geely, 194 General Electric, 110, 168, 211 Genghis Khan, 39–40 Georgia, Republic of, 59 technocracy in, 307 Germany, Nazi, 50 Germany, unified: Arab refugees in, 255 Asian immigrants in, 253, 254, 256 Asia’s relations with, 242 multiparty consensus in, 284 Ginsberg, Allen, 331 Giving Pledge, 317 Global-is-Asian, 22 globalization: Asia and, 8–9, 162, 357–59; see also Asianization growth of, 14 global order, see world order Goa, 44, 89, 186 Göbekli Tepe, 28 Goguryeo Kingdom, 34 Go-Jek, 187 Golden Triangle, 123 Google, 199, 200, 208–9, 219 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 58 governance: digital technology in, 318–19 inclusive policies in, 303 governance, global: Asia and, 321–25 infrastructure and, 322 US and, 321 government: effectiveness of, 303 trust in, 291, 310 violence against minorities by, 308–9 Government Accountability Office (GAO), 293 GrabShare, 174–75 grain imports, Asian, 90 Grand Canal, China, 37, 42 Grand Trunk Road, 33 Great Britain: Asian investments in, 247 Brexit vote in, 283–84, 286, 293–94 civil service in, 293–94 colonial empire of, 46–47 industrialization in, 46 Iran and, 252 populism in, 283–84 South Asian immigrants in, 253, 254 West Asian mandates of, 49–50 Great Game, 47 Great Leap Forward, 55 Great Wall of China, 31 Greece, 60, 91, 248 Greeks, ancient, 29, 34 greenhouse gas emissions, 176–77, 182 gross domestic product (GDP), 2, 4, 150 Grupo Bimbo, 272 Guam, 50, 136 Guangdong, 42, 98 Guangzhou (Canton), 37, 48, 68 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 58, 101, 102 Gulf states (Khaleej), 6, 9, 57, 62, 81 alternative energy projects in, 251 Asianization of, 100–106 China and, 101, 102 European investment in, 251 India and, 102 Israel and, 99–100, 105 Japan and, 102 oil and gas exports of, 62, 74, 100–101, 176 South Asian migrants in, 334 Southeast Asia’s trade with, 102 South Korea and, 102 technocracy in, 311–12 US arms sales to, 101 women in, 315 see also specific countries Gulliver, Stuart, 148, 150 Gupta Empire, 35 H-1B visas, 219 Hamas, 59, 100, 139 Hamid, Mohsin, 184 Han Dynasty, 32, 33, 34, 300 Hanoi, 180 Han people, 31–32, 37, 69 Harappa, 29 Hardy, Alfredo Toro, 275 Hariri, Saad, 95 Harun al-Rashid, Caliph, 37 Harvard University, 230 Haushofer, Karl, 1 health care, 201–2 Helmand River, 107 Herberg-Rothe, Andreas, 75 Herodotus, 30 heroin, 106–7 Hezbollah, 58, 95, 96, 106 Hindus, Hinduism, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 70–71 in Southeast Asia, 121 in US, 220, 221 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 51 Hispanic Americans, 217 history, Asian view of, 75 history textbooks: Asia nationalism in, 27–28 global processes downplayed in, 28 Western focus of, 27–28, 67–68 Hitler, Adolf, 50 Ho, Peter, 289 Ho Chi Minh, 52 Ho Chi Minh City, 56 Honda, 275 Hong Kong, 56, 74 American expats in, 234 art scene in, 342 British handover of, 60, 141 civil society in, 313 Hongwu, Ming emperor, 42 honor killings, 315 Hormuz, Strait of, 103, 106 hospitality industry, 190, 214 Houthis, 106, 107 Huan, Han emperor, 33–34 Hulagu Khan, 40 Human Rights Watch, 313 human trafficking, 318 Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 37 Hungary, 40, 248, 256 Huns, 35, 76 hunter-gatherers, 28 Huntington, Samuel, 15 Hu Shih, 332 Hussein, Saddam, 58, 62, 101 Hyundai, 104 IBM, 212 I Ching, 30 Inclusive Development Index (IDI), 150 income inequality: in Asia, 183–84 in US, 228, 285 India, 101, 104 Afghanistan and, 118 Africa and, 264–66 AI research in, 200 alternative energy programs in, 178–79, 322 Asian investments of, 118 Australia and, 128 British Raj in, 46, 49 charitable giving in, 316–17 China and, 19–20, 113, 117–18, 155, 156, 332 civil society in, 313 in Cold War era, 52, 55, 56 corporate debt in, 170 corruption in, 161, 305 demonetization in, 184, 186–87 diaspora of, 333–34 early history of, 29, 30–31 economic growth of, 9, 17, 148, 185–86 elections in, 63 European trade partnerships with, 250–51 expansionist period in, 38, 41–42 failure of democracy in, 302 family-owned businesses in, 160 film industry in, 349–51 financial markets in, 186 foreign investment in, 192 gender imbalance in, 315 global governance in, 322–23 global image of, 331–32 Gulf states and, 102 inclusive policies in, 304 infrastructure investment in, 63, 110, 185 Iran and, 116, 118 Israel and, 98–99 IT industry in, 204, 275 Japan and, 134, 156 Latin America and, 275 manufacturing in, 192 as market for Western products and services, 207 naval forces of, 105 Northeast Asia and, 154–55 oil and gas imports of, 96, 107–8, 176 Pakistan and, 53, 55, 61, 77–78, 117–18 partitioning of, 52–53 pharmaceutical industry in, 228, 275 population of, 15, 186 in post–Cold War era, 61, 62 privatization in, 170 returnees in, 226 Russia and, 86–87 service industry in, 192 Southeast Asia and, 154–55 special economic zones in, 185 spiritual heritage of, 332 technocracy in, 304–6 technological innovation in, 186–87 territorial claims of, 11 top-down economic reform in, 305 traditional medicine of, 355 West Asia and, 155 Indian Americans, 217, 218, 219–20, 222 Indian Institutes of Technology (ITT), 205 Indian Ocean, 38, 47, 74, 105, 261, 262, 266 European voyages to, 44 Indians, in Latin America, 276 IndiaStack, 187 Indochina, 45, 50, 52 see also Southeast Asia Indo-Islamic culture, 38 Indonesia, 53, 61, 121, 125, 182 art scene in, 342 in Cold War era, 54 economic growth of, 17, 148 eco-tourism in, 340 failure of democracy in, 302 foreign investment in, 187 illiberal policies of, 306 inclusive policies of, 304 Muslims in, 71 technocracy in, 304–5 Indus River, 32, 113 Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), 92, 159 industrialization, spread of, 22 Industrial Revolution, 2, 46, 68 Indus Valley, 29 infrastructure investment, in Asia, 6, 62, 63, 85, 88, 93, 96, 104, 108, 109, 110–11, 185, 190, 191, 243–44 see also; Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; Belt and Road Initiative Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), 257, 286–87 insurance industry, 210 intermarriage, 336, 337–38 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 162, 163, 166, 323 International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), 116 International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 100 International Systems in World History (Buzan), 7 Internet of Things (IoT), 134, 136, 197 Interpol, 324 Iran, 11, 15, 62, 92, 95, 98, 101, 140 China and, 101, 106–7, 116 in Cold War era, 54 European trade with, 251–52 growing opposition to theocracy in, 312 India and, 116, 118 Islamic revolution in, 57 Israel and, 99, 100 nuclear program of, 62 oil and gas exports of, 50, 94, 106, 107–8, 118, 176 in post–Cold War era, 58–59 privatization in, 170 re-Asianization of, 81, 106 Russia and, 87 Saudi Arabia and, 95–96, 100, 105–6 Syria and, 106 tourism in, 252 Turkey and, 94 US sanctions on, 87, 107, 241, 251, 252 women in, 315 Yemen and, 107 Iran-Iraq War, 58, 106 Iraq, 9, 11, 16, 49 Kuwait invaded by, 59 oil exports of, 55, 96 Sunni-Shi’a conflict in, 312 Iraq Reconstruction Conference (2018), 96 Iraq War, 3, 62, 91, 217, 240 Isfahan, 41 Islam, 40, 316 politics and, 71–72 spread of, 36, 38–39, 43, 69–72, 74 Sunni-Shi’a conflict in, 95, 312 Sunni-Shi’a division in, 36 see also Muslims; specific countries Islamic radicalism, 58, 59, 62, 65, 68, 71, 72, 115, 117, 139 see also terrorism Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 63, 71, 94, 96, 117 Israel, 11, 54, 96 arms sales of, 98 China and, 98–99 desalinzation technology of, 181 EU and, 97 Gulf states and, 99–100, 105 India and, 98–99 Iran and, 99, 100 Russia and, 88 see also Arab-Israeli conflict; Palestinian-Israeli conflict Japan, 14, 16, 63, 68, 69, 73 Africa and, 265 Allied occupation in, 51 alternative energy technologies in, 322 Asian investments of, 118, 156 Asianization of, 81 Asian migrants in, 336–37 Asian trade with, 273 capitalism in, 159 cashless economy in, 189 China and, 19–20, 77, 134, 136–37, 140–42 in Cold War era, 5, 55 corporate culture of, 132 early history of, 29, 31, 34–35 economic growth of, 55, 132, 148, 158, 163 economic problems of, 132, 134–35 in era of European imperialism, 47–48 EU trade agreement with, 133 expansionist period in, 38, 42, 44 foreign investment in, 135 in global economy, 133–37 global governance and, 322–23 global image of, 331 Gulf states and, 102 immigration in, 135–36 India and, 134, 156 infrastructure investment in, 110 Latin America and, 275 precision industries in, 134, 135–36 robotic technology in, 134 Russia and, 82, 86–87 Southeast Asia and, 133, 153–54, 156 South Korea and, 141–42 technological innovation in, 134, 196, 197 territorial claims of, 11 tourism in, 135 US and, 136 in World War I, 49 in World War II, 50–51 Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), 265 Japan-Mexico Economic Partnership Agreement, 273 Java, 35, 38, 39, 45 Javid, Sajid, 254 Jericho, 28 Jerusalem, 54, 98 Jesus Christ, 35 jihad, 38 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 52 Jobs, Steve, 331 Joko Widodo (Jokowi), 305, 306, 320 Jollibee, 172 Jordan, 54, 62, 97, 99 Syrian refugees in, 63 Journal of Asian Studies, 352 Journey to the West, 353 Judaism, 36 Kagame, Paul, 268 Kanishka, Kush emperor, 35 Kapur, Devesh, 218 Karachi, 113 Karakoram Highway, 113 Kashmir, 53, 55, 61, 77–78, 117–18, 119 Kazakhstan, 59, 140, 207 China and, 20, 108 economic diversification in, 190 energy investment in, 112 as hub of new Silk Road, 111–12 Kenya, 262, 263 Kerouac, Jack, 331 Khaleej, see Gulf states Khmer Empire, 70 Khmer people, 34, 38, 239 Khmer Rouge, 56 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 57, 59 Khorgas, 108 Khrushchev, Nikita, 56 Khwarizmi, Muhammad al-, 37 Kiev, 40 Kim Il Sung, 55 Kim Jong-un, 142 Kish, 28 Kissinger, Henry, 357 Koran, 316 Korea, 11, 31, 51, 68, 69 early history of, 34 expansionist period in, 38 Japanese annexation of, 48 reunification of, 142–43 see also North Korea; South Korea Korea Investment Corporation, 164 Korean Americans, 217 Korean War, 51 Kosygin, Alexei, 56 K-pop, 343 Kuala Lampur, 121, 246 Kublai Khan, 40 Kurds, Kurdistan, 87, 94, 99, 256 Kushan Empire, 32, 35 Kuwait, 101 Iraqi invasion of, 59 Kyrgyzstan, 59, 108, 182 language, Asian links in, 68–69 Laos, 45, 52, 60, 122, 154 Latin America: Asian immigrants in, 275–76 Asian investment in, 273–75, 276–77 Indian cultural exports to, 350 trade partnerships in, 272–73, 274, 275 US and, 271–72 Lebanon, 49, 54, 58, 95, 106 Syrian refugees in, 63 Lee, Ang, 347 Lee, Calvin Cheng Ern, 131 Lee Hsien Loong, 296–97 Lee Kuan Yew, 56, 127, 268, 288, 289, 292–93, 299, 305 voluntary retirement of, 296 Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, 22, 299 Lenin, Vladimir, 49, 89 Levant (Mashriq), 81, 95, 97 LG, 275 Li & Fung, 184–85 Liang Qichao, 48–49 Liberalism Discovered (Chua), 297 Lien, Laurence, 317 life expectancies, 201 literature, Asian, global acclaim for, 353–54 Liu, Jean, 175 Liu Xiaobo, 249 logistics industry, 243 Ma, Jack, 85–86, 160, 189 Macao (Macau), 44 MacArthur, Douglas, 51 McCain, John, 285 McKinsey & Company, 160, 213 Macquarie Group, 131 Maddison, Angus, 2 Made in Africa Initiative, 262 Magadha Kingdom, 31 Magellan, Ferdinand, 43 Mahabharata, 35 Mahbubani, Kishore, 3 Mahmud of Ghazni, Abbasid sultan, 38 Malacca, 38, 43, 44, 124 Malacca, Strait of, 37, 39, 102, 103, 118, 125 Malaya, 46, 50 Malay Peninsula, 39, 53 Malaysia, 53, 61, 188 Asian foreign labor in, 335 China and, 123, 124 in Cold War era, 54 economic diversification in, 190 economic growth of, 17 technocracy in, 308 Maldives, 105 Malesky, Edmund, 308 Manchuria, 38, 48, 50, 51 Mandarin language, 229–30, 257 Manila, 121, 245 Spanish colonization of, 44 Mansur, al-, Caliph, 37 manufacturing, in Asia, 192 Mao Zedong, 51–52, 55, 56, 261, 300, 301 Marawi, 71 Marcos, Ferdinand, 53–54, 61 martial arts, mixed (MMA), 340–41 Mashriq (Levant), 81, 95, 97 Mauritius, 268 Mauryan Empire, 32–33, 68 May, Theresa, 293 Mecca, 57 media, in Asia, 314 median ages, in Asia, 148, 149, 155 Median people, 29 Mediterranean region, 1, 6, 29, 30, 33, 68, 84, 92, 95, 99, 106 see also Mashriq Mehta, Zubin, 332 Mekong River, 122 Menander, Indo-Greek king, 33 mergers and acquisitions, 212–13 meritocracy, 294, 301 Merkel, Angela, 242, 254 Mesopotamia, 28 Mexico, 7 Asian economic ties to, 272, 273, 274, 277 Microsoft, 208 middle class, Asian, growth of, 3, 4 Mihov, Ilian, 309 mindfulness, 332 Ming Dynasty, 42–43, 44, 69, 73, 75, 76, 105, 137, 262 mobile phones, 157, 183–84, 187, 188, 189, 193, 199, 208–9, 211 Modi, Narendra, 63, 98, 117, 119, 154–55, 161, 180, 185, 222, 265, 305, 306, 307, 320 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 54 Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, 72, 247, 310, 312, 315 Mohenjo-Daro, 29 Moluku, 45 MoneyGram, 196 Mongolia, 92, 111–12 alternative energy programs in, 112, 182 technocracy in, 307 Mongols, Mongol Empire, 39–40, 42, 44, 68, 69, 73, 76, 77, 239 religious and cultural inclusiveness of, 40, 70–71 Monroe Doctrine, 271 Moon Jae-in, 142 Moscow, 81, 82 Mossadegh, Mohammad, 54 MSCI World Index, 166, 168 Mubadala Investment Company, 88, 103, 104 Mughal Empire, 41–42, 46 religious tolerance in, 70–71 Muhammad, Prophet, 36 Mumbai, 185–86 Munich Security Conference, 241 Murakami, Haruki, 354 Murasaki Shikibu, 353 music scene, in Asia, 343 Muslim Brotherhood, 59 Muslims, 70–72 in Southeast Asia, 38–39, 43, 70–71, 121 in US, 220 see also Islam; specific countries Myanmar, 60, 63, 161 Asian investment in, 118–19 charitable giving in, 316 failure of democracy in, 302 financial reform in, 184 Rohingya genocide in, 122–23 see also Burma Nagasaki, atomic bombing of, 51 Nanjing, 42, 49 Napoleon I, emperor of the French, 1 nationalism, 11, 20, 22, 49–50, 52–55, 77, 118, 137, 138–39, 222, 312, 329, 337, 352 Natufian people, 28 natural gas, see oil and gas natural gas production, 175–76 Nazism, 200 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 52, 55 Neolithic Revolution, 28 neomercantilism, 20, 22, 158 Nepal, 46, 119–20, 333 Nestorian Christianity, 36, 70 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 97, 98, 100 Netflix, 348 New Deal, 287 New Delhi, 245 Ng, Andrew, 199 NGOs, 313 Nigeria, 265 Nisbett, Richard, 357 Nixon, Richard, 56, 101 Nobel Prize, 48, 221, 249, 323, 353–54 nomadic cultures, 76 Non-Aligned Movement, 55 Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, 61 North America: Asian trade with, 13, 14, 207 as coherent regional system, 7 energy self-sufficiency of, 175, 272 internal trade in, 152 see also Canada; Mexico; United States North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 7 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 2, 57, 92, 116 Northeast Asia, 141 India and, 154–55 internal trade in, 152 manufacturing in, 153 North Korea, 55, 61 aggressiveness of, 63 China and, 143 cyber surveillance by, 142 nuclear and chemical weapons program of, 142 Russia and, 143 South Korea and, 142 US and, 142–43 Obama, Barack, 18, 82, 229, 240 oil and gas: Asian imports of, 9, 62, 82–83, 84–85, 96, 102, 106, 107–8, 152, 175, 176, 207 Gulf states’ exports of, 62, 74, 100–103, 176 Iranian exports of, 50, 94, 106, 107–8, 118, 176 Iraqi exports of, 55, 96 OPEC embargo on, 57 price of, 61 Russian exports of, 82–83, 84, 87–88, 175, 176 Saudi exports of, 58, 87–88, 102, 103 US exports of, 16, 207 West Asian exports of, 9, 23, 57, 62, 152 Okakura Tenshin, 48 oligarchies, 294–95 Olympic Games, 245 Oman, East Asia and, 104 ONE Championship (MMA series), 341 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), 57 Operation Mekong (film), 123 opium, 47, 123 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 241 Oslo Accords, 59 Osman I, Ottoman Sultan, 41 Ottoman Empire, 40–41, 43, 45, 46–47, 48, 73, 91 partitioning of, 49–50 religious tolerance in, 70–71 Out of Eden Walk, 4 Overseas Private Investment Company (OPEC), 111 Pacific Alliance, 272 Pacific Islands, 181–82 US territories in, 48 Pacific Rim, see East Asia Pakistan, 52–53, 58, 62, 72, 95, 102, 105 AI research in, 200 Asianization of, 81, 113–18 as Central Asia’s conduit to Arabian Sea, 113–14 China and, 20, 114–16, 117–18 corruption in, 161 failure of democracy in, 302 finance industry in, 168–69 foreign investment in, 115 GDP per capita in, 184 India and, 55, 61–62, 117–18 intra-Asian migration from, 334 logistics industry in, 185 as market for Western products and services, 207 US and, 114–15 Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), 307 Palestine, Palestinians, 49, 54, 99 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 59 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 59, 62, 97, 100 Pan-Asianism, 48, 351–52 paper, invention of, 72 Paris climate agreement, 178, 240 Paris Peace Conference (1918), 49 Park Chung-hee, 56 Park Geun-hye, 313 parliamentary democracy, 295 Parthians, 33, 76 Pawar, Rajendra, 205 Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 50 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 169 People’s Action Party (PAP), Singapore, 294 People’s Bank of China (PBOC), 110, 188 Pepper (robot), 134 per capita income, 5, 150, 183, 186 Persia, Persian Empire, 29, 30, 42, 45, 47, 50, 68, 75 see also Iran Persian Gulf War, 61, 101, 217 Peru: Asian immigrants in, 275, 276 Asian trade with, 272 Peshawar, 32 Peter I, Tsar of Russia, 45, 90 pharmaceutical companies, 209–10 Philippines, 61, 157, 165 alternative energy programs in, 180 Asian migrants in, 333 China and, 123–24 Christianity in, 74 in Cold War era, 53–54 eco-tourism in, 340 foreign investment in, 124 illiberal policies of, 306 inclusive policies in, 304 as market for Western products and services, 207 Muslims in, 71 privatization in, 170 technocracy in, 304–5 urban development in, 190 US acquisition of, 48 US and, 123–24 philosophy, Asian vs.


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Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

His campaign slogan “Putting People First” and understanding of the global economy were lifted from his Oxford friend Robert Reich’s Work of Nations (1991). Reich thought that the changing nature of labor (from production to symbolic manipulation) and the globalization of production meant that ending income inequality and stagnant wages required helping Americans obtain the (high-tech) skills that corporations, whether American or foreign, needed. Globalization was inevitable and progressive, if workers improved their proficiency. Because it did not matter if Americans worked for domestic or foreign corporations, Reich opposed industrial policies, which he renamed corporate welfare.

Structural factors such as the shift from high-paying manufacturing to low-paying service industries—steel to fast-food restaurants—and increased trade competition with low-wage countries explained the growth of wage inequality better than education did. After all, why didn’t Europe experience growing income inequality despite its use of technology? Moreover, inequality increased faster from 1977 to 1992, when growth, productivity, and technical change were meager. Finally, after 1989, compensation for CEOs increased 100 percent while that for jobs related to math and computer science rose only 4.8 percent, and engineering fell 1.4 percent.68 Robert Kuttner, whose book The End of Laissez Faire (1991) was published at the same time as Reich’s, found globalization more problematic.

Using slightly different data, Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez find that most of the decline of the wealth at the top came during World War II when taxation was high and progressive and there were wage controls. But after the war, until the 1970s, the top did not retrieve its wealth. Like Margo and Goldin, they attribute the continuation of egalitarian results to labor market institutions and social norms. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (Feb. 2003), 1–39. 3. Gilbert Burck, “American Genius for Productivity,” Fortune (July 1955), 87. 4. Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 37. 5. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 283–84. 6.


pages: 300 words: 65,976

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, sugar pill, twin studies, urban sprawl, working poor

In experiments where rabbits and monkeys are placed in isolation or in subordinate positions, or they are put under stress, their blood pressure and levels of “bad” cholesterol tend to increase. 50 “We still labor under the myth that somehow we’re each on our own and as individuals we can make these choices to prevent heart disease,” Kawachi says. “If society or government really wanted to drive down the rates of cardiovascular disease, they would be tackling it at macro levels. Policies that appear to have little to do with health, like macroeconomic policies to reduce the level of income inequality, can have a major impact on driving down the rates of illness in society.” Narrowing the income and education gaps in American society would prevent disease and increase life expectancy not only among the poor, Kawachi contends, but throughout society. Don’t count on health columnists, the American Heart Association, or the Center for Science in the Public Interest to redirect their spotlights in those directions, however.

Friedman, “Modern Science Versus the Stigma of Obesity,” Nature Medicine 10 (June 2004): 563–69. 10. For these and related statistics and first-person accounts, see David Shipler, The Working Poor (New York: Knopf, 2004); Katherine Newman, Falling from Grace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); “Income Inequality,” report published by Americans for Democratic Action, Washington D.C., 2004; William Welch, “Report: 82M Went Uninsured,” USA Today, June 16, 2004; “Can We Give America a Raise,” American Prospect (January 2004); Robert Perrucci and Earl Wyson, The New Class Society (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 11.

Williams, and Myriam Torres, “Discrimination, Health and Mental Health: The Social Stress Process,” chap. 8 in Socioeconomic Conditions, Stress and Mental Disorders, published online by the Mental Health Statistics Improvement Program, 2003; Emilie Agardh, Anders Ahlbom, et al., “Explanations of Socioeconomic Differences in Excess Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Swedish Men and Women,” Diabetes Care 27 (2004): 716–21. 55. Janet D. Latner and Albert J. Stunkard; John Lynch, “Income Inequality and Health,” Social Sciences & Medicine 51 (2000): 1001–5; Eric Brunner, “Stress and the Biology of Inequality,” British Medical Journal 314 (1997): 1472–76; Richard S. Strauss and Harold A. Pollack, “Social Marginalization of Overweight Children,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 157 (2003): 746–52; Annika Rosengren, Lars Wilhelmsen, and Kristina Orth-Gomér, “Coronary Disease in Relation to Social Support and Social Class in Swedish Men,” European Heart Journal 25 (2004): 56–63.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

While Occupy Wall Street activists formed a tent city in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, members of Black Lives Matter were staging protests across the country to advocate a political agenda that could address the root causes of inequality.14 Soon, more voices joined the chorus, this time from the top. Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities.

This kind of economics debacle isn’t unique to Uber: for example, Egypt was able to improve its growth and overall macroeconomic performance in the years right before the 2011 revolution, yet official figures indicated that poverty increased in tandem. At the micro level, households on average were worse off.17 Competing concepts of inequality can produce similar mixed messaging: wealth inequality might be high, but income inequality can, overall, be low. While this assessment of inequality makes sense to economists, the poverty of this distinction makes it look glaringly suspicious to passive observers, who can see with their own eyes that many people live in poverty while an elite few live very well.18 Figure 3. A message Uber sent to a driver.

See rating system Evolv, 111 expansion method, 168–69 Expedia, 111, 155 Facebook: 2016 U.S. presidential election scandal of, 114; data harvesting by, 109–10, 164; driver forums on, 199, 214; education support by, 172; effects on journalism of, 6, 222n14; Free Basics program of, 172; Hughes on income inequality, 23–24; on Nazism, 167; neutrality logic of, 34, 109, 113–14; sharing rhetoric of, 32, 34, 165; Uber ad campaigns of, 76–77, 76 fig.; use of algorithmic technology, 202, 206, 213–14; user experience of, 14, 20 Faiq (driver), 42, 90, 169 fair-housing laws, 175 Fair Work Commission, 156 family life of drivers, 40–41, 44–45, 75 Faraz (driver), 66 fare rates, 42, 43, 87–91, 102, 108, 170.


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The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

Birnbaum argues that the lack of balance reflects the structure of the game versus the composition of the players. 19. Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 29–32. 20. Powell measured parity using a Gini coefficient. The coefficient was developed by Corrado Gini, an Italian statistician, to measure income inequality. Zero represents perfect parity and 1.00 reflects maximum disparity. Powell found that the average Gini coefficient for U.S. companies was 0.60, with a standard deviation of 0.24. He found that the nonindustrial domains had an average Gini coefficient of 0.56, with a standard deviation exactly the same as the industrial sample.

Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 18. Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,” American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (December 1981): 845–858. 19. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995); and Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 20. Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, “Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (February 2008): 49–100; and Carola Frydman and Dirk Jenter, “CEO Compensation,” Annual Review of Financial Economics 2 (December 2010): 75–102. 21.

Frank, Robert H. The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Frank, Robert H., and Philip J. Cook. The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Frazzini, Andrea, and Owen A. Lamont. “Dumb Money: Mutual Fund Flows and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns.” Journal of Financial Economics 88, no. 2 (May 2008): 299–322. Freeman, David H. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.”


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The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

In December 2010—in a move echoing Huey Long’s rejection of Roosevelt’s Government Economy Act in 1933—he staged a one-man filibuster against the budget and tax agreement that Obama, chastened by congressional losses, had worked out with the Republicans that prolonged the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Sanders first started thinking seriously about running for president in April 2013, when he called a meeting in Burlington with his top friends and advisors to discuss whether he should do so. The group speculated that Sanders’s outrage over income inequality might find a ready reception in 2016. They noted that the Occupy Wall Street protests had dissipated, but that the issues they had raised were now widely discussed. Sanders took another two years to make a final decision, but in April 2015, he told his friends he was running. In an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that month, Sanders, noting “this strange moment in American history, when our middle class is disappearing, when we have so many people living in poverty, when we have to deal with climate change, when we have to deal with the horrendous level of income and wealth inequality,” asked [H]ow do we address these issues in a way that takes on the billionaire class.

According to a Center for Immigration Studies analysis, in 2012, between 62 and 65.6 percent of illegal immigrants received some kind of welfare assistance compared to 48.5 percent of legal immigrant households and only 30.2 percent of native-born households. 4338 percent for: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-09/news/mn-54845_1_gallup-poll. 4332 percent for: http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Globalization/AmericansGlobalization_Mar00/AmericansGlobalization_Mar00_apdxa.pdf. 43“big government”: See Kevin Phillips, Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics, Little Brown, 1994. 45rise in inequality: See John H. Dunn, Jr. “The Decline of Manufacturing in the United States, and Its Impact on Income Inequality,” The Journal of Applied Business Research, September–October 2012. 45white-collar jobs: Peter Temin, “The American Dual Economy,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, November 2015. 45bottom 70 percent: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class. 46wrong with the U.S. economy: Daniel Yankelovich, “Foreign Policy after the Election,” Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992. 47obtaining an early discharge: On Perot’s life, see Gerald Posner, Citizen Perot: His Life and Times, Random House, 1996. 47GM’s management ignored him: See Doron P.


pages: 165 words: 48,594

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

To take another example, if capitalists believe that top managerial executives such as CEOs play crucial roles in generating enterprise profits and growth, they can allocate huge portions of the surplus to them as salaries, bonuses, stock options, and so on. This will likely result in widening income inequality, especially if combined with decisions to relocate production from higher to lower wage locations, to replace workers with machines, and so on. Stagnant or falling wage levels, combined with growing allocations of surpluses to top managers’ fast-rising pay packages, can generate a political and cultural polarization based on growing income and wealth inequality.

They often banished notions of workers becoming also the direct, first appropriators and hence distributors of enterprise surpluses to the murky future realms of socialist utopias. In my view, the macro-level changes brought about by traditional socialism (nationalized ownership of means of production, planning, reduced income inequality, etc.) did not survive in part because they were not accompanied and reinforced by micro-level changes in the internal reorganization of enterprises. A viable and durable socialism requires both micro- and macro-level transformations of capitalism. That is a major lesson of the first century of efforts to establish and build socialism.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Sanders had a point. Consider that as of early 2019, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg together were worth $357 billion. They could write a $1,000 check to every man, woman, and child in America and still be multibillionaires. The kind of income inequality Sanders was talking about was starkly profiled in a 2018 article by the New York Times. Karleen Smith, who once worked as a clerk at Macy’s in the Landmark Mall outside Washington, D.C., has now taken up residence in her former store, which has been turned into a homeless shelter. Ms. Smith, fifty-seven at the time, told the Times: “It’s weird to be moving into this building.

A 2016 Harvard study: Harvard, Institute of Politics, “Clinton in Commanding Lead over Trump among Young Voters, Harvard Youth Poll Finds,” Harvard Institute of Politics, The Kennedy School, April 25, 2016. Consider that as of early 2019: Tami Luhby, “Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Together Were Worth $357 Billion,” CNN Business, January 21, 2019. The kind of income inequality Sanders was talking about: Michael Corkery, “A Macy’s Goes from Mall Mainstay to Homeless Shelter,” New York Times, June 13, 2018. The combined fortunes: Tami Luhby, “The Top 26 Billionaires Own $1.4 Trillion—as Much as 3.8 Billion Other People,” CNN Business, January 21, 2019. “No one working for the wealthiest person on Earth”: Tami Luhby, “Amazon Defends Itself from Bernie Sanders’ Attacks,” CNN Business, August 31, 2018.

See also health-care industry Alexa apps in, 230 patient data in, 225 hotels, Echo smart speakers in, 143 House of Vans, London, 196–97 housing manufacturers, 216–27, 238 Hughes, Chris, 248, 250 Humana, 28 Hyundai, 237, 238 Icahn, Carl, 242 IDC, 86, 91 image recognition technology, 116–17. See also facial recognition software income inequality. See also wealth gap Sanders’s criticism of Amazon for, 240–41 Indeed.com, 131 India, 14, 66, 189, 221, 271 Infinity Cube, 37–38 influencers, 210 innovation, and flywheel, 80–81 Instagram, 194, 197 addictive nature of, 17, 18 feature for selling directly to customers, 211 Lulus’s influencers on, 210–11 Instant Pot electric multicooker, 151 Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 148 insurance industry Amazon’s entry into, 219, 228, 234, 236 Ant Financial in, 235 robo-advisory services in, 235 Intel, 51 Internet addiction to, 18 Bezos’s early interest in, 39 business models based on, 125 cloud computing services on, 25 DARPA and creation of, 34 home health care using, 223 HTTP standards for, 125 voice access to, 112 Internet of Things, 123–24, 270 iOS operating system, 14, 225 iPhone, 26, 64, 69, 108, 110, 117, 199 ITT, 216 Iverson, Ken, 5 iWatch, 222 Iyengar, Sheena, 21 Jabra, 111 JANA Partners, 168 Jassy, Andy, 44, 51–52, 63 JD.com AI Internet-connected devices from, 124 AI skills and customer knowledge of, 8, 124, 270 Amazon’s competition with, 266 delivery drones used by, 178 global spheres of influence with, 188–89 warehouse with robots of, 136–38 Jentoft, Leif, 139 JetBlack delivery service, Walmart, 190–91 Jet.com, 54, 183–84, 185 jobs AI-driven tech giants and, 271 AI’s impact on, 143, 248, 267 automation and, 9, 12, 126–27, 141–43, 241–42, 248, 267 Bezos as focal point for concerns about losses of, 126 drone deliveries and, 124 interconnected devices and, 124 new technologies and, 143–44 robots and, 11, 29, 127, 144, 270 technology’s disruption of, 127 universal basic income and, 248–49 wage changes in, 127 Jobs, Steve, 26, 53, 55, 110 Joly, Hubert, 204 Jorgensen, Ted, 31–32 Joy, Lisa, 102 JPMorgan Chase, 27, 227, 234, 236 Julie talking dolls, 107 Juniper Research, 220 Juno Therapeutics, 217 Kabbani, Nader, 226 Kalanick, Travis, 57–58 Kantar, 16, 168 KFC restaurants, China, 198, 199 Khalifah, Saoud, 159–60 Khan, Lina, 258–59 Khanna, Ro, 243 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 8 Kindle e-readers, 26, 31, 47, 65, 66, 74, 76, 80, 81, 82, 105, 217, 226 King, Martin Luther Jr., 249 Kiva robots, 128 Koch, David and Charles, 250 Kosmo.com, 64, 65 Kraft Heinz, 267 Kroger, 5, 24, 136, 141, 168, 175, 176 Lake, Katrina, 206, 207–8 Lennar, 218 Liu, Richard, 178 Livongo Health, 229 Long Now Foundation, 71 long-term management in Bezonomics, 76, 88 long-term view AI flywheel and, 71, 81–82, 269 Amazon innovation lab and, 224 Amazon’s use of, 3, 61–64, 65–66 AWS example of, 63–64 Bezos and, 59, 61–66 Blue Origin project and, 68 employees’ need for, 63 machine learning on cancers and, 223 new delivery technologies and, 174 philanthropy strategy and, 251 profitability and, 61–62 pushes into new sectors and, 236 shopping on Alexa and, 116 10,000-year clock and, 70–71 Walmart’s JetBlack project and, 191 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 101 Lore, Marc, 54–55, 183–88, 189, 190, 191, 192 Los Angeles Times, 207 Lot-Less Closeouts stores, 167 Loup Ventures, 110 Lululemon, 190 Lulus, 9, 194, 209–11, 213 luxury retailers, 9, 200–2 LVMH, 205 Lyft, 23 Ma, Tony, 90 machine learning Alexa voice recognition and, 113–14 Amazon’s application of, 270 Bezos on power of, 83 black box and, 91, 147 decision-making and, 87 fake review detection with, 160 flywheel model and, 5, 83–84, 85 health-care industry and, 223 voice recognition and, 109 Machine Learning service business, Amazon, 218 Mackey, John, 164 Man in the High Castle, The (TV series), 102–3 Marcus, James, 41, 45 Marketplace, 52 Amazon Lending loans to small businesses on, 234 Bezos’s creation of, 42 number of businesses on, 10 third-party merchants on, 42 Marketplace Pulse, 262 MarketWatch, 208 Marriott Hotels, 143 Max Borges Agency, 15–16, 19 McCabe, Chris, 153 McCarthy, John, 107 McGrath, Judith, 66 McKinsey & Company, 126, 174, 181, 215 McMillon, Doug, 185–86 McWhorter, John, 120 medical records project, 225 medicine.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

As workers’ fortunes came under renewed attack in the early 1970s, the historic gains of the New Deal were rolled back decades. Inequality became the defining feature of our economy as we arrived at a second Gilded Age. This was more than unfair—during the pandemic it had deadly consequences. A 2020 study found that in over three thousand US counties, income inequality was associated with more cases and more deaths by the virus.10 I pay particular attention to the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, when the unemployment rate remained stubbornly high long after the crisis had been declared officially over.11 The solution to lagging employment growth was an explosion of low-wage service jobs.

During the pandemic, servant workers were forced to fetch, deliver, transport, acquire, and provide the goods and services everyone needed, which required they move around at higher rates to the detriment of their own safety. Still, those at the bottom also rely on those at the top. Researchers led by Raj Chetty at the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights group found that income inequality has also meant inequality in consumption patterns. As the rich have amassed their fortunes, their spending has driven a greater percentage of the economy. And when they curtailed their spending during the pandemic, it rippled down to job losses for the servant class. We ended up with an odd dynamic in which small businesses and gig-style workers in the wealthiest neighborhoods were hit harder than those in less affluent ones because the rich cut back their spending more than everyone else.

Adam Dean, Atheendar Venkataramani, and Simeon Kimmel, “Mortality Rates from COVID-19 Are Lower in Unionized Nursing Homes,” Health Affairs 39, no. 11 (September 10, 2020): 1993–2001, https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01011. 9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 2016). 10. Annabel X. Tan et al., “Association Between Income Inequality and County-Level COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in the US,” JAMA Network Open 4, no. 5 (May 3, 2021): e218799, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.8799. 11. “Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 6, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/economy/the-legacy-of-the-great-recession. 12.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The same rage against the system showed up in Britain, where a majority of citizens primarily living outside of prosperous London voted to take England out of the European Union. In Germany, a right-wing party espousing a virulent brand of xenophobia gained critical seats in the Bundestag. And around the world in prosperous countries, anger simmered, stoked by a sense of loss and by raging income inequality. In the United States, real incomes have been falling for decades. Yet in the shining towers of finance and on kombucha-decked tech campuses for glittering growth engines such as Google and Apple, the gilded class of technology employees and Wall Street types continue to enjoy tremendous economic gains.

In the United States, a creeping fear grew with each generation that the promise of a life better than their parents’ would go unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the computers and systems starting advancing at an exponential pace—getting faster, smaller, and cheaper. Algorithms began to replace even lawyers, and we began to fear that the computer was going to come for our job, someday, somehow—just wait. As income inequality grew, the yawning gap pushed the vast majority of the benefits of economic growth in wages and wealth to the top 5 percent of the world’s society. The top 1 percent reaped the biggest rewards, far out of proportion to their number. None of this is to say that Americans are materially worse off than they were forty years ago.


pages: 196 words: 53,627

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

-Europe welfare disparity, to a large extent, reflects the different attitudes and preferences that prevail on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Polls show that Europeans tend to view the poor as hard-luck cases who aren’t personally responsible for their situation, while Americans tend to view welfare recipients as, well, shiftless cheats. Income inequality bothers Europeans much more than Americans, which annoys U.S. liberals to no end. But it makes sense when you consider that large majorities in the United States—71 percent, according to one survey—see poverty as a condition that can be overcome by dint of hard work, while just 40 percent of Europeans share that viewpoint.

Typically, they arrived poor and unskilled, taking jobs in mining, construction, and other industries. Mexicans are following this pattern. And the issue isn’t their low socioeconomic status upon arrival so much as whether they remain that way for generations on end. Normally, it’s liberals who traffic in class-envy statistics, fretting about “income inequality,” “stagnant wages,” “rising poverty,” “the disappearing middle class,” and the plight of the “working poor.” A 2004 BusinessWeek story was typical of this thinking. It noted that “one in four workers earns $18,800 a year or less,” and went on to prescribe the usual left-wing remedies, including higher minimum wages and more unions.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

The results are reported in Table 5.4 in the Appendix (with a preceding explanation). And what does it tell us? Countries with major economies—the OECD and BRICS nations—are happier than other countries, and the subSaharan nations are considerably less happy. Countries are happier when there’s less income inequality, and unhappy when they’re beset by major conflicts. Population density doesn’t seem to matter, and one reason might be that advances in transportation and communication have shrunk the differences between life in sparsely and densely populated places. Finally, more people equals less happiness.

TABLE 5.3 DEFINITION OF VARIABLES Happy World Happiness Report 2015–17 Density World Bank 2016 OECD-BRICS Dummy variable, 1 if a member of the OECD or a BRICS country, 0 otherwise Sub-Saharan Africa Dummy variable, 1 if in sub-Saharan Africa, 0 otherwise Latin America Dummy variable, 1 if in Latin America, 0 otherwise Diversity A measure of ethnolinguistic diversity, from Alberto Alesina et al., “Fractionalization,” Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 8 (2003): 155. Income Inequality World Bank Gini Rankings Conflict Council of Foreign Relations Global Critical Conflict Tracker Military Military budget/GDP, SIPRI Unemployment CIA World Factbook Freedom Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2018 GDP/Pop CIA World Factbook Government Spending World Bank and OECD TABLE 5.4 OLS REGRESSIONS FOR COUNTRY HAPPINESS RANKINGS 2015–17 Note.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

But this is an illusion created by the fact that it uses inequality of per capita consumption expenditure (calculated from National Sample Survey data) as a surrogate for inequality of income. For various reasons, including severe under-​reporting of and by the rich, measured consumption inequality systematically underestimates true income inequality. Some attempts have been made to measure inequality of incomes in India directly. These turn up with calculated Gini coefficients above 50 per cent, which puts India in the same ball-​park as high-​inequality Latin American countries like Brazil.22 Measures of interpersonal inequality of consumption are good enough to indicate what is happening to the trend of inequality.

[ 180 ] Stability and Inclusion 181 Of course, we have to be cognizant of the fact that though private schools are cheaper than public schools from the national standpoint, they are not so for the average citizen, whose child has to pay fees in a private school but can attend a government school for free. Indeed, one of the main arguments for public education is that it ensures universal free access (at the expense of the taxpayer) and makes up for the effects of income inequality. But this is a deficiency that could be corrected by offering all parents, or poor parents in particular, the option and the means to choose private or public schools for their children, by giving them ‘education vouchers’. Under such a scheme, both public and private schools would charge fees but students would ‘carry their school fees with them’ in the form of vouchers that are paid for out of general taxation.

In practice, a host of domestic policy impediments—​small-​scale industry reservations, rigid labour laws, infrastructure deficiencies, lack of access to credit, weak human capital policies, and discouragement of FDI in labour-​ intensive industries—​has suppressed the demand for low-​skilled labour.13 (In contrast, the demand for skilled labour has risen, and with it the wage premium for skills, which is one reason why income inequality increased over this period.) Income redistribution policies, such as cheap food via the PDS, and social empowerment policies, such as provision of education and health care, have not worked satisfactorily due to design problems and I n di a a n d t h e W or l d Ec o n o m y [ 253 ] 254 weak state capacity to deliver public services.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

It’s been a feeding frenzy for a few dozen super-rich: the US had fifty-one billionaires in 2003 and 313 the next year.21 In the United States, such extreme concentrations of wealth are combined with extraordinarily high levels of incarceration among poorer groups. As the world’s pre-eminent ‘penal democracy’,22 the US, with 5 per cent of the world’s population, held fully 24 per cent of the world’s prisoners (more than two million people) in 2007.23 The UK, meanwhile, is now the most polarized nation in Western Europe apart from Italy. Its income inequality – again measured by the Gini coefficient – has risen dramatically since the early 1960s, with the remodelling of the economy through radical re-regulation, privatization and neoliberalization (Figure 1.3). For the richest 10 per cent of the UK population, incomes rose in real terms by 68 per cent between 1979 and 1995.

After housing costs, the UK’s richest 10 per cent increased their share of the nation’s marketable wealth from 57 per cent in 1976 to 71 per cent in 2003. At the same time, according to Philip Bond in the Independent, ‘the speculative capital that could be deployed or invested by the bottom 50 per cent of the British population fell from 12 per cent to just 1 per cent’.24 1.3 Radical growth in income inequality in the UK between 1961 and 2002/3 for income before housing costs (BHC) and after housing costs (AHC), as measured by the Gini coefficient. The imposition of market fundamentalism had particularly spectacular effects on the ex-Communist Comecon block after the collapse of communism in the late 1980s.

., Cities and Structural Adjustment, London: University College London Press, 1996. 12 Davis, ‘Urbanization of Empire’, 2. 13 Cited in ‘UN-HABITAT unveils State of the World’s Cities report’, 23 October, 2008, available at www.unhabitat.org. 14 United Nations Development Project, Human Development Report 1999, United Nations: New York, 1999, 36. 15 Branco Milanovic, ‘True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculations Based on Household Surveys Alone’, The Economic Journal 112, 2002, 88. 16 Ibid., 51–92. 17 Both quotes from Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, New York: New Press, 2007, xi-xii. 18 Ibid, xiii. 19 Giovanni Andrea Cornia, ‘The Impact of Liberalisation and Globalisation on Within-country Income Inequality’, CESifo Economic Studies 49:4, 2003, 581. 20 Pat Murphy, ‘Peak America – Is Our Time Up?’, New Solutions 7, 2005, 2, available at www.communitysolution.org. 21 Holly Sklar, ‘Boom Time for Billionaires’, ZNet Commentary, 15 October 2004, cited in Henry Giroux, ‘The Conservative Assault on America: Cultural Politics, Education and the New Authoritarianism’, Cultural Politics 1:2, 143. 22 Joy James, ed., Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 23 Ashley Seager, ‘Development: US Fails to Measure Up on ‘‘Human Index’’, Guardian, 17 July 2008. 24 Phillip Blond, ‘Outside View: The End of Capitalism as We Know It?’


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The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Even within each industry, the dynamic modern corporation still coexisted through the 1920s with small and weak firms that had not yet adopted the new productive systems and technologies.36 Moreover, the new mass consumption was rendered fragile, especially given the absence of public income-support programs, by growing income inequality and the gap between real wages and increasing productivity. The easy credit, economic growth, and technological advances of the 1920s obscured these problems. But with the onset of the Great Depression they became magnified—especially as it became clear that, although the US now dominated the world economy, neither American business nor, even more significantly, the American state, had the capacity to end the crisis, and prevent it from reversing capitalist globalization.

Quoted in Russell Jacoby, “Politics of the Crisis Theory,” Telos, Spring 1975, p. 35. 97 See Simon Mohun, “Distributive Shares in the US Economy 1964–2001,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 30: 3 (2006). 98 For wages and labor compensation, see Economic Report of the President, Washington, DC, 2002, Tables, B-47, B-48, and B-60. For CEO compensation, see Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118: 1 (2003), Table b4, column 6, updated at elsa.berkeley.edu. 99 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, International Labor Comparisons: Productivity and unit labor costs in manufacturing, Table 1, available at bls.gov. Note as well that productivity measures in manufacturing are much more reliable than in the service sector, where difficulties in measuring output understate the numbers. 100 For a convincing empirical link between the recovery in the rate of profit after the early 1980s and trends in the output per unit of capital stock (capital productivity), see Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, “The Profit Rate: Where and How Much Did It Fall?

See Rob van Tulder and Winfried Ruigrok, “European Cross-National Production Networks in the Auto Industry: Eastern Europe as the Low End of European Car Complex,” Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, Working Paper 121, 1998, p. 3. 116 Michael J. Haynes, “Labour, Exploitation and Capitalism in Russia Before and After 1991,” Critical Sociology 34: 4 (2008), p. 571. See also Branko Milanovic, Income Inequality and Poverty during the Transition from Planned Economy to Market Economy, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998. 117 Gowan, Global Gamble, pp. 191, 241. 118 See Michael S. Minor, “The Demise of Expropriation as an Instrument of LDC Policy, 1980–1992,” Journal of International Business Studies 25: 1 (1994), Table 1, p. 180. 119 Thomas W.


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The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

In spite of having grown up in relatively straitened circumstances, Westerners born since 1981 do not suffer the same inflated expectations as their elders. Millennials have grown up with something the rest of us may be forced to learn in the years ahead. These are the costs, both material and psychological, that we pay for stagnation. The other big crisis of Western political economy is rising income inequality. The West is suffering from acute polarisation. History tells us that inequality soars when societies develop. That is what economic theory dictates as well. During the nineteenth century, British and US inequality rose to giddying heights as the owners of new wealth – the railroads, shipping lines, iron and steel mills and machine industries – reaped the benefits of vast new monopolies.

By 2015 that number had risen to almost half.35 Far from withering away, as we expected would happen, the working class is growing in leaps and bounds according to people’s self-perception. In many ways these self-identification surveys mean much more than hard statistics on median income or income inequality. They express a feeling people have about being shut out from society. It is a very un-American state of mind. As is true of most of these trends, the West’s drift to pessimism has been most radical in the land of optimism. Michael Young, the British sociologist who coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy, would feel vindicated.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Academics call this process ‘assortative mating’ or ‘associative mating’, which, as cultural commentator David Brooks has pointed out, has meant that marriage announcements in major newspapers have started to look like law firm mergers. A number of studies have shown that recent decades have been marked by a decline in marriages across educational divides and that this might also have contributed to a rise in income inequality. As this educational elite has become more self-insulated, the distance between social groups has become greater than at any time since the Second World War, with ‘class mixing’ inside or outside the workplace much less likely than in previous decades. The oligarchic elite has become as self-perpetuating as any of its aristocratic predecessors.

In 2019, they acknowledged that ‘the success of the Asian Miracles was not a matter of luck but the result of [industrial policy]’. The ‘strong commonalities’ of the policies pursued by the Asian Tigers included the ‘preeminent role of industrial policy in their development’, which has meant their ‘economic model resulted in much lower market income inequality than in most advanced countries’.7 The successful industrial policies utilised by the Tigers are deeply different from those the UK adopted in the 1970s, which gave the policies a bad name. Whereas the British strategies of the 1970s focused on propping up existing industries and import substitution, the Asian Tigers have spent a relentless focus on being ahead of the curve for the industries of the future.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Davos bills itself as a high-minded confab where global elites gather to discuss the world’s most pressing problems, but in reality it’s more like the Coachella of capitalism—a beyond-satire boondoggle where plutocrats, politicians, and do-gooder celebrities come to see and be seen. It’s the only place in the world where it wouldn’t be at all unusual for the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the Japanese prime minister, and will.i.am to sit around chatting about income inequality while eating $37 sandwiches. My bosses at the Times had invited me to cover that year’s forum, which was focused on “Globalization 4.0”—the essentially meaningless term Davos types had concocted for the emerging economic era defined by this new, transformative wave of AI and automation technology.

The Second and Third Industrial Revolutions went more smoothly for workers, in part because of the labor protections that emerged out of the backlash to the original Industrial Revolution. But they still had plenty of problems. The Second Industrial Revolution created the Gilded Age, a period of American history during the late nineteenth century that was marked by staggering corruption, bloody labor clashes, bitter racial injustice, and soaring income inequality. And the advances in communication technology during the Third Industrial Revolution generated huge productivity gains, but they also facilitated a new 24/7 work culture and introduced new sources of anxiety into white-collar workplaces, leading to unprecedented levels of burnout and job-related stress.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Source: PovcalNet (2005 PPP) Inequality: Measuring the Divide Most everyone is worried about inequality these days. We know that income inequality within countries has been getting worse over the past few decades; this much is common knowledge, and we have movements like Occupy Wall Street to thank for bringing it to popular attention. But what about inequality between countries? On this front, most economists tell us we have nothing to worry about. Yes, there may be a yawning divide between rich and poor countries, but there’s also some good news: that divide is narrowing, and fast. Economists typically measure income inequality between countries using the Gini index, a method devised by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912.

In fact, the greatest drop in inequality occurred precisely once the United States started pushing free-market policies around the world through structural adjustment and the World Trade Organization. The Cato Institute, a well-known libertarian think tank, picked up on the story too. ‘Despite what you might think if you listen to voices prominent in the media … there has been a vast reduction in poverty and income inequality worldwide over the past quarter-century,’ they wrote. ‘This is the good news about the world today. Indeed, it’s the most important news about our world.’ This story has the benefit of feeling intuitively right. After all, we’re aware that countries like China and some East Asian economies have made dramatic leaps towards industrialisation, and have produced large and growing middle classes.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Technological innovations often need to be embodied in new equipment and new software. But US firms, despite high profits and low funding costs, have not upgraded their capital much in recent years. This is a puzzle that we will explore in Chapter 5. Inequality In addition to a slowdown in growth, inequality has risen over the past forty years. Broadly speaking, income inequality can grow between the middle class and the poor, or between the rich and the middle class. Or both, as it turns out, but not always at the same time. In the 1970s and 1980s, we observe mostly an increase in inequality between the middle class and the poor. This inequality goes hand in hand with the wage gap between college graduates and those without post-secondary degrees, a factor known as the college premium.

Behind your rising health-care bills: Secret hospital deals that squelch competition. Wall Street Journal, September 18. McGrath, C. (2006). The ideal lobbyist: Personal characteristics of effective lobbyists. Journal of Communication Management 10(1), 67–79. Meyer, B., and J. Sullivan (2018). Consumption and income inequality in the United States since the 1960s. VOX, January 15. Miller, M. H. (1998). Financial markets and economic growth. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 11(3), 8–15. Mishak, M. J. (2016). Drinks, dinners, junkets, and jobs: How the insurance industry courts state commissioners. Center for Public Integrity, October 3.

., 168 Dube, Arindrajit, 281–282 Duggan, Mark, 288 Durante, Ruben, 199 EasyJet, 139 Eberly, Janice, 51 e-commerce spending, 40–42 economic policy, gap between economic research and, 290 economic research, gap between economic policy and, 290 economics: debates in, 9, 13; defined, 9 Economides, Nicholas, 2 economies of scale, 265, 266, 267–268 Ederer, Florian, 82 education: and US per-capita economic growth rate, 15; and income inequality, 16 Edwards, Geoff, 170 efficiency, versus market power in merger regulation, 88–90 Egan, Mark, 220 employment: and US per-capita economic growth rate, 14–15; and labor market competition, 23 endogeneity, 157–160, 180, 193 entrepreneurs, age of successful, 82 entry of new firms, 80–83, 93–96, 125–127, 216, 217–218.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

And most turned out to involve the Big Tech behemoths of our era, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and, of course, Apple. It’s no secret that the concentration of market power has been rising in numerous industries over the past few decades, a trend that has been linked to everything from growing income inequality to slower economic growth to a surge in political populism. But as I settled into my new role at the FT and began digging into the financial data, I discovered something rather shocking—that 80 percent of corporate wealth was now being held by just about 10 percent of companies.1 And these weren’t the firms that owned the most physical assets or commodities; they weren’t the GEs or the Toyotas or the ExxonMobils.

In these and many other senses, the digital revolution is a miraculous and welcome development. But in order to ultimately reap the benefits of technology in a broad way, we need a level playing field, so that the next generation of innovators is allowed to thrive. We don’t yet live in that world. Big Tech has reshaped labor markets, exacerbated income inequality, and pushed us into filter bubbles in which we get only the information that confirms the opinions we already have. But it hasn’t provided solutions for these problems. Instead of enlightening us, it is narrowing our view; instead of bringing us together, it is tearing us apart. With each buzz and beep of our phones, each automatically downloaded video, each new contact popping up in our digital networks, we get just a glimmer of a vast new world that is, frankly, beyond most people’s understanding, a bizarre land of information and misinformation, of trends and tweets, and of high-speed surveillance technology that has become the new normal.

This has provoked calls for an overhaul of antitrust policy similar to the one America had with the passage of the Sherman Act at the end of the nineteenth century, which was designed to ensure that the economic power of large companies did not result in the corruption of the political process. It’s a timely call. Income inequality and corporate consolidation in the United States have reached levels not seen since that Gilded Age, which is no accident, since our monopoly laws have become just as weak and inefficient as they were back then. At the turn of the last century, oligopolies such as Standard Oil and U.S. Steel were in many ways more powerful even than the government.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

One in seven children across the African continent die before the age of five.6 These statistics are particularly worrying in that (as with many other developing regions of the world), roughly 50 per cent of Africa’s population is young – below the age of fifteen years. Adult literacy across most African countries has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. Literacy rates, health indicators (malaria, water-borne diseases such as bilharzia and cholera) and income inequality all remain a cause for worry. And still across important indicators, the trend in Africa is not just downwards: Africa is (negatively) decoupling from the progress being made across the rest of the world. Even with African growth rates averaging 5 per cent a year over the past several years, the Africa Progress Panel pointed out in 2007 that growth is still short of the 7 per cent that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty reduction.7 On the political side, some 50 per cent of the continent remains under non-democratic rule.

This point would later come back to haunt many African states. By the beginning of the 1970s the growth-oriented strategy was widely believed in policy circles to have failed in its mission to deliver sustained economic growth. Mounting numbers of people living in a state of absolute poverty, increasing levels of unemployment, rising income inequality, worsening balance of trade positions and a growing sense that sustained growth – real sustained growth – could not occur without materially improving the livelihood of society’s poor demanded a new aid strategy. Yet, despite the aid aimed at poverty alleviation, recipients under the programme in countries such as Zambia would later see their poverty levels skyrocket and growth rates plummet.


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy. Is it mere coincidence that both parties, despite their claims to be locked in a political death grip, mutually advance the cause of liberal autonomy and inequality?

,” Cowen nevertheless concludes that liberalism will continue to enjoy widespread support: We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care. . . . This framing of income inequality in meritocratic terms will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy individuals will in fact rise from poverty on a regular basis, and that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.5 Cowen predicts that this low-wage majority will settle in places that look a lot like Texas: cheap housing, some job creation, and subpar government services.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

Bush 139 influence on Margaret Thatcher 138–9 influence on Ronald Reagan 139 influence on the monetarists 138–9 key economic theories 122–36 key ideas 142 libertarian views 134–6, 140 long-term legacy 137–41 nature of the free market system 131–3 Nobel Prize (1974) 137 opposition to central state planning 134–6, 140 out of fashion 129–31 prices and knowledge 131–3 Prices and Production (1931) 126, 130 rejection of government control of the economy 120 study of philosophy and economics 121–22 The Road to Serfdom (1944) 135, 138, 140 time and the value of capital 124–6 verdict 141–2 Hegel, Georg 51–2, 54 herd behaviour 105 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 Hicks, John 173 High Speed 2 train line from London to the North 125 hindsight bias 227 242Index Hobbes, Thomas 5 hubris hypothesis 227 human behaviour, Becker’s approach 212–15 human capital theory (Becker) 200–2, 210 human decision making processes (Kahneman) 221–5 Hume, David 4, 97 Hutcheson, Francis 3–4 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 income inequality in the present day 64–6 individualism, view of Friedman 155–7 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 Industrial Revolution 11 inflation 107, 110 actions of the central banks 161 and Keynesian policies 127 and money supply 151–2 relationship with unemployment 153–5 Institute of Economic Affairs 138, 161 interest rates effects of adjustments 103–4 effects of credit expansion 123–4 natural rate of interest (Hayek) 123 intergenerational economics 178–80 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 international economics and trade, view of Samuelson 183–7 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 108–9, 113, 186 international trade and comparative advantage (Ricardo) 35–8 international trade theory 184–5 intervention during economic depression, view of Keynes 92–3, 94, 105–6 investment, volatility caused by uncertainty 104–5 invisible hand concept (Smith) 7–9 Johnson, Harry 94 Johnson, Lyndon B. 110, 190 joint-stock companies 86 Kahneman, Daniel (1934– ) 206, 217–36 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 biases and errors in financial decision making 225–32 cognitive biases 222–5 decision making under risk 228–32 early life and influences 219–20 economic writings and theories 221–32 from psychology to economics 225–32 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 human decision making processes 221–5 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 long-term legacy 233–4 loss aversion 230–2 multidisciplinary approach to economics 218 Nobel Prize for economic sciences (2002) 218, 220 optimism bias and overconfidence 226–7 Prospect Theory 228–32, 234 Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012) 226–7, 234 verdict 235–6 Kennedy, John F. 110, 190 Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) 19, 73, 86, 91–116, 171 aggregate demand and the role of government 102–4 Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 causes of unemployment 101 challenging the classical consensus 99–106 Index243 clash with Hayek 120, 126–31 criticism from monetarists 110–11 criticism of self-correction of markets 99, 105–6 criticism of the gold standard 95, 98, 107 criticism of the quantity theory of money 97 drivers of recession 101 early life and influences 93–4 effects of changes in money supply 97 effects of interest rate adjustments 103–4 effects of reducing wages 101–2 elevation to the House of Lords 106 end of the Keynesian revival 113–14 First World War and aftermath 95–7 focus on demand side economics 127 General Theory 99–106 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 99–100 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 International Monetary Fund 108–9 investments as King’s College Bursar 98, 114 investor expectations and uncertainty 104–5 key ideas 115–16 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 long-term legacy 109–14 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 move into economics 94–8 multiplier concept 103 national economist to international statesman 106–9 paradox of thrift 101 periods in and out of favour 92–3 plans for post-WWII international economy 107–9 popularity of Keynesianism 109–10 revival in the 2008 financial crisis 111–13 savings and investment 100–1 Second World War and aftermath 106–9 severe falls in output 101–2 state intervention during economic depression 92–3, 94, 105–6 Treaty of Versailles 95–6 and investment volatility 104–5 unpopularity beginning in the 1970s 110–11 verdict 115 Keynes, John Neville 93 Klaus, Vaclav 140 Kotlikoff, Laurence 179 Krugman, Paul 180, 191 Kuznets, Simon 148 Laar, Mart 140 labour-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 labour market, human capital concept 200–2, 210 laissez-faire economic system 9 rejection by Keynes 105–6 law of diminishing returns 31 Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) 42, 67 Leviathan (Hobbes) 5 Levitt, Steve 234 libertarian views Friedman 157 Hayek 134–6, 140 life choices, economic perspective 203–6 Lindbeck, Assar 168 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 London School of Economics (LSE) 122, 126, 128 loss aversion 230–2 Lucas, Robert 202 244Index Mackintosh, William 109 Malthus, Thomas Robert 31, 33, 169 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept (Marshall) 80–2 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 marginal rate of substitution 180 market equilibrium price 76–7 market mechanism (Smith) 15–16 market price, supply and demand factors 15–16 market self-correction, criticism by Keynes 99, 105–6 marriage, economic perspective 203–6 Marshall, Alfred (1842–1924) 71–89, 170 and the business world 84–6 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 concept of time in supply and demand 77–9 early life and influences 73–4 economics as a science 73, 86 economics theories 75–86 elasticity of demand 82–4 geographical effects in economics 84–6 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 influence on Keynes 93, 95 interaction between costs and value 75–7 key ideas 88–9 long-term legacy 86–8 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept 80–2 mathematical approach to economics 72 microeconomics 72, 86 political economy 74 price as interaction of supply and demand 75–9 Principles of Economics (1890) 72, 76, 77–8, 87–8, 188 supply and demand model 75–84 verdict 88 Marx, Karl (1818–83) 19, 49–68 and the global financial crisis (2008) 61–3 capitalist exploitation of the working class 56–8, 62–3 capitalist production process 54–6 communism 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 Das Kapital 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 distribution of economic value 54–6 downfall of capitalism 56–8, 61–3 early life and influences 51–3 economics theories 53–8 ‘fictitious capital’ concept 62 income inequality in the present day 64–6 key ideas 68 long-term legacy 63–7 surplus value of labour 54–6 verdict 67–8 view of Marxist governments 66 mass production 11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 170 mathematical approach to economics Marshall 72 Samuelson 169–70 mercantilism 7–8, 22–3 mergers and acquisitions 226–7 Merton, Robert 187 microeconomics 172–3, 174, 196 work of Marshall 72, 86 Microsoft 233 middle class, rise of 64 Mieses, Ludwig von 121–2 Mill, James 30–1 Mill, John Stuart 30, 181 The Principles of Political Economy (1848) 188 Modigliani, Franco 173 monetarism 110, 138–9, 146, 151–2 monetarist rule 152 Index245 money supply and the Great Depression (1930s) 150–2 effects of changes in (Keynes) 97 role in running the economy 151–2 monopolies evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 multiplier effect 103, 174–5 Murphy, Kevin 201, 210–12 NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation of unemployment) 153–5 Nashat, Guity 206 neoclassical synthesis 174 neo-Keynesianism 168–9, 173–5 net profit 81 New Classical Economics 159 New Deal (Franklin D.

Bush 139 influence on Margaret Thatcher 138–9 influence on Ronald Reagan 139 influence on the monetarists 138–9 key economic theories 122–36 key ideas 142 libertarian views 134–6, 140 long-term legacy 137–41 nature of the free market system 131–3 Nobel Prize (1974) 137 opposition to central state planning 134–6, 140 out of fashion 129–31 prices and knowledge 131–3 Prices and Production (1931) 126, 130 rejection of government control of the economy 120 study of philosophy and economics 121–22 The Road to Serfdom (1944) 135, 138, 140 time and the value of capital 124–6 verdict 141–2 Hegel, Georg 51–2, 54 herd behaviour 105 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 Hicks, John 173 High Speed 2 train line from London to the North 125 hindsight bias 227 242Index Hobbes, Thomas 5 hubris hypothesis 227 human behaviour, Becker’s approach 212–15 human capital theory (Becker) 200–2, 210 human decision making processes (Kahneman) 221–5 Hume, David 4, 97 Hutcheson, Francis 3–4 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 income inequality in the present day 64–6 individualism, view of Friedman 155–7 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 Industrial Revolution 11 inflation 107, 110 actions of the central banks 161 and Keynesian policies 127 and money supply 151–2 relationship with unemployment 153–5 Institute of Economic Affairs 138, 161 interest rates effects of adjustments 103–4 effects of credit expansion 123–4 natural rate of interest (Hayek) 123 intergenerational economics 178–80 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 international economics and trade, view of Samuelson 183–7 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 108–9, 113, 186 international trade and comparative advantage (Ricardo) 35–8 international trade theory 184–5 intervention during economic depression, view of Keynes 92–3, 94, 105–6 investment, volatility caused by uncertainty 104–5 invisible hand concept (Smith) 7–9 Johnson, Harry 94 Johnson, Lyndon B. 110, 190 joint-stock companies 86 Kahneman, Daniel (1934– ) 206, 217–36 behavioural economics 218–19, 233–6 biases and errors in financial decision making 225–32 cognitive biases 222–5 decision making under risk 228–32 early life and influences 219–20 economic writings and theories 221–32 from psychology to economics 225–32 gambler’s fallacy (misconception of chance) 224 heuristics and bias in decision making 222–5 human decision making processes 221–5 illusion of validity concept 220, 224 long-term legacy 233–4 loss aversion 230–2 multidisciplinary approach to economics 218 Nobel Prize for economic sciences (2002) 218, 220 optimism bias and overconfidence 226–7 Prospect Theory 228–32, 234 Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012) 226–7, 234 verdict 235–6 Kennedy, John F. 110, 190 Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) 19, 73, 86, 91–116, 171 aggregate demand and the role of government 102–4 Bretton Woods agreement 95, 108–9 causes of unemployment 101 challenging the classical consensus 99–106 Index243 clash with Hayek 120, 126–31 criticism from monetarists 110–11 criticism of self-correction of markets 99, 105–6 criticism of the gold standard 95, 98, 107 criticism of the quantity theory of money 97 drivers of recession 101 early life and influences 93–4 effects of changes in money supply 97 effects of interest rate adjustments 103–4 effects of reducing wages 101–2 elevation to the House of Lords 106 end of the Keynesian revival 113–14 First World War and aftermath 95–7 focus on demand side economics 127 General Theory 99–106 Great Crash (1929) 98, 99 Great Depression (1930s) 99–100 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development 109 International Monetary Fund 108–9 investments as King’s College Bursar 98, 114 investor expectations and uncertainty 104–5 key ideas 115–16 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 long-term legacy 109–14 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 move into economics 94–8 multiplier concept 103 national economist to international statesman 106–9 paradox of thrift 101 periods in and out of favour 92–3 plans for post-WWII international economy 107–9 popularity of Keynesianism 109–10 revival in the 2008 financial crisis 111–13 savings and investment 100–1 Second World War and aftermath 106–9 severe falls in output 101–2 state intervention during economic depression 92–3, 94, 105–6 Treaty of Versailles 95–6 and investment volatility 104–5 unpopularity beginning in the 1970s 110–11 verdict 115 Keynes, John Neville 93 Klaus, Vaclav 140 Kotlikoff, Laurence 179 Krugman, Paul 180, 191 Kuznets, Simon 148 Laar, Mart 140 labour-intensive goods, effects of increase in wages 33 labour market, human capital concept 200–2, 210 laissez-faire economic system 9 rejection by Keynes 105–6 law of diminishing returns 31 Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) 42, 67 Leviathan (Hobbes) 5 Levitt, Steve 234 libertarian views Friedman 157 Hayek 134–6, 140 life choices, economic perspective 203–6 Lindbeck, Assar 168 liquidity preference theory 105, 113 London School of Economics (LSE) 122, 126, 128 loss aversion 230–2 Lucas, Robert 202 244Index Mackintosh, William 109 Malthus, Thomas Robert 31, 33, 169 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept (Marshall) 80–2 marginal propensity to consume (MPC) 103 marginal propensity to save (MPS) 103 marginal rate of substitution 180 market equilibrium price 76–7 market mechanism (Smith) 15–16 market price, supply and demand factors 15–16 market self-correction, criticism by Keynes 99, 105–6 marriage, economic perspective 203–6 Marshall, Alfred (1842–1924) 71–89, 170 and the business world 84–6 ceteris paribus approach to economic analysis 79–80 concept of time in supply and demand 77–9 early life and influences 73–4 economics as a science 73, 86 economics theories 75–86 elasticity of demand 82–4 geographical effects in economics 84–6 industrial districts 84–6, 87 industrial economics 84–6, 87 influence on Keynes 93, 95 interaction between costs and value 75–7 key ideas 88–9 long-term legacy 86–8 marginal analysis 80–2 marginal change concept 80–2 mathematical approach to economics 72 microeconomics 72, 86 political economy 74 price as interaction of supply and demand 75–9 Principles of Economics (1890) 72, 76, 77–8, 87–8, 188 supply and demand model 75–84 verdict 88 Marx, Karl (1818–83) 19, 49–68 and the global financial crisis (2008) 61–3 capitalist exploitation of the working class 56–8, 62–3 capitalist production process 54–6 communism 50 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 52, 58–61 Das Kapital 52, 53–4, 59–61, 62, 67–8 distribution of economic value 54–6 downfall of capitalism 56–8, 61–3 early life and influences 51–3 economics theories 53–8 ‘fictitious capital’ concept 62 income inequality in the present day 64–6 key ideas 68 long-term legacy 63–7 surplus value of labour 54–6 verdict 67–8 view of Marxist governments 66 mass production 11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 170 mathematical approach to economics Marshall 72 Samuelson 169–70 mercantilism 7–8, 22–3 mergers and acquisitions 226–7 Merton, Robert 187 microeconomics 172–3, 174, 196 work of Marshall 72, 86 Microsoft 233 middle class, rise of 64 Mieses, Ludwig von 121–2 Mill, James 30–1 Mill, John Stuart 30, 181 The Principles of Political Economy (1848) 188 Modigliani, Franco 173 monetarism 110, 138–9, 146, 151–2 monetarist rule 152 Index245 money supply and the Great Depression (1930s) 150–2 effects of changes in (Keynes) 97 role in running the economy 151–2 monopolies evil of 10–11 regulation to prevent 21–2 multiplier effect 103, 174–5 Murphy, Kevin 201, 210–12 NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation of unemployment) 153–5 Nashat, Guity 206 neoclassical synthesis 174 neo-Keynesianism 168–9, 173–5 net profit 81 New Classical Economics 159 New Deal (Franklin D.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Economists have put forth many reasons to explain why the world has been slogging through its weakest recovery in the postwar era. Most of the explanations focus on the way severe credit crises can depress the demand side of the economy, as consumers and companies struggle to work off their debts and slowly regain the confidence to spend money. Others blame weak demand on rising income inequality, the regulatory crackdown on bank lending, or some other symptom of post-crisis stress disorder. While all these arguments may have some merit, the evidence is mixed as to what impact these factors had on economic growth. In the United States, there are clear signs that consumer demand fully recovered by 2015: Car sales have hit new highs and job growth is running at a brisk pace, yet the headline GDP growth number is still well below its pre-crisis pace.

However, if a tycoon is making a fortune by cozying up to politicians and landing contracts from the government, or worse by capitalizing on Daddy’s contacts, then resentment surfaces, and the nation’s focus turns to redistributing rather than creating wealth. The most rigorous statistical measures of inequality can offer a useful snapshot of the big picture, but they are updated too infrequently to provide the necessary warning signs of fast-shifting popular sentiment. The most common measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, scores a nation from one to zero: One represents a totally unequal society in which one person gets all the income, and zero represents a completely egalitarian society in which everyone has the same income. But the Gini score is derived from official data by academics, using a variety of methods, published on no particular schedule and for no consistent sample of countries.

Financial Times, June 3, 2014. “World of Work Report 2013: Repairing the Economic and Social Fabric.” International Labor Organization, 2013. Wyatt, Caroline. “Bush and Putin: Best of Friends.” BBC News, June 16, 2001. Chapter 3: Good Billionaires, Bad Billionaires Alderson, Arthur, and Kevin Doran. “How Has Income Inequality Grown.” Indiana University, 2010. “All Men Are Created Unequal.” Economist, January 7, 2014. Allegretto, Sylvia A. “The State of Working America’s Wealth.” Economic Policy Institute, 2011. Anderson, Jon Lee. “The Comandante’s Canal.” New Yorker, March 10, 2014. Berg, Andrew G., and Jonathan Ostry.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. Paris: OECD Publishing. 70. Dabla-Norris, Era, Kalpana Kochhar, et al. (2015). “Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective.” IMF Staff Discussion Note. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund. 71. The Economist (2011, February 10). “Mine, All Mine.” The Economist. Retrieved from www.economist.com. 72. Dabla-Norris, Era, Kalpana Kochhar, et al. (2015). “Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective.” IMF Staff Discussion Note. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund. 73. Federal Election Commission (2014, March 27).

Retrieved from blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2013/07/30/guest-post-what-killed-the-aztecs/; Hunefeldt, Christine (2004). A Brief History of Peru. New York: Facts On File Inc., p. 52. 73. Ruggiero, Guido (2002). A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell. 74. Milanovic, Branko (2012). “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now.” Policy Research Working Paper 6259. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Development Research Group. 75. Oxfam (2016). An Economy for the 1%. Oxford: Oxfam International. 76. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2014). “Access to Sanitation.”


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

So if you earn a lot you must be a value creator. I will argue that the way the word ‘value' is used in modern economics has made it easier for valueextracting activities to masquerade as value-creating activities. And in the process rents (unearned income) get confused with profits (earned income); inequality rises, and investment in the real economy falls. What's more, if we cannot differentiate value creation from value extraction, it becomes nearly impossible to reward the former over the latter. If the goal is to produce growth that is more innovation-led (smart growth), more inclusive and more sustainable, we need a better understanding of value to steer us.

THE ECLIPSE OF THE CLASSICALS A series of thinkers and economists who were roughly contemporaneous with Marx began to lay the foundations for what has become modern mainstream economics. Landlords were defended as productive by Lord Lauderdale (1784-1860), a Scottish earl, and profits by Nassau Senior (1790-1864), an English lawyer and economist, as abstinence from consumption. Linking profits to a notion of sacrifice allowed a useful moral justification for the large income inequality between capitalists and workers.2 Furthermore, as scarce capital could be either invested or saved, profits were no longer linked to theories of exploitation but came to be seen as simply a return for saving and not consuming. But to put the classicals to bed properly, a new theory of value had to be invented.

The rise in private debt in the US and UK has resulted in household savings falling as a percentage of disposable income - income minus taxes - especially in periods of sustained economic growth (during the 1980s, the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s). Simultaneously, household consumption expenditure has been buoyant. It has outpaced any rise in disposable income, and its contribution to GDP has grown.42 Income inequality has been on the rise in most advanced economies, especially in the US and in the UK, over the past four decades. Increasing inequality in the US has taken three complementary forms.43 First, real wages have fallen or stagnated for many low- and middle-income households. For instance, OECD data on the US economy indicate that the annual real minimum wage (in 2015 US dollars) fell from $19,237 in 1975 to $13,000 in 2005 (in 2016 it was $14,892).


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

South Korea and Taiwan are the gold medalists of the global economic race, the only two nations in recorded economic history to achieve five straight decades of growth above 5 percent. Both nations are former colonies of Japan that built their success by copying essentials of the Japanese system. They invest heavily in research and development and work to contain the kind of income inequality that can produce popular resistance to rapid growth. Both are at a turning point as their economies mature; with per capita incomes of more than $20,000, growth is naturally slowing. Korea, however, has a much better chance than Taiwan of catching up with Japan, whose income level has stagnated at $35,000 for many years.

This blunder wouldn’t happen in China, where the influence of politicians does not lead to consistently irrational economic decisions. We’ve already seen how, early on in the reform process, Deng Xiaoping chose to open up the southern coastal regions that would most quickly tie China into global trade even if the decision led to increased regional income inequality—and political risks—in the short term. The contrast between Vietnam and the hyper-rapid port development in China is night and day: even ten years ago China had no ports in the world’s top ten in terms of traffic, and now it has four. Vietnam is following the more typical route of authoritarian economies and distributing investment dollars for political reasons.

As Tyler Cowen points out, the United States is a leading exporter of products that lie in the “sweet spot” for future demand from the emerging world, including civilian aircraft, semiconductors, cars, pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment, automobile accessories, and entertainment. Technology, Inequality, and the Debt Threat There is an undeniable and scary connection between technology and persistent or rising income inequality, an issue that has remarkable resonance everywhere I travel, from Chile to South Korea. Kenneth Rogoff has called inequality “the single biggest threat to social stability around the world,” and for good reason. A decade ago the technorati were predicting that a wireless, digital world would give working people a welcome windfall in leisure time, but the reality looks a lot less comfortable.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

I wondered what Yellen’s husband, George Akerlof, who had railed against the deficit racked up by the Bush administration, thought about the outrageous balance sheet and Yellen’s obvious role in exacerbating income inequality. Bizarrely, Bernanke’s renunciation of his GOP affiliation was lauded as brave when his self-congratulatory memoir, The Courage to Act, was released in 2015. But how exactly is income inequality the fault of any political party when the Fed is in charge? At a press conference in June 2016, Yellen reiterated that the Fed would continue to reinvest proceeds from maturing securities and that she anticipated continuing this policy “until normalization of the level of the fed funds rate is well underway.”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. Immediately the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders. In exchange for four more years of loyalty, Fisher would give me the freedom to do my job. At that moment I committed to stay at the Fed. As we finished our lunch, we talked about the direction of Fed policy, about income inequality and pension systems potentially going bust. “Since we’re talking about four years from now,” I said, “what will you see in your lifetime that will be the most surprising?” His answer stunned me. “I think there’s the potential for riots in our own streets, social unrest like we’ve never seen,” Fisher said.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

“Policymakers thought we would have to build a bridge to June, because by then it would be calmed down.” A student asked if the current recession offered an opportunity to rebalance the income inequality that has plagued American society. Hassett responded testily: “If you look at the period from when President Trump started to this January, wage growth was highest for the bottom ten percent, and income inequality declined sharply.” He pointed out that wage growth was higher for African Americans than for whites. Then he ventured an attack on liberal economists who failed to recognize the achievements of the Trump administration.

In Oklahoma City, students of color actually graduated at a higher rate than whites. Overall, the Black-white proficiency gap in math was 41.3 percent for progressive cities and 26.2 in conservative cities; the gap for Latinos and whites was 34.4 percent versus 19.1. The researchers examined the size of cities, number of students in private schools, greater income inequality, and higher poverty rates, but only one factor could account for these disparities: “The biggest predictor for larger educational gaps was whether or not the city has a progressive population.” The report was titled “The Secret Shame.” With all the wealth, political idealism, community effort, and apparent goodwill directed by the white progressive power structure of Minneapolis to the Black community, nothing changed, except for the fact that, year after year, things got worse for the Black citizens.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

After 2010, there was an increasing turn towards nationalism in many countries: the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump in the US. While globalisation remains a potent force in the world economy, it is also increasingly unfashionable. This is a story that most readers will be familiar with. Much has been written about how globalisation lost its appeal. These accounts usually point towards growing income inequality, concerns about immigration, and deindustrialisation in developed nations – all driving a turn against the supposed benefits of a flat world. Less well-scrutinised, however, is the way exponential technologies both create the rationale for more borders and provide the tools to build them. We often assume that the more high-tech a society becomes, the more global and borderless it will be.

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

The reduction of unemployment with the help of radical neoliberal medicine generates new and sharper problems. Societies such as the United States or Britain are proving this before our very eyes. They have reduced the problem of unemployment and exchanged it for problems such as low wages, low productivity, low social security, growing income inequality and, especially in America, dramatically higher rates of imprisonment. Is the so-called neoliberal way the only way of bringing down unemployment? The answer is: no. A glance at the Netherlands or Scandinavia shows that there too unemployment has been significantly reduced in a short period of time – not through application of the American model, but through active labour-market policies, part-time work, a radical cheapening of labour-power, and a range of economies.

More than half of those employed in this segment of the labour market are low-wage earners, compared with only a quarter in Germany. What this means, however, is that the tenth by which America's labour force participation exceeds that of Germany consists of low-paid jobs displaying low productivity. Furthermore, incomes in this sector of employment are still evidently declining. Growing income inequality has led in the United States to millions of working poor; between 1973 and 1993, real hourly wages of those without a university diploma fell from $11.85 to $8.65. In the early 1970s, households in the top 5 per cent of the income pyramid earned ten times more than those in the bottom 5 per cent; today they get nearly fifty times as much.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The monopoly profits of this new era have been very, very good to a few men. The Forbes 400 list, which ranks American wealth, places Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the top ten. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham (CEO of Y Combinator), in a 2016 blog post, was quite open about celebrating income inequality. He wrote, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2500 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.”

The software developed was called Persona Management, and it allowed a single operator to pretend to be hundreds of different people posting negative comments. But perhaps more important, the Kochs’ vision of an antiregulation, antitax legislative environment has been realized, and with its realization has come the extraordinary income inequality which is so much a part of our story. The chart on the next page tells the story. Of the sixty-two richest people on the Forbes 400, twenty-six earned their fortunes from the media and tech businesses that are the subject of this book. The list of the top ten wealthiest people reads like our table of contents. 1.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Gallup Daily tracking interviews. http://news.gallup.com/poll/188144/employee-engagement-stagnant-2015.aspx. 11   US Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000. 12   Desilver, Drew. US Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, Is Now Highest since 1928. Pew Research Center. December 5, 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/. 13   Friedman, Thomas. How to Monetize Your Closet. New York Times. December 21, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-monetize-your-closet.html; Geron, Tomio.


The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living by Brock Bastian

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cognitive dissonance, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, placebo effect, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, sugar pill, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce

Researchers sourced data from nearly 150,000 people, spanning all the major geographical regions of the world.17 Specifically, they examined measures of risk-taking behaviour along with a number of indicators of hardship that people may face within each geographically distinct context. These included the homicide rates in each country, the Gross Domestic Product of each country, income inequality, infant mortality, life expectancy at birth and gender inequality. Of interest is that these indicators were all significantly related to each other: poor countries tend to have higher levels of income inequality and people living in these countries are exposed to more homicide, higher rates of infant mortality, lower life expectancy and greater gender inequality. For the purposes of this study, however, it meant the researchers could combine these various indicators into an overall measure of ‘hardship’.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Louis Federal Reserve, February 7, 2019, www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/february/is-college-still-worth-it-complicated. *My favorite source for this data is Chad Stone, Danilo Trisi, Arloc Sherman, and Jennifer Beltrán, “A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated January 13, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. *Congressional Budget Office, “The Distribution of Household Income, 2016,” July 9, 2019, www.cbo.gov/publication/55413. *W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph Price, and Angela Rachidi, “Marriage, Penalized: Does Social-Welfare Policy Affect Family Formation,” Institute for Family Studies and American Enterprise Institute, July 2016.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

Would you like to roll back rising income inequality? How? Hike taxes back to the 91 percent top marginal rate that prevailed in 1960? If you actually succeed in substantially lowering compensation in all forms, you will also get reduced productivity from those who remain in the United States and a major brain drain among those who accept the opportunities that they will find elsewhere—the same responses among the most entrepreneurial and most able that have already beset European countries that have made it difficult for talent and hard work to be rewarded. Apart from that, rolling back income inequality won’t make any difference in the isolation of the new upper class from the rest of America.

The results are thus based on categorical variables for marriage, work satisfaction, social trust, and strength of religious involvement, and the interactions between marriage and work satisfaction. The equation also includes age as a control variable. 9. See Brooks, 2008, chapter 5, for a recent review of the literature on happiness and income and chapter 6 for a review of the literature on happiness and income inequality. 10. The analysis was conducted using interaction terms of income with the categorical independent variables, but all of the interaction effects were substantively tiny and did not approach statistical significance. The results reported in table 15.2 replicated the one reported in Figure 15.6 with the addition of a continuous variable expressing family income in constant dollars. 11.


pages: 394 words: 124,743

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

We'd settled on what seemed like a neutral option: we rented a Ford Escape from Budget. (Haley had made sure it had a GPS, since none of us knew our way around Detroit.) Ron drove, with Brian, Diana, and me as passengers. Our first stop was Solidarity House. As I had told Ron when we first met, I believed in saving jobs. I had also written op-eds about America's growing income inequality and about the declining real wages of workers. I believed that organized labor could be a constructive part of the solution as long as it focused on those issues, rather than on featherbedding, trying to protect workers who were not pulling their weight, and blindly fighting technological change.

The only positive aspect of the episode was that Larry asked me to follow up with Corker and do my best to mollify him, which led to a strong friendship between us. In the course of a sangria-fueled Mexican dinner one warm spring night, Corker asked me, "You seem like such a sensible fellow, why are you a Democrat?" "Three main reasons," I said, ticking off my views that Republicans had favored the rich at a time of growing income inequality, abandoned fiscal responsibility, and held unfortunate positions on social issues such as a woman's right to choose abortion. As events unfolded, I became convinced that we had gotten our supplier policy right. In particular, we were correct in resisting the many pleas to bail out failing companies—to invade Laos, as Larry would have put it.

I felt a little bit of buyer's remorse about the Chrysler-UAW contract. While it was a vast improvement over previous agreements, I wasn't sure we had used our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to full advantage. I respected Ron Gettelfinger's determination to protect workers' interests. And I sympathized. My many op-ed pieces over the years had warned that income inequality in America was an enormously important moral issue and that real wages for blue-collar workers had been declining, even in years of prosperity. At the same time, if these automakers couldn't be made competitive, we would have no jobs, an outcome much worse, to my mind, than jobs that were lower paid.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

In 2013, roughly 14 percent of the country’s population “lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members,” according to the US Department of Agriculture—a 30 percent increase since 2007.3 The US middle class, long viewed as the globe’s most successful, now suffers growing income inequality. A crucial factor in this decline has been the failure of educational attainment to progress as successfully as in other industrialized states.4 The system is rigged. During the global financial crisis, Bank of America nearly crashed. One of the largest financial institutions in the nation, it was nevertheless granted £45 billion by President Barack Obama to prevent its collapse.

Hayatullah had left Pakistan because of communal violence and a lack of opportunities. He believed that Australia would offer a refuge, with peace and jobs. His new home was not officially at war, but it had declared its opposition to any and all boat people (those many asylum seekers arriving by plane were conveniently ignored in the toxic debate). Income inequalities in Pakistan were endemic, with a tiny elite owning vast swathes of the country. This was a global problem, though the degree of disparity differed from country to country. Thousands of asylum seekers formed an underclass in Australia—the exact number was unknown, but it was in the tens of thousands—due to a lack of opportunities and housing, poor public funding, and isolation.

Notes Introduction 1Jo Confino, “It Is Profitable to Let the World Go to Hell,” Guardian, January 20, 2015. 2Peter Coy, “The Richest Rich Are in a Class of Their Own,” Business Week, April 3, 2014. 3Ned Resnikoff, “Food Pantries Stretched to Breaking Point by Food Stamp Cuts,” Al Jazeera America, November 24, 2014. 4David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest,” New York Times, April 22, 2014. 5Matt Taibbi, “Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail,” Rolling Stone, March 14, 2012. 6Matt Taibbi, “Bank of America Is a ‘Raging Hurricane of Theft and Fraud,’” Occupy Wall Street day of action, February 29, 2012. 7Justin Wolfers, “All You Need to Know About Income Inequality, in One Comparison,” New York Times, March 13, 2015 8David Halperin, “The Perfect Lobby: How One Industry Captured Washington DC,” Nation, April 3, 2014. 9Cecilia Olivet and Pia Eberhardt, Profiting from Crisis: How Corporations and Lawyers Are Scavenging Profits from Europe’s Crisis Countries (Amsterdam Transnational Institute/Corporate Europe Observatory, March 2014). 10Aditya Chakrabortty, “New Era Estate Scandal: Families at the Mercy of International Speculators,” Guardian, November 20, 2014. 11James V.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Countries treat the world’s poor and vulnerable as they treat their own. U.S. policies, by pursuing a constricted notion of social insurance, foster a society of fear and vulnerability that lacks the readiness to contribute more to global cooperation. Mainstream Americans feel increasingly unnerved by widening income inequality at home, and are therefore less likely to support assistance for the poor abroad. Figure 11.2 illustrates the relationship between domestic social policies and international aid policies. The horizontal axis measures each country’s social spending as a percent of national income, and the vertical axis measures the country’s development aid as a percent of national income.

It has also contributed to the failure of the welfare state. In order to combat poverty and inequality in those racially divided societies, it is also essential to combat racism and intolerance. FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE UNITED STATES The oddest fact about U.S. politics in the past quarter century is that income inequalities have widened considerably, the number of families living in poverty has stopped declining, the size of the prison population is sky-high, the underclass has become even less socially mobile than before, and yet American politics has increasingly favored the rich: in hefty tax cuts, reduced outlays for the poor, the lack of progress on expanded health care coverage, and much more.

Democracy has not brought home the benefits for the bulk of the population, but instead has favored the super-rich. Yet perhaps none of this is surprising, since the heightened inequality of income has been accompanied by an even more ruthless penetration of big money into national politics. The cross-country evidence that we’ve just reviewed puts to rest the false proposition that the growing income inequality in the United States is the inevitable price to pay for a highly productive economy. The social-welfare states enjoy high productivity and much greater economic fairness, and with much less poverty. While there is no doubt that the U.S. super-rich are benefiting in terms of personal wealth and megaconsumption, there is no evidence that the rest of the population has been a beneficiary of the strategy of stingy social outlays.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

What might seem like a small jump forward for some—like a smart phone priced under $20—may be as profound for one group as commuting to work in a driverless car is for another. People will find that being connected virtually makes us feel more equal—with access to the same basic platforms, information and online resources—while significant differences persist in the physical world. Connectivity will not solve income inequality, though it will alleviate some of its more intractable causes, like lack of available education and economic opportunity. So we must recognize and celebrate innovation in its own context. Everyone will benefit from connectivity, but not equally, and how those differences manifest themselves in the daily lives of people is our focus here.

A collection of best practices will emerge among states to deflect, diffuse and respond to the charges presented by newly connected publics. (This is a reasonable assumption since the interior ministers in repressive states, responsible for policing and national security, visit with each other to share knowledge and techniques.) Issues like income inequality, unemployment, high food prices and police brutality exist everywhere, and governments will have to make preemptive adjustments to their policies and messages to address public demand more responsively than in earlier times. Even in comparably stable societies, leaders are feeling the pressure of a connected citizenry and recognizing the need for reform or adaptation in the new digital age because no government is invulnerable to these looming threats.

health, 1.1, 1.2 data about health care, 2.1, 2.2 heart rate Hezbollah, 5.1, 5.2 hidden people high-quality LCD screens hijacking accounts hive mind Hizb ut-Tahrir Holbrooke, Richard Holocaust denial holographic “avatars,” 29 holographic projections, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 4.1 holographic “tablets,” 29 Homeland Security Department, U.S. Hormuud https encryption protocols Huawei human rights, 1.1, 3.1 humiliation Hussein, Saddam, itr.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 Hutus Identity Cards Act identity theft identity-theft protection, 2.1, 2.2 IEDs (improvised explosive devices), 5.1, 6.1 IEEE Spectrum, 107n income inequality, 1.1, 4.1 India, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 individuals, transfer of power to Indonesia infiltration information blackouts of exchange of free movement of see also specific information technologies Information and Communications Technologies Authority Information Awareness Office information-technology (IT) security experts infrastructure, 2.1, 7.1 Innocence of Muslims (video), 4.1, 6.1 innovation Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, n insurance, for online reputation integrated clothing machine intellectual property, 2.1, 3.1 intelligence intelligent pills internally displaced persons (IDP), 7.1, 7.2 International Criminal Court, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2 internationalized domain names (IDN) International Telecommunications Union Internet, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Balkanization of as becoming cheaper and changing understanding of life impact of as network of networks Internet asylum seekers Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) internet protocol (IP) activity logs internet protocol (IP) address, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1 Internet service provider (ISP), 3.1, 3.2, 6.1, 7.1 Iran, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1 cyber warfare on “halal Internet” in Iraq, itr.1, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2 reconstruction of, 7.1, 7.2 Ireland iRobot Islam Israel, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 iTunes Japan, 3.1, 6.1n, 246 earthquake in Jasmine Revolution JavaOne Conference Jebali, Hamadi Jibril, Mahmoud Jim’ale, Ali Ahmed Nur Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World (Rosenberg), 4.1 Joint Tactical Networking Center Joint Tactical Radio System Julius Caesar justice system Kabul Kagame, Paul, 7.1, 7.2 Kansas State University Karzai, Hamid Kashgari, Hamza Kaspersky Lab Kenya, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2 Khan Academy Khartoum Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Khomeini, Ayatollah Kickstarter kidnapping, 2.1, 5.1 virtual Kinect Kissinger, Henry, 4.1, 4.2 Kiva, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 Klein, Naomi, n Kony 2012, 7.1 Koran Koryolink “kosher Internet,” 187 Kosovo Kurds, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1 Kurzweil, Ray Kyrgyzstan Laârayedh, Ali Lagos language translation, 1.1, 4.1, 4.2 laptops Latin America, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 law enforcement Law of Accelerating Returns Lebanon, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2 Lee Hsien Loong legal options, coping strategies for privacy and security concerns legal prosecution Lenin, Vladimir Levitt, Steven D.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

Cohn, Cindy. “Amicus Brief of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Case 14-4104, Document 57).” 2015. https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/11/eff_ibm_apartheid_amicus_brief_final.pdf. [Accessed June 26, 2017.] Desilver, Drew. “U.S. Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, Is Now Highest Since 1928.” Pew Research Center, 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/. [Accessed June 26, 2017.] Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. Flaherty, David H. Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, and the United States.


pages: 243 words: 77,516

Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals by John Lefevre

airport security, Bear Stearns, blood diamond, buy and hold, colonial rule, credit crunch, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, income inequality, jitney, junk bonds, lateral thinking, market clearing, Occupy movement, Sloane Ranger, the market place

Despite the housing collapse, the ensuing crisis, and subsequent bailouts, not a single banker had been held criminally responsible. Bonuses had remained relatively intact and the equity markets had come roaring back from the lows of 2009. The fact that most people hadn’t bene­fited from the market recovery, and that income inequality was breaking through generational highs, only further fanned the flames of anger and resentment. One friend of mine joked about how his wife had been nearly heckled out of a Manhattan doctor’s office after being overheard telling the receptionist that their insurance was provided by Goldman Sachs.

We openly compare this view to that of the throngs of admirable and selflessly hardworking Filipina helpers who crowd the sidewalks of Hong Kong every Sunday, sitting in their cardboard box forts while playing cards and giving each other manicures on their only day off. In the context of this fleeting, drunken, yet philosophical discussion about income inequality, I am reminded of the fact that I have roughly five hundred ₱1,000 notes casually weighing my cargo shorts halfway down my ass. I decide to unbundle one of the stacks and nonchalantly drop a bill over the edge of the third-level railing, against which we are all leaning. The bill flutters around magnificently as it makes its way slowly down, catching the invisible currents that push it ever so gently one way or the other.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The effect ceased at pretty much the same time as he drew attention to it, which may explain why it is not better known.[xxix] Even in the long run, the picture is not all rosy. A French economist named Gilles Saint-Paul has developed a formula which shows that while demand for unskilled human labour declines, the demand for skilled human capital increases faster. But a side effect can be the increase in income inequality.[xxx] Is it different this time? Mechanisation and automation has displaced workers on a huge scale since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It has imposed considerable suffering on individuals, but has led to greater wealth and higher levels of employment overall. The question today is whether that will always be true.

A poll published in January 2015 by a US personal finance website[cccxxi] echoed the finding a year earlier by the Federal Reserve[cccxxii] that two-thirds of Americans had savings equal to less than three months income. Half them could not cover an emergency expense of $400 without going into debt. This was aggravated by the recession which began in 2007: the average American family’s net worth fell from $136,000 in 2007 to $81,000 in 2013. Wealth inequality is far more extreme in today’s world than income inequality, both globally and within individual nations. It is also less significant. The charity Oxfam created a stir in January 2016 by claiming that the richest 62 people own as much as the poorest 50% of the world.[cccxxiii] The figure may or may not be correct, but it tells us less than it appears to.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

," World Bank working paper (November 2003), p. 17. 52 Soliman, Possible Way Out, p. 9. chronic underinvestment in irrigation. As a result, the wages of casual and informal labor fell, poverty soared at a pace which the National Human Development Report characterized as "unprecedented in Pakistan's history," and urban income inequality, as measured by the GINI coefficient, increased from 31.7 percent in 1992 to 36 percent in 1998.53 The biggest event of the 1990s, however, was the conversion of much of the former "Second World" - European and Asian state socialism — into a new Third World. In the early 1990s those considered to be living in extreme poverty in the former "transitional countries," as the UN calls them, rocketed from 14 million to 168 million: an almost instantaneous mass pauperization without precedent in history.54 Poverty, of course, did exist in the former USSR in an unacknowledged form, but according to World Bank researchers, the rate did not exceed 6 to 10 percent.55 Now, according to Alexey Krasheninnokov; in his report to UN-HABITAT, 60 percent of Russian families live in poverty, and the rest of the population "can only be categorized as middle class by a considerable stretch."

("Middle-class" Russians, for example, spend 40 percent of their income on food as compared to a global middle-income standard of less than one-third.)56 Although the worst "transitional poverty" is hidden from view in derelict regions of the ex-Soviet countryside, the cities display shocking new extremes of overnight wealth and equally sudden misery. In St. Petersburg, for example, income inequality between the richest and poorest decile soared from 4.1 in 1989 to 13.2 in 1996.57 Moscow may now have more billionaires than New York, but it also has more than one million squatters, many of them illegal immigrants from the Ukraine (200,000), China (150,000), Vietnam, and Moldavia; these people live in primitive conditions in abandoned buildings, rundown dormitories, and former barracks.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

According to Time magazine, the wealthy now dominate sales at top-tier stores and are also the largest buyers of all clothing.18 In the United States, the chasm between the rich and poor narrowed throughout the early twentieth century. By the 1950s income was remarkably equal and upward mobility achievable for many. But in recent decades, the haves and the have-nots have been returning to their respective corners and, embarrassingly, the United States is one of the only developed countries that has experienced growing income inequality. Now the top 1 percent of American households takes almost a quarter of all household income, a share not seen since 1929.19 We’re now wearing this yawning income gap on our bodies. What happens when the primary consumers of “good” clothing have such deep pockets is that prices are driven up for everyone else.

, 15, 54, 67 HAE Now, 158 Hall, Jerry, 30 H&M, 2, 6, 11–16, 18–20, 23, 29, 32–34, 58, 61, 69, 70, 77, 94, 96, 98–101, 104, 106, 113, 114, 116–17, 131, 183, 185–86, 189, 199, 202, 204, 221 Conscious Collection of, 117 cost-cutting by, 113 designs copied by, 107, 109, 112 factories and, 145–46, 147, 151–52, 181 Lagerfeld and, 70, 93 Hare, Bill, 95 Harney, Alexandra, 168 Hartman, Eviana, 114, 209 Harvard Business Review, 98, 99 Hasan, Mehedi, 152–53 Helmut Lang, 75 Hernandez, Lupe, 46–48 Hilfiger, Tommy, 18, 23, 24, 67, 91, 141, 146 Hodge, Donnie, 155, 157, 159 Hong Kong, 41, 165 income inequality, 76–77, 79–80 Independent, The, 70, 93, 101 India, 41, 125, 180 Inditex, 145, 172 Inman Mills, 49 International Labor Rights Forum, 151 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 51 Internet, 15, 65, 103–4, 109, 115, 135, 201, 213 YouTube videos, 12, 13–15, 122 Isenberg, Alexandra, 64–65, 68, 73 It’s Fashion, 92 Jacobs, Marc, 34, 62, 67, 68 Japan, 41, 51 J.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

As Harry Johnson (1923–1977) put it: ‘The notion that there exist masses of “disguised unemployed” people leads easily to the idea that “development” involves merely the mobilisation and transfer of these presumably costless productive resources into economic activities.’12 In the 1950s and 1960s most of Latin America, as well as India, pursued policies based on this kind of analysis. By the 1970s there was growing doubt that government push was working. The data for developing countries showed rapid population growth, widening income inequality, and small growth in industrial employment. Import substitution was also producing inflation and balance of payments problems. Borrowing abroad for infant industries led to the pile-up of debt, which peaked with the debt crises of the 1970s and 1980s. There was also evidence that forced growth policies were producing deleterious side effects ranging from civil wars to the establishment of murderous authoritarian regimes.

Beyond this it has no gospel to preach. We can identify three answers to the ‘growth of the cake’ question. The first is that the cake just needs to grow without end, since people are permanently dissatisfied with what they have. This dissatisfaction is independent of the level of wealth already achieved, or of income inequalities. Indeed, the smaller the income gaps between different sections of the population, the larger the impact of relative wants is likely to be, as envy will be more rampant, and competition for status more intense. The impossibility of satisfying relative wants is the bedrock of the scarcity perspective.


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

CDB’s local-debt finance system is also, in the words of political scientist Victor Shih, an “engine of inequality,” depending on the exploitation of poor villagers and farmers to generate revenue from land sales. It has upended the lives of millions of people like farmer Li, who lost his land to a local government-funded stadium project and got inadequate compensation. The system has helped to send China’s income-inequality level so high that the government has stopped publishing the globally recognized income-inequality index. No less an authority than former premier Zhu Rongji, speaking at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University in April 2011—the shared alma mater of Zhu, Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, and Chen Yuan—said: “The money is like plundering people and has lifted up land prices by so much.”


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The centrality of land to this troubling ongoing development has been a principal theme of emerging critiques of the book that has done so much to put inequality in the intellectual and political spotlight – Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.3 The first line of critique concerns income inequalities. One of Piketty’s main contributions has been to show that stability in the respective shares of national income accruing to wage earners and capital owners, for so long considered a ‘stylized fact’ of macroeconomics, did not survive beyond the 1950s. In most advanced capitalist countries, labour’s share of income consistently rose through to the end of the 1970s.

More and more income, in short, has been realized in the form of rent: ‘This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.’1 The growth in income share accruing to landowners tends in turn to exacerbate overall income inequality. Why? Because landowners are already typically high-income earners. This is especially true of landownership in the form of housing ownership. ‘People who have the greatest incomes’, reports Beverley Searle of the English case, ‘also have most housing wealth.’2 The other line of critique is similar, but instead concerns increasing inequalities of wealth.

Henry, 335 farming estate, local government, 88–90, 116, 242–4, 256, 260–1 farmland, ownership of, 79, 116, 265 feudalism, 75, 83 feudal tenure, 76–8 ‘fictitious commodities’ (Polanyi), 66–71 financial asset, land as a, 60–1, 112 financialization, 15–17, 102 financial landownership, 112–3, 117 Fine, Ben, 15 fire sales, 210, 336 Forest Holidays, 333 Forestry Act (1919), 91, 204 Forestry Act (1981), 251 Forestry Commission, 91 landholdings, 6, 91, 101, 117, 210, 251–2, 259 proposed privatization, 326–7, 333 Foundation for Common Land, 344 Fowler, Norman, 140 France, 5, 144n1, 188 Fraser, Isabelle, 295–6 free good, land as a, 138, 177 freehold, 8n1, 27, 77, 160n2 Freightliner, 273 French, Nick, 179–80, 185 Friedman, Milton, 51 Fulham, 238 Gardner, Alison, 147 GB Railfreight, 273 Genesis housing association, 236–7 geographic differences, in land value, 115 George, Henry, 51, 86, 109 Germany, 308 Giles, Chris, 18–9, 291 Glass, Ruth, 92 Gleeson, James, 166–7 Glenigan, 169 global financial crisis, 50, 63, 128, 154, 302 Gloucestershire County Council, 258 Goldstein, Jesse, 83 government economy, land disposal and, 152–5 Government Hubs, 183 Government Property Agency (GPA), 182, 183, 219, 220 Government Property Unit (GPU), 122, 157, 182, 183, 184, 219, 253 Greater London Authority (GLA), 167, 220, 221, 315–6, 347 Greater London Council (GLC), 132–3, 297, 298 Greater Manchester Land Commission, 199 The Great Transformation (Polanyi), 26, 65–6, 324 Green, Brian, 32 Green, Philip, 137, 140, 141 green belt, 159–60, 164, 164n3, 165 greenfield land, 95, 130, 159–60, 163 Greenspan, Alan, 104 Green Party (UK), 240 Greenwich Council, 270–1 Grenfell Tower, 195–6 Griffith, Matt, 190n1, 300, 302–3 Grosvenor Group, 298 Guernsey, 195 Guide for the Disposal of Surplus Land, 268–9 Guide for the Disposal of Surplus Property, 141 Hackney, 150, 232n2, 236 Haila, Anne, 20, 141–2 Hall, Stuart, 74–5 Hampshire, 203 Hancock, Matthew, 264 Hands, Guy, 312 Hardin, Garrett, 36, 138 Haringey Council, 325 Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), 325, 333 Harlow, 99 Harrington, Deborah, 269, 318 Harris, Robert, 142 Harvey, David, 9, 12–3, 20, 58–65, 112, 121, 125, 292 Hawke, Bladen Wilmer, 103, 231 Hayek, Friedrich, 294 Healey, John, 228, 320–1n4 Heath, Ted, 112 Hemel Hempstead, 99 Herefordshire, 256 Her Majesty’s (HM) Treasury, 9–10, 122, 153–4, 181–3, 200, 207, 227–8, 231–2, 278 and land disposal proceeds, 212–5 Heseltine, Michael, 118, 156, 188, 225 Hetherington, Peter, 164 Heygate Estate, 313–4 Highland Clearances, 82 Hilferding, Rudolf, 17 Hill, Stephen, 233 Hillier, Meg, 235 Historic Houses Association, 151 hoarding, land. see land hoarding Hodkinson, Stuart, 13 Holloway Prison, 343 Home, Robert, 79, 96, 328 homeownership, growth in, 116 Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), 209, 220, 221, 280, 281, 316, 320 Homes England, 220n2. see also Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) House Builders Federation, 301 housebuilding, 71, 94–6, 131, 146, 168–72, 208–10, 279–86, 300–5. see also property developers House of Lords, 28, 74, 85, 87 Housing Act (1930), 95–6 Housing Act (1980), 204 Housing and Planning Act (2016), 216 housing associations, 145, 213n1, 216, 216n4, 236, 312 Housing Benefit, 129, 271–3, 272n1 housing crisis, 94, 123, 196, 270–1, 279, 319–21 housing land, 2, 98, 114–6, 212–3, 238, 250, 255, 261–2, 288, 325 Housing of the Working Classes Act (1855), 95 Housing Revenue Accounts, 146, 339, 341 Housing Review (2014), 145 Hughes, Robert, 221 Hunter, James, 52–3 Hutton, Will, 315 incentivization, of land disposal, 211–5 ‘inclosure.’ see enclosure movement income inequalities in, 53–4 landownership and, 30–2, 44–8 industrial landowners, 117 inefficiency. see efficiency inequality, land and, 44–57 infrastructure, land requirements for, 40 Infrastructure Act (2015), 151, 220 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), 160, 288 Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), 123, 137–8, 139, 158 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 106, 200 Isle of Man, 195 Islington, 270 Italy, 27 Javid, Sajid, 304–5 Jeffersonian Myth, 27 Jersey, 195 John Lewis/Waitrose, 298 Johnson, Boris, 123, 124 Jones, Carwyn, 170–1 Joseph, Keith, 104 Jowell, Tessa, 195, 196 Kennedy, Charles, 210 Kensington, 196 Kent, 266 Kenya, 5 Keynes, John Maynard, 17 Khan, Sadiq, 283n3, 338 ‘The Kilburn Manifesto,’ 74–5 Kirkaldy, Liam, 52 Kivell, Philip, 50, 64–5, 96, 100, 108 Klopp, Jacqueline, 5 Knight Frank, 167, 217, 219 Knowsley, 332 Kober, Claire, 325 Kramer, Susan, 151, 158 Krutilla, John, 41, 42, 287, 294 Kuwait, 298 labour and value, 33 as ‘fictitious commodity,’ 66 Labour Party (UK), 18–9, 325 land nationalization, 93–4, 97 land policy, 104, 108, 111–4, 170–1, 293n3, 320n4, 336 land privatization, 122, 176n1, 204–5, 228, 238, 251–4, 256 land reform, 93–4, 328 Labour Research Department, 247 La Cava, Gianni, 54 Lafarge, 299, 334–5 Lake District, 344 Lambert Smith Hampton, 219, 266 land and value, 33–4, 48–52, 54–5 as ‘fictitious commodity,’ 66–71 quantity privatized in Britain, 2, 7, 247–58, 322–3 land banking, 299–305 Land Campaign (1913), 88–9 Land Commission (1967), 111–2 land communalization, 46, 50–1 Land Compensation Act (1961), 99n1 land disposal targets, 157, 208–10, 231, 279–86 land hoarding, 126, 130, 132–3, 156, 173, 232, 299 land leasing, 127–8 landlordism, 92–3 land market, 50, 58–64, 71, 287–96, 303 land nationalization, 46–7, 50–1, 93–4, 97, 110, 336, 337–8 landownership enclosure movement, 79–85 financial form, 112–3, 117 history of, in Britain, 73–117 importance of, 23–72 income and, 30–2, 44–8 pleasure and, 35–8 political influence and, 26–8 power and, 28–30 private-sector lobbying around, 124–5 privileges of, 25 wealth and, 32–5, 48–53, 54–6 land privatization in Britain consequences of, 245–321 extent of, 2, 7, 247–58, 322–3 historical background to, 73–117 politics of, 121–6, 240–4, 324–31 processes of, 174–244 resistance to, 22, 105–6, 324–7 ‘land question,’ in Britain, 75, 85–8, 92–6, 108–14, 328–9 land reform, 78, 85–6, 88–9, 93–4, 140, 192, 228, 251, 345–6 Land Reform Act (2003) (Scotland), 228 land registers, 185–200, 186n2 Land Registration Act (2002), 77–8 Land Registry for England and Wales, 193 Land Release Fund, 208 land release strategies, 209 Land Securities Group, 298 Land Settlement Act (1919) (Scotland), 90 Land Settlement Association (LSA), 89–90, 222 land settlements, 89–90, 222–3 land speculation, 50–1, 60–4, 112–4, 164n3, 288–90, 292, 303–4, 347 land taxation, 46–7, 51–2, 77, 88–9, 94, 109–13, 170–1, 292–3 ‘Land Use Futures’ report, 290–1, 335–6, 344–5 land value taxation. see land taxation Lapsley, Irvine, 180 Laurence, Timothy, 154–5 leasehold, 77, 160n2 Leeds, 270 Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 54n1 Legal and General Property, 295, 298 Lend Lease, 124, 313–4, 325, 333 Lenin, Vladimir, 46 Letts, Quentin, 257 Letwin, Oliver, 172, 303 Liberal Democrats (UK), 253 Liberal Party (UK) land policy, 88–9, 92–3 land reform, 86 Linden Homes, 347 Liverpool, 324 Living Wage Campaign, 316–8 Lloyd George, David, 88–9, 92–3, 94, 109 local government financing, 145–7 landholdings, 115, 117, 181, 187–8, 201–3, 209–10, 250, 254–8, 260–2 Local Government Association (LGA), 157, 169, 267–8 Local Government Planning and Land Act (1980), 186, 211, 216, 241 Local Government Transparency Code, 198 Locke, John, 138 London and Amsterdam Trust Company, 298 London Citizens, 317 London Councils, 332 London County Council (LCC), 95 London First, 124, 167 London Investment Property Group, 268 London Land Commission, 331 London Metropolitan Police force, 205–6 London Plan, 290 Lowndes, Vivien, 147 Lyell, Nicholas, 222–3 Lyons, Michael, 145, 164–5, 172, 301, 304 Macpherson, C.B., 57 Maier, Charles, 27 Manchester, 96, 100 Manchester City Council, 100–1 market efficiency. see efficiency market failure, 38–44, 314–7 market-like competition, 140 market rent, 275, 282n2, 339 market value, 141–2, 216, 229–34, 232n3, 265–70, 282–3, 343–4 Martin, Alice, 310 Marx, Karl Capital, 62, 67–8 on enclosure movement, 11, 75, 82–3 on land and value, 33, 35 on landownership, 31, 44–7, 58, 65 The Communist Manifesto, 46–7 Massey, Doreen, 37–8, 52, 112–4, 116–7, 184, 297, 328–9, 339, 341 on land nationalization, 337–8 on neoliberal Britain, 74–5 on public landownership, 38, 107, 141, 226, 327, 339 May, Theresa, 171, 321, 332–3 McCloskey, Donald, 82 McDonald, Andy, 342 McInnes, Liz, 273 McKenzie, William, 151 Meek, James, 143, 145, 255, 272, 273, 294 Private Island, 1–2, 18n2 on privatization, 120 Metropolitan Police, 218–9, 232n2 Miliband, Ed, 170, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 48, 74, 109 Milton Keynes, 99, 272 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foods, 223 Ministry of Defence (MoD), 182–3, 230, 269, 271, 277–9, 283, 303–4, 316–7 landholdings, 12n1, 105–6, 117, 165, 207–8, 249, 252–3, 259, 280 sale of married quarters estate, 154–5, 213–4, 271, 273–6, 311–2 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 198n1. see also Department for Communities and Local Government Ministry of Justice (MoJ), 343 Ministry of Public Building and Works, 101 Ministry of Works, 101 Minton, Anna, 42, 315, 330 MIPIM, 124, 125 Mirowski, Philip, 294 Mitchell, Don, 43 modern-day land barons, 295–6 Molior, 123, 288 monastic lands, appropriation of, 79–80 Monbiot, George, 28, 188–9, 311 Monmouth, 266 monopoly power, 60, 61, 64, 121 Montagu Evans, 219–20 Montgomery, John, 100, 225–6, 283 Moore, Michael, 229 Moore Stephens, 219–20 Morphet, Janice, 146, 319 Morton, Alex, 159 MRH Minerals, 299, 334–5 Municipal Bonds Agency, 147 Mystery of Capital (de Soto), 34–5 National Audit Office (NAO), 122, 154–5, 181–4, 207–8, 276n2 National Coal Board, 97, 133, 247 National Health Service (NHS), 137–8, 140, 150, 152–3, 156, 177–9, 204–6, 210–8, 226 landholdings, 97–8, 104, 131, 148–9, 177, 239, 254, 260, 332–3 nationalization, 97–8, 110, 248, 336. see also land nationalization nationalized industries, 117, 187, 247–51 National Planning Policy Framework, 282n2 National Power, 18 National Trust, 116, 117, 344 NatWest Markets, 274 Naylor, Robert, 153, 156, 206, 214, 218, 332–3 Neil-Gallacher, Ettie, 276 neoliberalism, 14–9, 74–5, 114–7, 125, 148 Network Rail, 248, 273, 331, 341–2 landholdings, 248, 259n1, 259n4, 261, 331 Neutze, Max, 51, 69, 70 Newcastle, 100 New Economics Foundation (NEF), 281–2, 282n2, 325–6 New Life in Old Cities (Steen), 132–3 new towns, 98–9 New Town Development Corporations, 187 New Towns Act (1946), 98–9 Niemitz, Kristian, 158 non-developer financial institutions, 298 Norris, Steve, 233 Northumberland Park, 325 North Yorkshire, 256 Nottingham, 100, 324–5 Notting Hill Housing Group, 312 Nuclear Fuels, 18 Occupy London, 316 O’Connor, Feargus, 86 Office for National Statistics (ONS), 288, 306n1, 308, 309 Office of Fair Trading (OFT), 300, 301, 304 Office of Government Commerce (OGC), 122, 141, 150, 181, 207, 219 offshore money, 191–2 offshore tax havens, 192, 192n2 One Public Estate programme, 157, 182 option agreements, land, 189–90, 190n1, 300 Organ, Diana, 223 Orszag, Peter, 55 Osborne, George, 1, 202, 215–6 Our Ground group, 242, 324, 329, 332 overseas sovereign wealth funds, 298 Packer, Ian, 89, 93 Panama Papers, 192, 193 payment-deferral models, 236 Peck, Jamie, 15, 145, 147 Peel Estates, 299 People with Significant Control (PSC) register, 192, 193, 194 Perry, John, 339 Persimmon, 169 Pidgley, Tony, 236–7 Piketty, Thomas, 25, 54, 54n1 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 53–4 Planning and Housing Committee, 315–6 planning permission, 64, 110–2, 130, 168–72, 234–5, 284–6, 292–3, 300–4 planning system/guidelines, 29, 64, 76, 109–10, 130–1, 158–9, 170, 284–5, 295–6, 313n1 Plender, John, 292–3, 340, 341 Plimmer, Gill, 18–9 Plymouth, 100 Polanyi, Karl, 16–7, 20, 25, 34–6, 41, 60, 67–70, 311–2, 334. see also ‘counter-movement’; double movement’; ‘fictitious commodities’ The Great Transformation, 26, 65–6, 324 Porter, Ted, 277 Powell-Smith, Anna, 194–5 power centralization of, 181–2, 219–21 landownership and, 28–30 Prescott, Jon, 160 Prime Minister’s Office, 174 Prisk, Mark, 133, 334 Private Island (Meek), 1–2, 18n2 private landownership, 37–72, 112–7, 286–96, 296–9, 299–311, 311–6 ‘private-public places,’ 315 private-sector buyers, 224–39, 296–9 privatization. see enterprise privatizations; land privatization in Britain Property Advisers to the Civil Estate (PACE), 226–7 property developers, 42, 107–8, 218– 9, 281–6, 295–6, 312–3, 315. see also housebuilding acquisition of public land, 195, 234–9, 298–9 criticism of planning system, 158–9 land banking, 171–2, 299–305 lobbying by, 123–5 Property Holdings, 181 Property Investment Forum, 295 property-owning democracy, 116 Property Repayment Services (PRS), 178, 179–80 Property Services Agency (PSA), 101, 106, 178–9, 181, 203, 217 Public Accounts Committee, 235, 274, 275, 280, 281, 284, 319 public estate in Britain definition, 6–10 extent of reduction, 2, 7, 247–58, 322–3 growth, 88–101 size, 96, 117, 258–62 Public Health Act (1875), 95 ‘public interest,’ 39 public land disclosure initiatives, 197 public land-for-housing programme, 209–10, 235, 249, 279–86, 300, 303, 331 Public Land Initiative (PLI), 235–6 public landownership, 43–4, 56–7, 64–5, 71, 84–5, 102–8, 330–1, 335–42 critique of, 126–73 public property map, 196–7 public space, 43–4 ‘public works,’ 39 Public Works Loan Board, 146–7, 341, 341n4 Qatari Investment Authority, 298 Quirk, Barry, 237–8 Railtrack group, 248 Rathbone Trust Company, 299 Raynsford, Nick, 229 Readman, Paul, 88–9 Redbridge Council, 271 Redundant Lands and Accommodation (RLA) procedure, 224–7, 231, 337 Regeneration Investment Fund for Wales (RIFW), 265–6 regeneration. see council estates, ‘regeneration’ of Register of Surplus Public Sector Land, 227 Reisman, David, 39, 40 Renfrewshire, 272 rent, 30–2, 44–8, 53–4, 57–64, 78, 305–11 rentier capitalism, 305–11 residential land. see housing land Resource Accounting and Budgeting framework, 179, 199 The Return of Owners of Land, 74, 84, 85, 87, 90 Ricardo, David, 44 right of pre-emption, 228 Right to Buy policy, 144–6, 204, 212, 262, 268, 272–3, 307, 328. see also council housing abolition, 146, 146n3 discounts to market value, 267–8 extension to housing association tenants, 216, 216n4, 255n3 Right to Contest, 134–5, 228–9 Roberts, Allan, 165–6 Rogers, Richard, 160, 161–2, 236 Rogers, Will, 32 Roldugin, Sergei, 193 Ropes & Gray, 194 Rosen, Michael, 150, 173, 318 Rothbard, Murray, 39 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 1 Royal Hospital for Sick Children, 239 Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 216 Royal London Mutual Insurance Society, 298 Royal Mail, 7n1, 18, 200–1, 247 Royal Town Planning Institute, 301 Russian Narodniks, 46 Rustin, Michael, 74–5 saturation surveys, 295 ‘Save Public Land’ campaign, 325–6 Savills, 131, 158, 167, 217, 219, 274 school buildings/playing-fields, 150, 221, 241–2, 249, 256–7, 318–9 School Premises Regulations (1981), 256 Schultz, Ted, 166 Scott, Allen, 59–60, 64, 65 Scottish Land Commission, 345 Scottish Parliament, 28 Scottish Water, 247n1, 259n3, 259n4, 261 Searle, Beverley, 54 Sea Street Developments, 266 SEGRO, 298 Select Committee on Economic Affairs, 282, 283 Sevilla-Buitrago, Alvaro, 13 Seymour, Richard, 2 Shapps, Grant, 157, 158, 168–9, 231 Shaw, Giles, 203 Sheffield, 95 Sheffield City Council, 65n2, 99, 107 Shelter housing charity, 301 Shelton, William, 118 Shorncliffe, 316–7 Shrubsole, Guy, 189, 326–7 Silkin, Lewis, 103 Simmel, Georg, 17 slum clearance, 95–6 Small Holdings and Allotments Act (1908), 70, 205 Smith, Adam, 20, 25, 39, 40, 44, 51, 310, 311 The Wealth of Nations, 57–8, 305 Smulian, Mark, 165 social cleansing, 314 social dislocation, 65–72, 311–21 social housing. see council housing Somerset, 256 South Wales Land Developments, 265–6 Southwark, 124, 161 Southwark Council, 313 Sovereign Land Trust, 320–1n4 space reduction targets, 180–3 Spain, 188 speculation. see land speculation Spelthorne Borough Council, 340 Spending Review (2010), 213 stagflation, 106 Stanley, Edward, 25–6, 28, 31, 85 Steen, Anthony, 134, 159, 163, 334 New Life in Old Cities, 132–3 Stevenage, 99 Stiglitz, Joseph, 51, 54–5 stimulatory economic policy, 102 St.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The average farm in Arvin was nine times the size of the average Dinuba spread, and most of Arvin’s farms were owned and operated by interests outside the community.1 Goldschmidt discovered that Dinuba, with its family-farm economy, enjoyed a better standard of living. Not only was the median income higher in Dinuba, but there was less income inequality as compared with Arvin. That is, extremes of poverty and wealth were less common. More people belonged to the broad middle class and more of those employed in Dinuba controlled their own livelihoods, working either as farmers, small-business owners, or independent professionals. Goldschmidt also found that Dinuba possessed far superior community infrastructure.

Thomas Lyson of Cornell University started designing large-scale statistical studies that would test the relationship between small businesses and social welfare. In one analysis, he examined more than two hundred manufacturing counties nationwide and compared those dominated by one or more large factories with those home to many small firms. He found that the big-business counties had greater income inequality, lower housing standards, more low-birth-weight babies (an indicator of overall health), more worker disability, lower educational outcomes, and higher crime rates. The smallbusiness counties not only scored better on all of these social welfare measures, but their residents belonged to more civic organizations and voted more often.5 Lyson and colleagues Charles Tolbert of Baylor University and Michael Irwin of Duquesne University conducted another analysis of some three thousand counties, looking at the prevalence of locally rooted economic and social institutions, including small manufacturing businesses, small farms, community gathering places (e.g., coƒee shops and taverns), churches, and associations.

The smallbusiness counties not only scored better on all of these social welfare measures, but their residents belonged to more civic organizations and voted more often.5 Lyson and colleagues Charles Tolbert of Baylor University and Michael Irwin of Duquesne University conducted another analysis of some three thousand counties, looking at the prevalence of locally rooted economic and social institutions, including small manufacturing businesses, small farms, community gathering places (e.g., coƒee shops and taverns), churches, and associations. They found that counties that are home to a large number of these local enterprises and institutions generally have higher median incomes, less income inequality, and lower unemployment. The three researchers, along with Troy Blanchard of Mississippi State University and Alfred Nucci, with the U.S. Bureau of the Census, also examined rootedness, finding that counties that have a larger number of long-standing local businesses and community gathering places tend to retain their residents—and the longer people live in a community, the more they participate in local aƒairs and civic organizations.6 In 2005 Tolbert, chair of Baylor’s sociology department, began to analyze the civic and social value of locally owned retail businesses in particular.


pages: 58 words: 18,747

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon cited much data along these lines in a paper asking “Has the Rise in American Inequality Been Exaggerated?” and answering, as you can imagine from the title, that it has been. Many observers have noted that the so-called college wage premium—the gap between what college graduates and those without college degrees earn—has increased over the past thirty or forty years. This increases income inequality. Gordon argues that the real increase in inequality hasn’t been as large as it first appears, noting research from Enrico Moretti and concluding that “fully two-thirds of the previously documented increase in the return to college between 1980 and 2000 vanishes when [Moretti] corrects for differences in the cost of living across metropolitan areas.”


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

As Brad DeLong, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the Clinton-era Treasury, ruefully remarked: “Rubin and us spear carriers moved heaven and earth to restore fiscal balance to the American government in order to raise the rate of economic growth. But what we turned out to have done . . . was to enable George W. Bush’s right-wing class war: his push for greater after-tax income inequality.”37 The question was pressing because following the momentous November 2006 midterms, control of the House and the Senate changed hands. In a turn of events that can only be described as fateful, it would be the Democrats who held power in Congress during the greatest crisis of American capitalism since the 1930s.

The “basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” he declared. Of course, the trend toward growing inequality was not confined to America. But, Obama insisted, there must be no more evasion, “this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country. . . . [S]tatistics show . . . that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina.” Comparable “wealthy allies, countries like Canada or Germany or France . . . have greater mobility than we do, not less.” Half of all Americans would experience poverty during at least one period of their lives. “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”

Summers, “The Inequality Puzzle: Piketty Book Review,” DEMOCRACY: A Journal of Ideas 32 (Spring 2014). 14. E. Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2012 Preliminary Estimates),” UC Berkeley, September 3, 2013 http://eml.berkeley.edu//~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf. 15. T. Piketty and E. Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (2003): 1–39. 16. Saez, “Striking It Richer.” 17. The distortion was caused by the extremely wealthy taking advantage of a Bush-era tax loophole to log their incomes in 2012. By 2015 the share of the top 1 percent in the recovery was down to 52 percent.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It’s also been shown to dampen economic growth. The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations.

Dampening growth: Sean McElwee, “Three Ways Inequality Is Making Life Worse for Everyone,” Salon, Friday, April 3, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/04/03/3_ways_inequality_is_making_life_worse_for_everyone. 248. U.S. most unequal: “Inequality Update,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, November 2016, https://www.oecd.org/social/OECD2016-Income-Inequality-Update.pdf. 248. Comparing nations’ inequality: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rankings. 248. Octopus in a coconut: https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/2969897786390725. ALSO BY JESSICA BRUDER Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man Photographs by Jessica Bruder.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In eastern Contra Costa County, just to the east of San Francisco, there was a 70 percent rise in poverty between 2000 and 2010. During the 2005 school year, 38 percent of students received free or reduced-price school lunch; by 2010, that number was up to 50 percent. These stats are not simply features of broader trends in income inequality or purely consequences of the recession that began in 2008. Yes, poverty has increased everywhere, but in the suburbs it increased at twice the rate it did in cities in the 1980s and 1990s. Fifty-five percent of poor people in metropolitan areas now live in suburbs, and 63 percent of the near-poor (those with incomes of up to twice the federal poverty level) live in the suburbs.

But hardly a peep was heard in the media, and New York politicians seemed unfazed, because New York’s economy had become, first and foremost, a real estate economy, and if real estate was doing fine, then that’s all that seemed to matter. 12 Fight Back Fighting for equitable geographies, for cities in which everyone, regardless of income, can comfortably live, is complicated. What do you fight against? The invasion of hipsters into a neighborhood? Rent increases and evictions? State and city policies? The lack of federal funds for housing? Income inequality? All of it? Pushing back against any of those things in a place such as New York means pushing back against a century of history and a deeply entrenched and wildly profitable real estate market. Since the RPA put out its first regional plan in the 1920s, New York’s governance has been synonymous with a quest for higher real estate values.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Clashes with police, especially in cities like New York and Oakland, were polarizing events that attracted even more public sympathy for the protesters, whose PR savvy and appeals to international counterparts—including Spain’s Indignados movement and those who participated in Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising—expanded the movement’s profile. Soon, income inequality became a national political issue. Less than a month after the protests began, a poll showed that Occupy Wall Street enjoyed 54 percent approval nationwide—more than double the Tea Party’s rating.9 The spirit of the young Occupiers resonated with millions who would never join an urban encampment because it was married to an easily comprehensible populist appeal.

See Britain, history of socialism in; China, history of socialism in; Germany, history of socialism in; Russia, history of socialism in; Sweden, history of socialism in; Third World; United States, history of socialism in Hitler, Adolf, 57, 177, 179 Hobsbawm, Eric, 207–208 Homestead Strike, 162 Howe, Irving, 180 Hundred Flower Campaigns, 148 identity politics, 235–236 ideology differences in, 67–68, 168, 175, 230 ideological kulaks, 102 influence on policy, 98–99, 112–113, 115, 120, 122–123, 152–153 in lieu of incentives, 145, 150 as motivation for socialism, 27–28, 233, 240 See also Marxism immigration, 217 imperialism, 74, 129–131, 147, 156 income inequality in China, 190 and Occupy Movement, 196–198 in Sweden, 119–120 in US, 160, 196–198, 200 incrementalism, 59 Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), Germany, 78 India, 152, 190–191 industrialization in Britain, 38–41, 44 in China, 141–142 in Germany, 52 in Russia, 101–102 in Sweden, 112 in Third World, 156 Industrial Revolution, 38–41, 44 industrial unionism, 169, 177, 182 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 165, 169–170, 171 inflation in Britain, 108, 206–207 in China, 141 and Keynesianism, 109 in Russia, 88 and social democracy, 127, 190 in Sweden, 123 Ingrao, Pietro, 242–243 internationalism of capitalism, 222 foreign aid, 156 influence of Maoism worldwide, 150 international revolution, 87, 96–97, 100, 103 and peace, 72, 241–242 and revolution, 87, 96–97, 100, 103 Russia-China relations, 134–136, 142, 147–148 See also Communist International (Comintern) International Workers Congresses of Paris, 56 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 43 intersectionality, 202 Ireland, 38 iron law of wages, 53, 54, 162 IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), 165, 169–170, 171 Jacobin (magazine), 231 Japan, 133–134, 139 Jaurès, Jean, 75–76, 106 Jena Congress, 68, 70 Jiang Qing, 148 Jiangxi Soviet, 137 Jim Crow, 118, 183 Jospin, Lionel, 126 JPMorgan, 193, 204–205 Judaism, 110, 211 Junkers, 52, 57, 72 Kamenev, Lev, 89–90, 92 Kautsky, Karl on class, 225 criticism of Bernstein, 63–64 and Debs, 167 establishment of Erfurt Program, 58–59 on governance, 106, 107 and Lenin, 83 and SPD, 59–60, 74, 75 Trotsky on, 84–85 and war vote, 78, 84–85 Keller, Helen, 170 Kennedy, Ted, 185 Kerensky, Alexander, 89, 92 Keynes, John Maynard, 109 Keynesianism, 109, 194, 207 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 183, 235 Kissinger, Henry, 151 KMT (Kuomintang).


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“business is to increase its profits”: Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html [inactive]. result of success is uninspiring: Scott Winship, “What Really Happened to Income Inequality in the 20th Century?” The Atlantic, May 14, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/what-really-happened-to-income-inequality-in-the-20th-century/257156. “Saying that the purpose of a company”: Kevin Laws, “Successful Startups Don’t Make Money Their Primary Mission,” Harvard Business Review, July 10, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/07/successful-startups-dont-make-money-their-primary-mission.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Or at least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe. In reality, here’s how it works: Poor people pay little. Middle-class people pay more. Rich people use tricks and loopholes (bought with their lobbyist friends) to pay as little tax as possible while the rest of us pick up the slack. This is a major contributing factor to income inequality in the United States. The more money you have, the more loopholes are available to you. And as a result, the less taxes you pay. And as a result, you make more money. It’s a vicious cycle. Oh, and by the way, it’s all completely legal. I spent a significant part of my life being angry at these rich bastards exploiting the system.

See also dope on dopamine Harris, Ed, 48 Harvey, Paul, 49 health insurance, 219, 225–31, 231, 249 Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), 228–29, 231 Hedonic Treadmill, 62–63, 64, 65 Helmsley, Leona, 121, 123 Hemingway, Ernest, 12 high-deductable health plans (HDHPs), 228–29, 231 high-maintenance items, reducing, 73–75, 74, 77 high-yield vs. corporate bonds, 182–83 Hoarding Mind-set, 158–61, 169 Home Country Bias, 106–7 homeowner’s insurance, 81, 82, 82, 83–84, 84, 86, 222, 231 a house is not an investment, 44, 74–75, 78–88, 139, 169, 174, 181, 186, 222 the Hustlers (millionaires), 270, 270–71, 274, 275 identity, loss of, the fear it generates, 248, 251–55, 252 IMGlobal, 230–31 “Immigrant Money Rebound Effect,” 55 income, personal finance, 268–69, 269, 270–72 Income-Based Repayment (IBR), 40, 41, 45 Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR), 41, 41 income inequality in US, 122 income (regular) and taxes, 137, 138–39, 140, 142, 154 income types and taxes, 137, 137–38 indexes, choosing which to track (Step 2 of Modern Portfolio Theory), 106–8, 107–8, 120 index investing, 93–99, 95–96, 100, 117–19, 166, 176, 179–81, 205, 207, 271, 274 individual retirement accounts (IRAs), 125, 126, 127, 128–30, 130, 135.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

In consequence, economists have largely ignored ethical aspects of taxation. As advisors to ministries of finance, they quite often propose taxes that breach promises that they consider to have been foolish (and quite probably they are right in this judgement). Indeed, economists appear to think that they have addressed ethical issues merely by considering income inequality, which is analysed through the standard Utilitarian calculus.* As Jonathan Haidt has found, for most people fairness means proportionality and desert, rather than equality. Yet they have been ignored.4 Forget desert: if the idle have less money than the hard worker, a transfer raises ‘utility’.

Many people find themselves in jobs that offer too little opportunity for self-respect: they contain insufficient skill for it to be a source of pride, or they lack the satisfaction that comes from knowing that what you do contributes to society. This, rather than simply the differences in pay packets, is the crux of the failures by which divergences between families become divergences between jobs. The income inequalities matter and get larger as life progresses through to retirement. But if they are only addressed by redistribution, not only will the required taxation-cum-benefits be enormous, the core deficiency of purpose, or meaning, will be accentuated. Many people will be living on the productivity of others.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

Somewhere in the interaction between money, institutions and values, the system manufactures poverty: either because of speculation, debt, unfair trade rules, loopholes in the tax system or the slow, sclerotic narrowing of local life and work. Recent research at the World Bank, released at the end of 2007, suggests that income inequality and absolute poverty in the world are very much worse than anybody thought.8 The problem with World Bank estimates of absolute poverty (living on less than $1 a day) is that they relied on calculations of what the equivalent of a US dollar was in some of the most impoverished economies in the world, a formula known as ‘purchasing power parity’.

Some Japanese firms voluntarily impose pay ratios limiting the gap between top and bottom pay. US basketball teams take a total remuneration package and pool it between players, with limits on any individual’s pay. A minimum wage was one of the key achievements of New Labour’s first term. Now it could tackle income inequality from the other end and propose a maximum wage. It matters both because the economic case for high executive pay in terms of company performance doesn’t hold up, and because highly unequal societies have a habit of falling apart. 20 Take a ‘five-a-day’ approach to well-being to help beat the negative psychological effects of recession and build resilience In the midst of the current economic gloom, the five ways to well-being recommendations, based on current well-being research, and developed by nef for the government’s Foresight Programme’s Mental Capital and Well-being Project, provide a range of simple steps that have nothing to do with spending money or consuming goods.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

From the 1970s to the turn of the century, mental illness in children and adults in developed countries doubled. A quarter of Britons now suffer emotional distress. Americans are three times more likely to be depressed today than in the 1950s. The level of emotional illness, it turns out, increases with income inequality, which also tends to be higher in English-speaking nations. The more a society becomes like the most wasteful, status-obsessed and materialistic country on Earth – the United States – the higher the rate of emotional distress. The unavoidable conclusion is one of the darkest sides of materialism: that mass production and mass consumption, ultimately, cause mass depression.

“From the 1970s to the turn of the century, mental illness in children and adults in developed countries doubled. A quarter of Britons now suffer emotional distress. Americans are three times more likely to be depressed today than in the 1950s. The level of emotional illness, it turns out, increases with income inequality, which also tends to be higher in English speaking nations. The more a society becomes like the United States of America – the most wasteful, most status-obsessed and most materialistic country on Earth – the higher the rate of emotional distress.” Source: Oliver James, Affluenza (London: Vermilion, 2007).


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

The centerpiece of the SEIU’s campaign was a 42-page report, released in April 2007, called “Beyond the Buyouts,” which underlined the scope of private equity’s ownership and question some of its methods, particularly in light of the workers at private-equity-owned companies. The tone was sweeping and focused largely on the wealth gap that would several years later become the centerpiece of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “These profits come during a period of historic income inequality in America, at a time when millions of Americans are working harder and harder for less, with less health care, less retirement security, and less time to spend with their children,” according to the report.14 The report went on to give a primer on the LBO business and provided snapshots of five of the biggest firms.

As we’ve seen, carried interest is the portion of the private-equity equation that creates the extraordinary wealth for the industry’s practitioners. Normally, any discussion of taxes leaves most of us desperate for a change in subject. In this case, the private-equity tax question became a touchstone for a broader debate about income inequality and class, viewed in the hothouse of a presidential election year. How the question is ultimately answered touches on some of the basic economics of how the private-equity money flows back to its most successful players. The question dates back decades, to the earliest days of the industry.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

This dynamic can influence us in measurably silly ways. Dutch psychologists, for example, found that if students were asked to describe a situation that made them feel powerless, they were more likely to subsequently believe conspiracy theories about a controversial train line near campus. Moments of rapid industrialization and income inequality—like Rowbotham’s and arguably our own—are prime sources of precarity and uncertainty. In the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, for example, newspapers logged a spike in conspiracy-minded letters to the editor, which contemporary researchers attribute to laborers’ worries that new technologies would cast them into unemployment.

Trump, whose chaotic presidency was guided by some of the United States’ darkest tendences, might be seen as both a product and an accelerator of those paranoid conditions. He rose to political prominence while pushing a conspiracy theory that falsely claimed Barack Obama, the first Black president, was not born in the United States. Trump and other Western right-wing populists who won elections in the mid-2010s did so in a time of surging income inequality, accompanied by growing fears, on the right, of immigration. Across the pond, following a Away from the Edge 197 sustained disinformation campaign that maligned Muslims and immigrants, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016. A 2018 University of Cambridge study found that Trump and Brexit voters were much more likely than their opponents’ supporters to believe conspiracy theories about immigration, with nearly half of Trump and Brexit voters believing the government was hiding “the truth” about immigration.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

They’re also quite warm toward top-down censorship, designed to stymie those moral opponents. American progressives in the early twentieth century felt the euphoric intoxication of the Utopian Impulse. The early American progressives identified the state as the solution to a variety of social ills: income inequality and exploitation of labor, under-education and even intellectual deficiency. Concerns about individual rights were secondary; the Declaration of Independence and its guarantees of natural liberty were hackneyed; the Constitution itself was a mere constraint on the possibility of utopia. Woodrow Wilson suggested that the state was the repository of all possibility, championing the notion that “all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view, and that the State consider itself bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of private interests.”

Academy president David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson explained, “We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting, essential change in our industry.”1 The standards were superfluous: Hollywood has long dedicated itself to the simple proposition that prestige pictures must fulfill leftist messaging requirements, and moneymakers must please the public. Sometimes prestige pictures are moneymakers. Generally, they aren’t: superhero movies bring in the dollars, and Moonlight brings the critical plaudits. The last four Best Pictures winners are, in reverse chronological order, a morality tale about the evils of income inequality (Parasite); a morality tale about racism and homophobia (Green Book); a morality tale about the evils of the military, and discrimination against the disabled, blacks, homosexuals, communists, and fish (The Shape of Water); and a morality tale about racism and homophobia (Moonlight). None of this means all these movies are necessarily bad (although The Shape of Water is indeed one of the worst movies ever committed to film).


pages: 92

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

Recent research suggests that a bright child from a deprived background will have fallen behind a less bright but more affluent child by the age of six, and the gap will simply widen in subsequent years. This winter, 4.5 million people will only be able to the social crisis afford to heat one room in their homes. If you are disabled you are now twice as likely to be poor than if you are not. Income inequality is higher than when Labour came to power and higher than at any time under 17 years of Tory rule and Thatcher.40 Taking all taxes together, the poorest 20 per cent pay 36.4 per cent of their income in tax, compared to just 35.6 per cent for the richest 20 per cent.41 Council housing waiting lists have grown by 77 per cent since 199742 and the number of households in temporary accommodation has more than doubled.43 It is clear to any impartial observer that across health, education, housing, taxes, benefits and crime, even after 12 years of Labour government, Britain remains marked by social division.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

In the absence of much dynamism in the real economy, loose monetary policy had simply served to prop up asset prices and facilitate what would in any other context look like unsustainable levels of borrowing. Wages in Britain were no higher than they had been in 2007 – a trend that made the ten years since the crash the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars. Income inequality, meanwhile, was rising – new evidence disproves the received wisdom that it had remained broadly stable since the 1990s.42 Wealth inequality was even more extreme, as a small number of extremely rich individuals owned and controlled our corporations, our banks and our land.43 It had become impossible for young people to acquire capital in the way that their parents did.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

The patterns strongly suggest that the forces of globalization including high global interest rates, debt crises, and shock liberalizations are associated with rising inequality in pay structures. Pay is, of course, the major component of income, and if pay inequalities are rising, it is a good bet that broader income and social inequalities are rising too.” Examining inequality within countries presents a more mixed picture. In the last two decades, income inequality has risen in China, India, and most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as in a number of Latin American countries. In the cases of China and India, extraordinary growth has been heavily concentrated in urban areas, widening the income gap with rural regions. In many countries, inequality has remained relatively stagnant, however, and it appears actually to have declined in a number of both industrialized and developing countries, including Italy, Japan, Bangladesh, Ghana, and the Philippines.

Finally, still others saw it as part of a cycle of self-congratulatory self-dealing among a small community of business leaders who ran companies and served on the boards that approved compensation packages. Whatever the real reasons, the upward spiral of executive pay has in turn triggered another even more high-profile debate. WAR OF THE RICH AND THE SUPERRICH? The prominence of this second debate derives from the fact that while global income inequality and the plight of the world’s poorest are the stuff of lively debate among economists, NGOs, and the philanthropically inclined, it suffers from lack of broader awareness. The people most directly involved are far away and poor—not exactly the type of audience that attracts advertisers in rich countries.

., “Globalization’s Gains Come with a Price,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2007. 66 The World Bank’s Branko Milanovic Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39. 67 with the Gini for all adults in the world nearly sixty-five Ibid., 108. 67 Professor James Galbraith James K. Galbraith, “By the Numbers,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002, 178-83. 68 In the last two decades, income inequality Birdsall, “The World Is Not Flat.” 68 Emmanuel Saez of the University of California Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Spring 2006, 204. See also Emmanuel Saez, “Income and Wealth Concentration in a Historical and International Perspective,” UC Berkeley and National Bureau of Economic Research, February 21, 2004. 69 As The New York Times explains in its series “Class War” Eric Konigsberg, “A New Class War: The Haves vs. the Have Mores,” New York Times, November 19, 2006. 69 Similar phenomena can be found in Britain “The Super-Rich: Always with Us,” Economist, October 19, 2006. 70 The Economist explains that the meritocratic Ibid. 70 Matt Miller wrote Matt Miller, “Revolt of the Fairly Rich,” Fortune, October 30, 2006. 70 he follows two individuals who both went to Harvard A recent study at Ohio State University, by the way, undercut a core assumption about the “smart” part of the equation.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

In practice, most of the world is now integrated into a Western economic system in which, as Smith recommended, the market sets most of the prices and determines the flow of trade and division of labour, but government plays a role closer to the one envisaged by Keynes, intervening to try to smooth the business cycle and reduce income inequality. As for non-economic institutions, there is no debate worth having. All over the world, universities are converging on Western norms. The same is true of the way medical science is organized, from rarefied research all the way through to front-line healthcare. Most people now accept the great scientific truths revealed by Newton, Darwin and Einstein and, even if they do not, they still reach eagerly for the products of Western pharmacology at the first symptom of influenza or bronchitis.

Tooze, Wages of Destruction. 80. For further details, see Ferguson, War of the World. 81. Harrison, Economics of World War II. 82. Westad, Global Cold War. 83. Ferguson, War of the World, pp. 606–17. 84. Data from Singer and Small, Correlates of War. 85. Piketty and Saez, ‘Income Inequality’, esp. figure 20. 86. Hyman, ‘Debtor Nation’. 87. I am grateful to my colleague Diego Comin for these figures. 88. Sullivan, Jeans, pp. 9, 77. 89. Ibid., pp. 214f. 90. ‘Coca-Cola as Sold Throughout the World’, Red Barrel, 8, 3 (March 1929). 91. See Allen, Secret Formula, p. 325. 92.

Hunt, ‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English Cotton Textile Industry, 1660–1774’, Economic History Review, 44, 3 (1991), 395–423 Okuefuna, David, The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age (London, 2008) Parthasarathi, Prasannan, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India’, Past & Present, 158 (1998), 79–109 Piketty, Thomas and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998’, NBER working paper no. 8467 (2001) Poiger, Uta G., Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2000) Pollard, Sidney, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 1981) Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ‘Rock Music in Czechoslovakia’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1994) 55–72 Safanov, Mikhail, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution’, History Today (Aug. 2003): http://www.historytoday.com Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1979) Siefert, Marsha, ‘From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia’, in Alexander Stephan (ed.), The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (Oxford, 2006), 185–217 Singer, J.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Harold Macmillan, speech at Bedford, 20 July 1957, quoted in ‘More Production “the Only Answer to Inflation”’, The Times (22 July 1957), p. 4. 4. A.B. Atkinson and A. Brandolini, ‘On Data: A Case Study of the Evolution of Income Inequality across Time and across Countries’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 33, no. 3 (2006), fig. 1, p. 383. While Atkinson and Brandolini make the point that the Gini index of income inequality continued to fall during the 1950s before tax, it is clear that after tax the gap between the income groups widened. This was due to Conservative taxation policies which benefited the middle and upper classes, as I discuss later in this chapter.

Many academics and journalists agreed that class simply didn’t matter any more. And yet in the early twenty-first century polls suggested that more than half of British people still considered themselves working class.1 Britain was an increasingly unequal society. In 1979 the Gini index, which measures income inequality, stood at 29 in Britain. By 2010 it had risen to 36. Partly this is because the poorest 10 per cent of people got poorer. But it is also because a tiny elite concentrated greater amounts of wealth in their own hands. During the 1990s and 2000s, the richest 10 per cent – a group of business leaders, corporate professionals, financiers, press barons and aristocrats – enjoyed far bigger rises in their income than any other group.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

The top 1 per cent earned 7.02 per cent of national income, nearly twice the 3.97 per cent they received in 1981, while the top 0.1 per cent obtained 2.19 per cent, nearly three times the 0.77 per cent they obtained in 1986. The top 0.01 per cent took home 0.75 per cent, nearly five times the 0.17 per cent they got in 1980. Looking at the Gini coefficient, a measure of a society’s overall income inequality, Britain and Italy are the most unequal societies in western Europe, while Denmark is the most equal, with Sweden just behind.722 The distribution of wealth is generally much more unequal. And as Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has pointed out, as growth slows and with it the creation of new wealth, old (inherited) fortunes weigh more heavily than before.723 A decent society should want to encourage effort and enterprise – by everyone, not just those who end up billionaires – without rewarding undeserved or unearned income.

Austria 1.3 per cent, Belgium 0.5 per cent, Denmark 0.9 per cent, Finland 1.1 per cent, France 0.7 per cent, Germany 1 per cent, Greece 1.2 per cent, Iceland 2 per cent, Ireland 2.4 per cent, Italy 0 per cent, Netherlands 0.9 per cent, Norway 0.1 per cent, Portugal 1.6 per cent, Spain 1.4 per cent, Sweden 1.5 per cent, Switzerland 0.6 per cent, UK 0.9 per cent, US 1.7 per cent and eurozone 0.9 per cent. 99 Federal Statistical Office of Germany, index of real earnings, January 2010 = 100. Index for 1999 and 2000 is 102.1; index for 2007 is 98.2; index for 2012 is 101.7. Kaja Bonesmo Fredriksen, “Income Inequality in the European Union”, OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 952, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k9bdt47q5zt-en 100 Philippe Fargues and Ashley McCormick, “Ageing of skills and complementary immigration in the EU, 2010–2025”. Draft paper prepared for discussion at the MPC Annual Conference (EUI, Florence, 21 June 2013). 101 Business investment (gross fixed capital formation by non-financial corporations) averaged 22.3 per cent of GDP in the eurozone in 1999–2001 and 18.9 per cent in Britain.

In the UK it was $24,119. www.gapminder.org 530 GDP per person in Estonia was $7,734 in 1994 and $18,858 in 2012 in 2005 dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power. www.gapminder.org 531 GDP per person in Estonia was $6,976 in 1994 and $11,058 in 2012 in 2005 dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power. www.gapminder.org 532 GDP per person in Ireland was $38,856 in 2005 dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power in 2012, up from $18,869 in 1994. www.gapminder.org 533 GDP per person in Spain was $26,458 in 2005 dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power in 2012, up from $18,783 in 1994. www.gapminder.org 534 GDP per person in Britain was $31,295 in 2005 dollars adjusted for differences in purchasing power in 2012, up from $24,119 in 1994. www.gapminder.org 535 Kaja Bonesmo Fredriksen, “Income Inequality in the European Union”, OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 952, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k9bdt47q5zt-en 536 Personal calculations from Eurostat, median equivalised net income, at purchasing power standard. Code: ilc_di03 537 Personal calculations from Eurostat, income of first decile, top cut-off point, at purchasing power standard Code: ilc_di01 538 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776 539 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith also argued that people had regard for others: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.


pages: 499 words: 152,156

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

conceptual framework, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, financial independence, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, land reform, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, Mohammed Bouazizi, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rolodex, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

FIVE NO LONGER A SLAVE When Deng Xiaoping declared that it was time to “let some people get rich first,” he didn’t say which people. It was up to them to figure it out. Before that, the Party’s first and most enduring target had been the tyranny of class. Mao dismantled four million private businesses, nationalized assets, and flattened society so thoroughly that China’s income inequality fell to the lowest level in the socialist world. Students were taught that the bourgeoisie and other “class enemies” were “blood suckers” and “vermin.” The zeal reached its greatest intensity during the Cultural Revolution, when the military went so far as to eliminate rank, until this created chaos on the battlefield and soldiers had to identify one another by the number of pockets on their uniforms.

” * * * Despite the failure of the jasmine protests, organizers called for another attempt the following weekend. A notice on overseas Chinese sites said, “The rights of the Chinese people are something the Chinese people themselves must fight for.” It called on the Party to create an independent judiciary, to fight income inequality and corruption, and if it could not, to “exit the stage of history.” In their choice of slogans, the organizers combined the practical (“We want to work, we want housing!”) with the abstract (“We want fairness, we want justice!”). Just as Chinese students abroad had played a vital role in the nationalist uprising a few years earlier, now another side of that cohort was speaking up.

THE HARD TRUTH To understand the changes in opportunity and mobility in China, I relied on many studies, including Cathy Honge Gong, Andrew Leigh, and Xin Meng, “Intergenerational Income Mobility in Urban China,” Discussion Paper no. 140, National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, University of Canberra, 2010; James J. Heckman and Junjian Yi, “Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Inequality in China,” NBER Working Paper no. 18100, May 2012; John Knight, “Inequality in China: An Overview,” World Bank, 2013; Yingqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, “Inequality of Opportunity and Income Inequality in Nine Chinese Provinces, 1989–2006,” China Economic Review 21, no. 4 (2010): 607–16. I am thankful for Martin Whyte’s advice and judgment on this subject. 19. THE SPIRITUAL VOID For background on faith in China before and after 1949, including the lost temples of Beijing, Mao’s cult of personality, and the violence that stemmed from it, I relied on Geremie Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY, and London: M.E.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

And a video game maker, robotics manufacturer, grocery store owner—and on and on. While Amazon seduced investors and customers, it also moved to the center of an acrimonious political struggle that had the potential to redefine free market capitalism. Its vocal critics believed that such brazen accumulation of wealth and power had a significant cost, exacerbating income inequality and stacking the odds against workers and locally owned businesses. “Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren at the debut of her unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2019. “Amazon crushes small companies by copying the goods they sell on the Amazon Marketplace and then selling its own branded version.”

In the midst of this ascendency, a reckoning was finally at hand. Americans and Europeans tend to lionize the business triumphs of their shrewdest entrepreneurs. But they are also inherently skeptical of large, distant corporations and can be downright vituperative toward the exceedingly wealthy, particularly at a time of grotesquely widening income inequality. And so the dual rise of Jeff Bezos’s fortune and his company’s market cap generated not just plaudits for a historic business accomplishment but also an incongruous amount of anger. In the final years of the company’s most prosperous decade, there was a dawning sense that the system was rigged, that consumers and smaller firms were caught in Amazon’s merciless grip, and that it and other tech giants were swallowing the economy whole.

had found an ingenious solution: Cecelia Kang, “Amazon to Deliver on Sundays Using Postal Service Fleet,” Washington Post, November 13, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/amazon-to-deliver-on-sundays-using-postal-service-fleet/2013/11/10/e3f5b770-48c1-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html (January 23, 2021). Economists called this kind of arrangement: David Weil, The Fissured Workplace (Harvard University Press, 2014). Weil further elucidates these ideas in “Income Inequality, Wage Determination and the Fissured Workplace,” in After Picketty (Harvard University Press, 2017), 209. purchased thousands of truck trailers: Jason Del Rey, “Amazon Buys Thousands of Its Own Truck Trailers as Its Transportation Ambitions Grow,” Vox, December 4, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/11621148/amazon-buys-thousands-of-its-own-trucks-as-its-transportation (January 24, 2021).


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A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic by Nicholas Eberstadt, Nick Eberstadt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, family office, income inequality, informal economy, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, reserve currency, women in the workforce, working-age population

President Obama’s momentous recent campaign speech, in Roanoke, Virginia on July 13, 2012, insinuating that entrepreneurs had not achieved their own accomplishments on their own, but rather owed their wealth to preexisting government expenditures70 on infrastructure and in their own upbringing, not only writes a narrative by which today’s American wealth may be attributed to government entitlement programs, but also opens the rhetorical door to almost limitless extractions from the well-to-do on the grounds that their success is not really theirs to enjoy. The second would be the brute facts of rising calendar-year income dispersion in modern America, and seemingly ever greater year-to-year volatility in household earnings.71 With more or less steadily rising “income inequality” by such metrics (though not by all metrics regarding economic inequality72) the call may gradually grow for explicitly redistributionist policies—whether to redress purportedly embedded structural defaults in our economic system, or to stimulate prosperity through neo-Keynesian spending schemes, or both.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The list of most frequently mentioned demands debated in various occupations hints at the extraordinary diversity of the movement’s targets: controlling financial speculation, particularly high frequency trading; auditing the Federal Reserve; addressing the housing crisis; regulating overdraft fees; controlling currency manipulation; opposing the outsourcing of jobs; defending collective bargaining and union rights; reducing income inequality; reforming tax law; reforming political campaign finance; reversing the Supreme Court’s decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations; banning bailouts of companies; controlling the military-industrial complex; improving the care of veterans; limiting terms for elected politicians; defending freedom on the Internet; assuring privacy on the Internet and in the media; combating economic exploitation; reforming the prison system; reforming health care; combating racism, sexism, and xenophobia; improving student loans; opposing the Keystone pipeline and other environmentally predatory projects; enacting policies against global warming; fining and controlling BP and similar oil spillers; enforcing animal rights; supporting alternative energy sources; critiquing personal leadership and vertical authority, beginning with a new democratic culture in the camps; and watching out for co-optation in the political system (as happened with the Tea Party).

Available at: <http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1>. “By the Numbers.” (2011) Demos. Available at: <http://archive.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm>. Gilson, D. (2011) Charts: Who are the 1%? Mother Jones. Available at: <http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/one-percent-income-inequality-OWS>. Gosztola, K. (2011-2012) The dissenter. Fire Dog Lake. Available at: <http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/>. InterOccupy: Connecting Occupations. Available at: <http://interoccupy.org/>. Kilkenny, A. (2011) Occupy Wall Street: Searching for hope in America. The Nation. Available at: <http://www.thenation.com/blog/163462/occupywallstreet-searching-hope-america>.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

., 15, 50, 56, 187, 190 Chinatown Bus effect and, 47 gerrymandering and, xvi, 182–87, 189 of 2012, 7, 37–38, 184–85 Elks Lodges, 44, 116 e-mail, xi, 8, 109–10, 125, 145 End of History, The (Fukuyama), 230–31 England, xii, 81, 82, 157, 158, 166–67, 179, 194 entrepreneurialism, 82, 164 ethnicity, 32, 79, 147, 148, 231, 237 ethnic tensions, 4, 39 Europe, 81, 226, 230, 232 evangelism, 42, 71 evolution, 90–91 expectations, 30, 60, 70–71, 82 Facebook, 37–38, 45, 48, 108, 114, 124–25, 140, 145, 148–49, 152, 190, 194, 219 faith, loss of, xv, xvii, xviii, 14, 181–82, 193, 195 family, 70, 119, 125, 129, 139, 194 affirmation and, 104–7 extended (traditional), 12, 15, 16, 26–27, 68, 97, 106 health care and, 201, 210 income inequality and, 21–22 nuclear, 16, 26, 32, 84, 145 in Saturn model, 95, 96 single-parent, 26, 30–31, 43, 105, 216 Farmer, Paul, 64 fathers, 12, 106, 131 of author, 132–33, 134, 240 fax machines, 16, 35, 74 fear, 71, 84, 119, 128, 157, 233, 235 of hitchhiking, 133, 134, 135 homosexuality and, 42 quality of life and, 50–52, 55–57, 60 Federal Express, 147–48 Ferguson, Niall, 229 Fiddler on the Roof (musical), 69–70 filibuster, xvi, 182, 185, 188, 191, 248n Filter Bubble, The (Pariser), 37 Fiorina, Morris, 139 First Wave society, 16, 20, 31–32, 233 Fischer, Claude, 87, 88, 105, 106, 128–29, 237–38 Fishkin, James, 192–93 Florida, Richard, 83, 175 food, 51, 58, 62, 79, 136–37, 202 brain and, 90–91 see also agriculture Ford, Gerald, 47 Fortune, 4–5, 14 Fowler, James, 96 Fox News, 184, 187–88 France, 80 Franklin, Rosalind, 161 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 7, 133–34 freedom, 25, 26, 43, 49, 52, 60, 67, 82, 102, 161, 207 French and Indian War, 157 Friedman, Thomas, xiv, 17–21, 24, 141–42, 151–52, 240 friends, 8, 12, 24, 25, 91, 95, 99–100, 101, 119, 120, 122, 124, 152, 194 affirmation from, 102–3, 104, 107, 110, 111 agreement of, 148–49 health care and, 201, 210 Fukuyama, Francis, 230–31 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 52 Gans, Herbert, 144–45 Gates, Bill, 10 gay marriage, 42, 50, 69 GDP (gross domestic product), 17, 53, 99, 180, 198, 227, 230 gemeinschaft, 86 General Social Survey, 105, 119–20, 260n–61n generational succession, 135 genetics, 160–62 genius, 159, 160, 162 Genovese, Kitty, 84–85 Georgetown University, 118 gerrymandering, xvi, 182–87, 189 ghettos, 128 Gingrich, Newt, 14, 15 Gini coefficient, 22, 23 Girls (TV show), 30 Gladwell, Malcolm, 6, 91–92 globalization, 17–18, 20, 50, 138, 141, 152, 221 global village, 16, 142–43 Google, 37, 194 government, U.S., xii–xviii, 52, 67, 200, 234 dysfunction of, 181–90 French government compared with, 80 health care and, 201–5 public frustration with, xiv–xvii, 181–83, 195 urban decay and, 127 Graduate, The (movie), 4, 28, 30, 248n Granovetter, Mark, 168–69, 266n Great Depression, 60, 68, 85, 202–6, 210, 226 Greatest Generation, 51, 70 Great Migration, 40–41, 43, 137 Great Recession, xv, 54, 55, 62, 106 Great Society, 210, 255n Gresens, Mr., 220–22, 225 grit, 5, 6, 216–25 Grove, Andy, 10 Guest, Avery, 118 Gutenberg, Johann, 162 “habits of the heart,” 81, 89, 115, 138, 258n Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 65–66, 141, 258n Hampton, Keith, 118–19 Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), 222, 224 health, health care, 101, 197–211 costs of, 198–200, 204–5, 206, 209–10 public, 197, 199, 204 quality of life and, 31, 51, 52, 57–60, 204 Hearst, William Randolph, 188 heart attack, 58, 200, 207 Heckman, James, 223 helicopter parent, 106 Henry, Peter Blair, 179–81 history, 51, 59, 67, 68, 230–34 affirmation and, 109, 110 of American community, 79–89 Dunbar’s number and, 94 Tofflers’ view of, 15–16 hitchhiking, 132–35 Hoffman, Dustin, 28 homogeneity, 46–47, 135, 147–48, 189, 191 homophobia, 42, 43, 51 homosexuality, 42–43, 87, 88 hospitals, 197, 199–204, 206–7 House of Representatives, U.S., xvi, 182, 184–85, 186 Hout, Mike, 237–38 Hughes, Charles Evans, 187 Hunter, James Davison, 69 hunter-gatherers, 16, 92, 142, 144–45 Hussein, Saddam, 67 Hutterites, 94 identity, 20, 42, 74, 130, 146 immigrants, 79, 82–83, 88, 232 income, xv, 21, 147, 180, 216, 227 discretionary, 55 inequality and, 21–24, 31 national, 21–22, 54 online communities and, 250n working women and, 27, 28 independence, 28–29, 30, 52, 57, 60, 106, 138, 151 of elderly, 197, 203, 207, 208–9 individualism, 65–66, 73, 74, 102 networked, 111 industrial paradigm, 14–15, 26, 82, 84–87, 170–71, 233 Industrial Revolution, xiii, 4, 16, 85, 86, 127, 138, 166, 201 inequality, economic, 21–24, 26, 31 information, 6–8, 18, 21, 26, 138, 260n brought together in a new way, 159–66, 209 Chinatown bus effect and, 35–38 information technology, 13, 16, 125, 141–43, 187, 209 affirmation and, 103–4, 108, 109–10 online communities and, 114–15 infrastructure, xiv, xv, xvi, 11, 25, 45, 194, 236 decay of, 229, 230 health, 200–201, 203–4, 206, 210 Inglehart, Ronald, 67–69, 73 inner directedness, 5–7 inner-ring relationships, see intimate relationships innovation, xiii, xvii, xviii, 158–75, 209 intellectual cross-fertilization, 158–68 interdependence, 17, 85–86 intermarriage: educational, 43–44 racial, 68 Internet, 10, 18, 36, 37, 121, 125, 146, 250n interracial marriage, 68 intimate relationships (inner-ring relationships), 92, 93, 96, 119–20, 137, 138–39, 145, 238 affirmation and, 103–7, 110, 112, 115 Chinatown Bus effect and, 42–46 health care and, 201, 204, 210 see also marriage iPhones, 160, 231 Iraq, 67 isolation: intellectual, 176 social, 73, 87, 113, 115, 118–19, 122, 127, 149, 207 Issacson, Walter, 164 Italy, 17, 163 It Gets Better Project, 43 Jackson, Kenneth, 40 Jacobs, Jane, 85–88, 127, 166–68, 170, 176 Jamaica, 179–81, 191 James, LeBron, 8–9 Japan, 226, 233 Jews, Orthodox, 98–99 jobs, 18–20, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 131, 139, 170–71, 235–36, 260n–61n affirmation and, 104–5, 107 assembly line, 53, 85 exporting of, 197–98 service, 18–19, 53, 132, 138, 236 Jobs, Steve, 10, 64, 160, 164–65 Johansson, Frans, 163, 168, 172 Johnson, Lyndon B., 127, 187, 210 Johnson, Steven, 159 Kahneman, Daniel, 13 Kelling, George, 150 Kelly, Mervin, 164 Kennedy, Robert, 206 Kenner, Edward, 158, 159 Kentucky, 147–48 Kerry, John, 47 Keynes, John Maynard, 53 Khrushchev, Nikita, 56 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 24, 46, 108–9, 128, 238 King, Stephen, 123 Kiwanis Club, 44, 45, 116 “Knowledge Is Power Program” (KIPP), 222, 223, 224 Koestler, Arthur, 158–60, 162, 166 Krebs cycle, 220–22 Ku Klux Klan, 111, 146 labor, labor unions, 14, 19, 20, 23, 53, 180, 181 leadership, xv, xvii, 23, 101, 108–9, 182, 186, 191 Leave It to Beaver (TV show), 34–35, 51 legislative districts, manipulation of (gerrymandering), xvi, 182–86, 189 Lehigh Valley, 170, 171 leisure, 53, 104–5, 139 Levin, David, 223 Levitt, Steven, 133–34 Lexus and the Olive Tree, The (Friedman), 141, 151–52 LGBT rights, 24, 42–43 libraries, 18, 36, 37 lifespan, longevity, 17, 31, 57–60, 62, 199, 204–5 Lincoln, Abraham, 228 Ling, Richard, 122–23 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 231 LISTSERVs, 114, 151 Little House on the Prairie (TV show), xii, 247n lobbyists, 183, 187, 229 Locke, Richard, 165, 172 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 5–6, 7, 65, 141 Loose Connections (Wuthnow), 239 Lorain, Ohio, 79–80, 135 “lord of the manor” community, xii–xiii, 81 Lowery, Rev.

Joseph, 24 McCarthyism, 4 McGrath, Charles, 5–6 McLuhan, Marshall, 16, 141, 142 macro level vs. micro level, 9–11, 40–41 Madison, James, 82, 139 magazines, 36, 37, 71 Making a New Deal (Cohen), 203 Manchester, 166–67 Mandelbaum, Michael, 141–42 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Wilson), 4 manufacturing, 15, 18, 19, 53, 166, 170–71 marriage, 28–31, 68–71, 74, 101, 147, 219 gay, 42, 50, 69 interracial, 68 Marsden, Peter, 119–20 marshmallow test, 214–15, 216, 218, 219, 222 Marty, Martin, 238 Mary Mac’s Tea Room, 136–37 Maslow, Abraham, 61–62, 66, 114, 126, 138 Massey, Doug, 40–41, 43 mass market, 15, 40 Master of the Senate (Caro), 187 matchmaking services, 69–70 materialism, material concerns, 41, 55, 70, 85 Meals on Wheels, 208, 209 Meaney, Michael, 223 media, 184, 186, 187–88 expansion of, 35–37 Medicaid, 201, 203–4 Medicare, xv, 198, 199, 201–30 Medici effect, 163–74, 176, 219 as “valuable inefficiency,” 168 medicine, 31, 58–59, 197, 199–200, 207–8, 229 Mexico, 197–98 Miami Heat, 8–9, 11 middle, failure to understand, 9–11 middle class, 28, 50, 54, 55, 58, 60, 128, 139, 144, 178, 191, 222, 225, 227, 238–39 gentrification and, 56 income inequality and, 22–23 in 1950s, 3–4 middle-ring relationships, xvii, 94, 97–98, 100, 109, 131, 134–38, 150, 169, 174, 193, 218, 219, 232, 233–34 global village and, 142–43 health care and, 201, 202, 204, 208, 210 social capital removed from, 113–26, 129, 138–39, 143, 145, 148, 189–90, 208, 213, 239 trust and, 134, 135 migrations, U.S. defined by, 82–83 militaries, 94, 217 Miller, Conrad, 179–81 Mischel, Walter, 214–16 mobility, 17, 21–26 physical, 24–25, 39–40, 104, 105 social, 21–24, 26, 226 Moffit, Terrie, 215 money, xvi, xvii, 54, 75, 100, 187 Morrison, Toni, 79–80, 135 mother(s), 12, 106, 130–31 of author, 133, 134 motive, 12–13, 49, 51, 59, 62, 73, 74, 75, 98, 212, 213 MSNBC, 184, 187–88 multistrandedness, 96 Mumford, Lewis, 31–32, 82–83, 201 Murray, Charles, 45, 48, 142, 144, 191, 238, 250n Murray Hill, N.J., 164 names, remembering, 91–92 narcissism, 73, 111 National Institutes of Health, 203–4 needs, 71, 195 basic, 61, 62, 67–68 hierarchy of, 61–62, 66, 70, 72, 75, 101, 114, 126, 138 neighborhoods, 22, 24, 74, 79–87, 99, 101, 110, 117, 127, 129, 139, 142, 145–51, 153, 166, 168, 171–72, 189–90, 194, 213, 232, 236, 239 Chinatown Bus effect and, 46–49 collective efficacy of, 149–51 gentrification of, 56 health care and, 201, 210 social isolation in, 118–19 neighborliness, 130, 142, 144, 195 networked community, 143–53, 168–76, 191, 194–95, 217, 235–41 health care and, 210–11 networked individualism, 111 network theory, 95 New Deal, 201, 203, 210, 230 New England, xii, 81 news, 74, 184, 186, 187–88, 194 access to, 18, 20, 35–36 newspapers, 18, 24–25, 35–36, 148, 152, 188 New York, N.Y., 19, 84, 128, 176, 230 Chinatown in, 33–35 Diamond District in, 98–99, 135 Jacobs’s views on, 85–86, 166, 167–68 New York Times, xiv, 27, 38, 46, 54–55, 59, 182, 229 New York Times Book Review, 5–6 New York Times Magazine, 64 niches, 36, 40, 41, 44–45, 73–74 affirmation and, 107–8, 110–11 Nichols, Mike, 4, 248n Nie, Norman, 125 1950s, 3–6, 32, 50, 52, 60, 114, 115, 127, 138, 139, 248n conformity in, 4–5, 65, 73, 74 family routines in, 58 fantasy view of, 3, 51 membership associations in, 130–31 1960s, 70–71, 248n social trust in, 135 upheavals of, 6, 68, 87, 108–9, 128 Nisbet, Robert, 194 North American Free Trade Agreement, 197–98 nostalgia, ix–x, 51, 72, 146, 182–83 nuclear war, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 60 nursing homes, 197, 200, 202, 206–7 Obama, Barack, 24, 37–38, 42, 59, 146, 186, 205, 210 Occupy movement, 109–10 Office, The (TV show), 131 Ogle, Richard, 162 Olds, Jacqueline, 130 Olympic Games (2014), 178 online buying, 41, 69–70 online communities, 114–15, 116, 145, 250n opportunity, 12–13, 26, 27, 32, 43, 49, 62, 69, 73, 74, 75, 98, 212, 213 affirmation and, 103, 108 optimism, 51, 82, 114, 236 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 5, 6, 138 organizations: new breed of, 116–18 voluntary, 80, 116, 118, 130–31, 187, 201, 228, 239 Osteen, Joel, 72, 238 other-directedness, 5–7 Our Best Life (Osteen), 72 outer-ring relationships, 96–97, 114–19, 137, 138–39, 143, 145, 147–48, 169, 173, 190, 204, 237, 238 affirmation and, 107–12, 115 online, 114–15, 121–22 Oxycodone epidemic, 147–48 Packer, George, 235, 236 Palin, Sarah, 206 Pariser, Eli, 37, 48, 176, 194–95 Park Forest, 4–5 Pasteur, Louis, 158–59, 174 Pauling, Linus, 161 PBS, 182, 192 pensions, 20, 205, 235–36 Perot, Ross, 197–98 Perry Preschool Project, 224 Pew Center for American Life, 250n Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 71 Pew Internet & American Life Project, 125 Pew Research Center, 106–7, 237 Pixar studio, 164–65 Planet Money (radio show), 180–81 Platinum Mile, 176 polio, 51, 52, 59 political science, 66–69, 141 politics, xiv–xvii, xix, 11, 15, 82, 101, 148, 181–95, 210, 229, 232 affirmation and, 108–10 Chinatown Bus effect and, 44, 47–48 culture wars and, 114 globalization and, 18 taste and, 37–38 polls, polling, 7, 29, 182, 226 deliberative, 192–93, 195 World Values Survey, 67–68, 73 Poole, Keith, 184 Porter, Eduardo, 255n potlikker, 136–37 poverty, 11, 22, 41, 43, 54, 62, 75, 146, 194, 201, 226, 255n in Brazil, 178, 267n urbanism and, 83, 216 prejudice, 88, 146, 148, 231 against homosexuals, 42, 43, 51 racial, 24, 39, 146 productivity, 19, 53, 167 progress, 24, 31, 35, 68, 75, 174, 238 progressives (the left), 11, 15, 23, 26, 31, 47, 148, 235 crime and, 56 Washington dysfunction and, 182, 184, 189, 190 property, 82, 179, 229 prosperity, 52–55, 57, 62, 67, 68–69, 72, 178, 230 psychology, Maslow’s influence in, 61–62 public policy, failure of, 22–23 Pulitzer, Joseph, 188 purchasing power, 53–54 Putnam, Robert, 7, 97, 99–100, 113–16, 119, 120, 141, 151–52, 170, 192 on social trust, 134–35 quality of life, 21, 50–62 affluence and, 52–55, 62, 72 health and, 31, 51, 52, 57–60 hierarchy of needs and, 61–62, 72 security and safety and, 52, 55–62, 72 Quest for Community, The (Nisbet), 194 race, 11, 32, 68, 79, 147, 148, 237 prejudice and, 24, 39, 146 see also African Americans racism, 4, 51 Radicalism of the American Revolution, The (Wood), xii, 81, 194 radio, 36, 37, 71, 133, 148, 152, 180–81 Rainie, Lee, 237 Rauch, Jonathan, 199 Raytheon, 165 Reagan, Ronald, 22 Real World, The (TV show), 63 rebels, 102–3, 127 religion, 29, 39, 48, 71–72, 74, 114, 147, 148, 231, 238 Republicans, 15, 37–38, 148, 182–85 retirement, 55, 60, 104–5, 197, 198, 204–5, 235–36 Riesman, David, 5–8, 12, 65, 73, 74, 213 Rock, Chris, 40 romance, 70, 71, 74 Romney, Mitt, 37–38 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 203 Rose, Charlie, 182 Rosenthal, Howard, 184 Rotary Clubs, 44, 45, 116 Rumspringa, 28–29, 30 Sachar, Abram L., 4 Saddleback Church, 72 Safford, Sean, xi, 97, 169–72 Sampson, Robert, 149–50 San Francisco, Calif., 129, 189 Santayana, George, 51 Saturn model, 95–98 see also intimate relationships; middle-ring relationships; outer-ring relationships Schmidt, Eric, 18 Schwartz, Richard, 130 Second Wave society, 16–17, 20, 23, 31–32, 48 mass market and, 40 membership organizations and, 44 townships in, 88, 89, 233 security and safety, 52, 55–62, 67, 68, 72, 133, 150 segregation, 40–41, 79, 237–38 self-actualization, 61, 72 self-control, 214–25 self-expression, 69, 71–72 self-fulfillment, 104, 261n self-interest, 183, 195 Senate, U.S., xvi, 184, 185, 186, 188, 191 service jobs, 18–19, 53, 132, 138, 236 settled horticultural societies, 92, 95 shopping, 25, 38–42, 49 shopping malls, 40, 41 Silicon Valley, 174, 175, 227, 237 Silver, Nate, 7 Skocpol, Theda, 44, 45, 116–18, 130, 201 smallpox, 157–58 social architecture, 232–34 in Barbados vs.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Daniel, xxiii, xxv, 170–80 background and overview of work of, 170–71 conflicts among hybrid superintelligences, 174–75 corporate/AI scenario, 176 goals of hybrid superintelligences, 173–74 machine superintelligences relation to hybrid superintelligences, 175–77 optimistic AI scenario, 177 organizational superintelligences as hybrids of humans and information technologies, 172–73 self-interested AI scenario, 176–77 state/AI scenario, 175–76 superintelligences as hybrids of humans and information technologies, 172–73 Hinton, Geoffrey, 96, 190 Hobbes, Thomas, 35 How Not to Be Seen (Steyerl), 210 human-AI ecologies, development of, 195–96 human-level/superhuman AI impossible argument, 26 human manipulation of humans, 244–46 Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), xviii–xx, xxv, xxvi, 3, 4, 5, 22, 56, 59–60, 81, 90, 93, 96, 102, 153–54, 163, 242, 256 Hume, David, 222 hybrid analog/digital systems, 37–38 hybrid superintelligences, 172–77 conflicts among, 174–75 goals of, 173–74 relation to machine superintelligences, 175–77 idealization, 236 Ihnatowicz, Edward, 259–60 Imagination, Dead Imagine (Barry), 262 income inequality, 201–2 Industrial Revolution, 187–89 inferences about what humans want, and AI, 127–28, 129–30 information Bateson’s definition, 179 as central in governing complex system behavior, 5–6 Kaiser on Wiener’s interpretation of, 153–59 Shannon on, 154, 155, 156–57 Wiener on, 5–6, 153–59, 179 inverse-reinforcement learning, 128–29 Japanese Fifth Generation, xxiii–xxiv Jefferson, Thomas, 248 job losses, 187–89 Jones, Caroline A., 254–65 background and overview of work of, 254–55 early artistic uptake of cybernetics, 256–58 etymology of cybernetics, 257–58 on feminist artists of 1990s and early 2000s, 261–62 on human-machine interactive environments, 259–61 on Ihnatowicz’s Senster, 259–60 individual mind and larger Mind (God), 265 left versus right cybernetics, 264–65 on Parreno’s With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life, 263–64 on Reichardt’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition, 258 on Tsai’s “Cybernetic Sculpture” exhibition, 258, 260–61 Joy, Bill, 92–93 Kahneman, Daniel, 130–31, 250 Kaiser, David, 151–59 background and overview of work of, 151–52 monetization and exploitation of information, 158–59 on Wiener’s interpretation of information, 153–59 Kasparov, Gary, 8, 184 Kass, Leon, 247 Keynes, John Maynard, 187 King, Gary, 18 Klee, Paul, 211 Klüver, Billy, 218 knowledge-based programming, 278–81 Kurzweil, Ray, 8–9 Lake, Brendan, 227 Lanchester, John, 186 Latham, John, 218 learning Bayesian models, 226–28 bottom-up approach to, 222, 223–26 children and, 222, 228–30 computational learning, 222 deep learning (See deep learning) top-down approach to, 222–24, 226–28 See also computer-learning systems Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 35, 275 Lilly, John, xxi Live Simulations, Cheng’s, 216–18 Lloyd, Sam, xxiii Lloyd, Seth, 1–12 background and overview of work of, 1–2 on singularity, 8–11 on technological overestimation, 7–9 on Wiener’s theories and predictions, 3–7, 9, 11–12 local minima/local maxima problem, 147, 149–50 logical planning view, of AI, 23–24 Logic Theorist, 130 Luddite argument against AI risk, 27, 81 machine-learning systems.

Robert, 96 optimistic AI scenario, in relation of machine superintelligences to hybrid superintelligences, 177 Orwell, George, 105, 106 Pagels, Heinz, xxiii Paglen, Trevor, 212 Paik, Nam June, 208, 259 Papert, Seymour, 271 parallel computing, xxiii–xxiv Pareto-topia, 98 Parreno, Philippe, 263–64 Pask, Gordon, 259 Pavlov, Ivan, 222 Peano, Giuseppe, 275–76 Pearl, Judea, xx, 13–19 background and overview of work of, 13–14 causal reasoning, 17–19 deep-learning, on lack of transparency in and limitations of, 15–19 human brain as nontransparent system argument, 15–16 on model-blind modes of learning, 16–17, 19 Pentland, Alex, 192–205 background and overview of work of, 192–93 credit-assignment function, applied to humans, 197–200 credit-assignment function, for AI, 196–97 culture in evolution, selecting for, 198–99 data used by AI, control over and review of, 203–4 human-AI ecologies, development of, 195–96 income inequality, 201–2 networks/ecosystems, working with, 194–95 next-generation AI, designing, 204–5 social sampling, 198–99 trust networks, building, 200–201 perception, and new technologies, xvi–xviii perceptron, 271 Perceptrons (Minsky and Papert), 271 Pinker, Steven, 100–112, 118 on AI dystopias, 108–12 background and overview of work of, 100–101 on computational theory of mind, 102–3 dystopian futures, flaws in, 105 on subjugation fear in AI scenarios, 108–10 on surveillance state dystopias, 105–7 on value alignment threat of AI, 110–11 on Wiener, 103–5, 112 Pitts, Walter, 270–71, 274 Plato, 222–23, 226 Poggio, Tomaso, 10 Popper, Karl, 116 Possible Minds Project, goal of, xxiv–xxv Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell), 275 provably beneficial AI, templates for, 29–32 purposefulness, identifying, 281–84 putting purpose into machines, 23–25.


I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

We had a simple belief: minimum wage, minimum talent. We always wanted to have good kids who wanted careers and not feel they had to compromise their pay. We paid them two or three bucks an hour more than minimum. We reviewed them every six months. And from the beginning we were growing like a weed, so we created enormous upside mobility. Income inequality is a terrible problem in this country, and I don’t have a magic solution. I don’t know about mandating a higher minimum wage. I do know that nobody can live on $20,000 a year. But I worry that mandating a higher minimum might hurt the people you want to try to help: the more you increase the costs of any factor of production, the more incentive you give owners to figure out a way to change that factor of production.

See also medical business; New York University Medical Center hedge funds, 169 Heidrick & Struggles, 207, 211 Henderson, Martha, 27–28 Herlihy, Ed, 193–95, 201–2, 244, 265 Hermann, Ray, 46 Hevesi, Alan, 188 Hight, Jack, 91–92, 167–68 Hill, Bonnie, 211, 218, 223, 227 Holzman, Steve, 245–48 Home Depot, 250, 255, 258 and activist fund, 222–25 under Blake, 226–35 board of, 207–13, 216, 218–19, 222–30 culture of, 181, 214–15, 221–22, 228–29, 233 employees of, 235, 259–63, 265 founding of, 116, 158–61, 230–31, 250–51, 262 IPO of, 160–61, 240 leadership of, 206–13 morale problems at, 211, 216–17, 221–23, 228, 233 under Nardelli, 190, 210–35 stock of, 169, 184, 216–17, 219–20, 223, 233, 235, 254 success of, 174, 176, 204, 213–16, 241 home-improvement business, 123, 129–42, 145–61, 163–64. See also specific companies Homeco, 156–58 houses, prefabricated, 111–12 Houston, Texas, 125–26, 136–37, 148 I Have a Dream Foundation, 164 IBM, 255–56 imaging technology, 181–82, 196–98 Immelt, Jeff, 181–82, 197, 206–10, 220–21, 256–57 income inequality, 263 industrial companies, 33–34, 40, 53 inflation, 152, 161 initial public offerings (IPOs), 93–94, 103, 153 and commissions, 192–95 Electronic Data Systems (EDS), 91, 98–99, 101 Home Depot, 160–61, 240 “hot” ones, 192–95 Kenner Products, 57–59 Ohio Mattress, 124 Panelrama, 123 Schaefer Brewing Company, 89 Stirling Homex, 111–12 institutional investments/sales, 54–57, 60–61, 79, 112–13, 126–27, 143, 185 insurance companies, 29–30, 32–34, 56–57, 60–63, 123–24, 255.


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

The Rolls-Royce mandarins of the Great British System had either been suborned or, in the culmination of a process started with Thatcher, lost sight of the vocation they once had: to serve the state, something much bigger than here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians. They took their knighthoods and left chaos and social inequity behind. Unequal Shares Income inequality did not change much, which may be surprising given both austerity and boardroom excess. But while most incomes fell or flatlined, in an odd balancing act those at the top took a hit from the lingering effects of the crash, while benefit freezes and restraints only took their full effect later, preserving the incomes of the poorest for a while. The Gini coefficient measuring income inequality may pick this up later. But already, within the top category of income earners, a gap had opened between the super-rich and the affluent also-rans, and it grew.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

Chapter 9: The Universe, All There Is, and the Rest 1. Vinkers CH, Tijdink JK, Otte WM. 2015. “Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis.” BMJ 351:h6467. 2. In the United States, the income inequality in academia is now larger than in industry or government. See Lok C. 2016. “Science’s 1%: how income inequality is getting worse in research.” Nature 537:471–473. 3. This, importantly, means that bad scientific practices can become dominant even though no individual scientist changes his or her behavior. See, for example, Smaldino PE, McElreath R. 2016.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

In fact, social movements thrive on the drama and urgency and solidarity that result from raising divisive issues. If conflict is deadly to the strategy of a party trying to build a majority coalition, it is the very stuff that makes social movements grow.”60 Hence, as we see today, the spawning of numerous movements based on, for example, race, gender, income inequality, environmental justice, etc. Again, when economic conditions have weakened, causing social conditions to do the same, the political system is said to be ripe for transformation. “[S]ocial movements tend to emerge at moments when the electoral system itself signals the emergence of new potential conflicts.

Rosen is surely right when he says that all forms of political journalism rest on a mental picture of how politics and democracy should function. There is nothing detached about it. (It must also be the case that assessments of the state of American democracy, including his own, similarly rest on a mental picture of democratic ideals.) A story about income inequality, for example, is only a story if there exists in the newsroom a perspective that inequality is bad. That a campaign looks more like a sporting event than an Oxford-Cambridge debate is a cause for hand-wringing only if you think that campaigns were once—or at least should now be—decorous.”37 The combination of propaganda, pseudo-news, and social activism in America’s newsrooms has resulted in the disastrous state of the modern press.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

Whom does free trade hurt in the developed world? The relatively scarce factor: low-skilled labor. Who benefits? Highly skilled workers. Further, globalization increases income inequalities in the rich nations, as the inflation-adjusted incomes of the highly skilled rise rapidly and those of the low-skilled rise more slowly or even fall. Once again, Stolper-Samuelson comes alive in the real world. For the past generation, income inequalities have grown dramatically in the United States. Figure 14-1 plots Census Bureau data with American families sorted into two groups-the top quintile, or 20 percent, and bottom 80 percent-and then computes their shares of total national income over the past thirty-five years.

This tightening did not correlate at all with the factors that traditionally have received blame for it: economic hard times and racism. Rather it took place precisely when income competition from recent European immigrants at the low end of the wage scale started to squeeze low-paid voters.25 Why all the fuss about income inequality? Isn't it simply a sign of a healthy economy that generously rewards the successful and ambitious? Well, no. Economists and demographers use a number of measures of inequality, the most popular being the Gini coefficient. This number varies between zero and one; a population in which everyone has exactly the same income has a coefficient of 0.0, and a population in which only one individual earns all the income has a coefficient of 1.0.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Now, compare this with Kevin Kelly’s rhetorical attempt to exclude questions of meaning as something that the Quantified Self crowd ought even worry about: “[Our critics say that] only intangibles like meaningful happiness count. Meaningfulness is very hard to measure, which makes it very hard to optimize. So far anything we can quantify has been getting better over the long term.” The last part, of course, is typical Silicon Valley nonsense: what about income inequality, or carbon emissions, or obesity rates in America? Kelly’s positivism would shock even Auguste Comte. But proclamations like Kelly’s also tap into the long-running scientific tradition—so astutely documented by historian Theodore Porter in his Trust in Numbers—that celebrates measurement as seemingly objective and consensus boosting.

They are more likely to experience disruptions in health care, interruptions in income. Food, and the ability to buy it, comes in similar episodes—periods of feeling flush, periods of being on the brink of an empty pantry. The impulse is to eat for today, tomorrow being a tentative proposition at best.” Once we start factoring in structural factors like poverty and income inequality, then obesity lends itself to a very different set of solutions than when it’s defined simply as a lack of individual responsibility or lack of knowledge about nutrition. Likewise, adopting a light but nutritious information diet might seem easy, but it’s not an option available to everyone.

Reality might be too easy for a designated fellow of the Institute for the Future, but one just needs to leave University Avenue in Palo Alto and drive a few miles to East Palo Alto or Oakland, and a different picture of an all-too-easy reality will emerge. Tetris and golf do have built-in obstacles that make these games more fun, but to complain that reality is missing such challenges is ridiculous. From discriminatory laws to structural income inequality to deeply entrenched racist and sexist attitudes, our lives are full of obstacles, even if these may not be visible in Silicon Valley. And some of them are completely voluntary: the game of life would be too easy if we could steal and kill as we pleased. The more of McGonigal one reads, the harder it is to avoid the impression that she has never worked a day in her life.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

And I have trouble forgiving people like the liberal economist Paul Krugman, who has written so much of such great importance about economic inequality and bank fraud over the years, and yet used his influential platform in the New York Times to repeatedly attack the only candidate, Bernie Sanders, who was serious about battling income inequality and taking on the banks. It’s perfectly understandable that people don’t want to rehash those ugly battles—they were miserable. We all cope with fear and uncertainty differently. A great many conservatives are dealing with their fears about a changing and destabilizing world by attempting to force back the clock.

Climate change is not a concern for the Republican Party because a great many people in positions of power clearly think it’ll be “somebody else’s babies” who will shoulder the risks, babies who don’t count as much as their own. They may not all be climate deniers, but almost every one of them is catastrophically unconcerned. This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their minds) liberates them not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

However, assuming that poverty alone explains higher murder rates might prove a red herring. The link between homicide and deprivation is not as strong as its link with income inequality: several studies have demonstrated that murder rates go up as differences in wealth increase. An examination of violent crime rates in 125 of the largest cities in the US concluded that it wasn’t objective poverty that could be linked to violence, but relative deprivation. The World Health Organization came to a similar conclusion, reporting that rising income inequality in Europe had resulted in an increase in homicide. For the first time Morse seemed oddly hesitant. ‘He could have done it, of course.’


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

He notes that the disparity is probably even greater if you look at assets rather than income, though no reliable data currently allow us to calculate asset inequality in Mexico. Of course, inequality is something that Mexicans and Americans share—both are among the most unequal countries in the world. But while income inequality has dropped slightly in Mexico as educational attainment has increased and the middle class has expanded, it has grown significantly in the United States over the past two decades. Inequality is due in part to fiscal policy, which penalizes smaller businesses and lower middle-income earners, says Esquivel.

Home mortgages have tripled in coverage: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, México: Transformando la política urbana y el financiamiento de la vivienda (Paris: OECD, 2015). To be sure, there is far less: Coneval, Medición de la pobreza en Mexico y en las entidades federativas 2016 (Mexico: Coneval, 2016), http://www.coneval.org.mx/Medicion/MP/Documents/Pobreza_16/Pobreza_2016_CONEVAL.pdf. But while income inequality has dropped: Mexico still has a higher Gini coefficient, around .48, while the United States’ Gini coefficient is .39, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2016. However, the US rate has expanded in recent years, while the Mexican rate dropped noticeably over two decades but still remained high.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

This is not to say it is distributed evenly: though climate change will be given its ultimate dimensions by the course of industrialization in the developing world, at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt—the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life.

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more. In an economic future doubly mangled by those forces, the near-monopoly on social power presently enjoyed by the world’s very wealthy will likely have much more to answer for, to say the least. And how might it answer? Beyond new Social Darwinist appeals to unequal outcomes as “fair” ones, an already familiar one-percenter worldview, the force of capital may find itself with very little to say.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

This was undoubtedly a sign of weakness on the government’s part, and it highlighted President Sun’s desperation to show he was capable of responding to the extraordinary change roiling the country. The USTC crash in 2033 had inflamed feelings of resentment from those who had lost out from a decade of stagnant growth and increasing income inequality. Massive protests and strikes had spilled out into dozens of cities, driven by people who were no longer distracted by the government’s usual tactic of blaming the West. They wanted real change, and President Sun dearly hoped the basic maximum income policy would be enough. It was certainly more than enough for Chinese billionaires.

Moral agency was merely the latest step. 92    THE MELT EVENT Earth, 2058 What made the twenty-first century? You could say that it was the century of the mind, given our new understanding of the human brain and the blossoming of AI. You could say it was the century of equality, thanks to the great strides made against sexism, racism, and income inequality. Or perhaps you could say it was the century of the new frontier, with the explosion of intelligence across the solar system. But human-created climate change may trump them all. It scarred Earth in a way that will still be seen millions of years into the future, our most wretched legacy to our descendants.


pages: 109 words: 33,946

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

banking crisis, Credit Default Swap, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, traumatic brain injury, Yom Kippur War

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1036 (2004): 233–56. Wrangham, Richard W., Michael L. Wilson, and Martin N. Miller. “Comparative Rates of Violence in Chimpanzees and Humans.” Primates 47 (2006): 14–26. In Bitter Safety I Awake Ahern, J., and S. Galea. “Social Context and Depression After a Disaster: The Role of Income Inequality.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60, no. 9 (2006): 766–70. American Psychiatric Association. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” 2013. http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/PTSD%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf. Axelrod, S. R., et al. “Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder in Veterans of Operation Desert Storm.”


pages: 121 words: 34,193

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Thomas Piketty

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, dematerialisation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, high net worth, income inequality, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, transfer pricing

Ferdy Adam, “Impact de l’échange automatique d’informations en matière de produits financiers: Une tentative d’évaluation macro-économique appliquée au Luxembourg,” Statec working paper no. 73, 2014. 15. James S. Henry, “The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes,” Tax Justice Network, July 2012, http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf. 16. Ruth Judson, “Crisis and Calm: Demand for U.S. Currency at Home and Abroad from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2011,” IFDP working paper of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, November 2012, http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2012/1058/ifdp1058.pdf. 17.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

McWilliams, ‘The Greatest Ever Economic Change’, Gresham Lecture, 13 September 2012, http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-greatest-ever-economic-change 44. See, for example, S. Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (New York, 1976) 45. D. Milanovic, ‘Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now’, Policy Research Working Paper 6259, World Bank, November 2012, p. 13 46. R. Freeman, ‘The New Global Labor Market’, Focus, vol. 26 (1) (2008), University of Wisconsin–Madison Institute for Research on Poverty, http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc261a.pdf 47.

Mrsnik et al, ‘Global Aging 2010: An Irreversible Truth’, Standard & Poors, 7 October 2010 18. N. Howe and R. Jackson, ‘How Ready for Pensioners?’, Finance & Development, IMF, June 2011 19. ‘World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision’ 20. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2012_%20KEY%20FINDINGS.pdf 21. B. Milanovic, ‘Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: in History and Now’, Policy Research Working Paper 6259, World Bank, November 2012 22. G. Mognus, Speech, IFC and Johns Hopkins Medicine International Health Conference 2013, http://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/6d0b56004f081ebf99d4db3eac88a2f8/George+Magnus'+Keynote+Speech+-+190313.pdf?


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

“Those guys are a bunch of jerks,” Wayne mutters, giving a dismissive wave that says, “They’re just a sideshow.” “Politically I’m on the enemy list. And I’m not so naive not to recognize it. I’ve lived my whole life doing what I thought was right and now I’m an enemy of the state.” Is he, though? It’s true that income inequality is a big campaign issue. Obama in a recent speech: “What drags down our entire economy is when there’s an ultra-wide chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.” Whereas Romney called Obama’s attacks on the super-rich, “the bitter politics of envy. I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation where people by virtue of their education, their hard work and risk taking and their dreams—maybe a little luck—could achieve great things.”

Frantz, Dennis, Rebecca—those at the bottom looking up—showed no animosity at all. The government used to tell people like Wayne exactly what to do with huge chunks of their income: Hand it over and we’ll decide how to use it. Today, America’s richest citizens have won the right to control these decisions themselves, and that’s a big reason why income inequality is so dire. For every secret philanthropist like Wayne, there are many who give little or nothing back. Meanwhile, Dennis and Rebecca continue to tread water, and might even drown. Wayne’s heart is in the right place. He’s not parsimonious. He started from nothing and he wants to give back, but he wants to choose how.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Beginning in 1981, the Reagan administration began removing regulations on business. He restored confidence, which unleashed a big increase in investment and economic activity. By 1982, Wall Street bought into the idea, and stocks began to rise. Reagan called it Morning in America. The problems—stagnant wages, income inequality, and a decline in startup activity outside of tech—did not emerge until the late nineties. Deregulation generally favored incumbents at the expense of startups. New company formation, which had peaked in 1977, has been in decline ever since. The exception was Silicon Valley, where large companies struggled to keep up with rapidly evolving technologies, creating opportunities for startups.

The “Chicago School” antitrust philosophy emerged as part of this market-driven, neoliberal worldview, arguing that concentration of economic power was not a problem, so long as it did not translate into higher prices for consumers. The Chicago School became official policy with the Reagan administration and has prevailed ever since. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but, as I’ve mentioned, the years since 1981 have seen a massive decline in new company formation (which peaked in 1977), as well as income inequality not seen since the era of Standard Oil. Three internet platforms—Amazon, Google, and Facebook—have benefited enormously from the Chicago School’s antitrust philosophy. The products of Google and Facebook are free to consumers, and Amazon has transformed the economics of distribution while keeping consumer prices low, which has allowed all three to argue successfully for freedom to dominate, as well as to consolidate.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

Based on Wildavsky’s typology, the Yale researchers divvy up Americans into four cultural groups: Individualists, Communitarians, Hierarchicalists, and Egalitarians. In general, Hierarchical folks prefer a social order where people have clearly defined roles and lines of authority. Egalitarians want to reduce racial, gender, and income inequalities. Individualists expect people to succeed or fail on their own, while Communitarians believe that society is obligated to take care of everyone. The Yale researchers report that people whose values are located in Individualist/Hierarchy space “can be expected to be skeptical of claims of environmental and technological risks.

As noted earlier, the Wildavskyan schema situates Americans’ cultural values on two scales, one that ranges from Individualist to Communitarian and another that goes from Hierarchy to Egalitarian. In general, Hierarchical folks prefer a social order where people have clearly defined roles and lines of authority. Egalitarians want to reduce racial, gender, and income inequalities. Individualists expect people to succeed or fail on their own, while Communitarians believe that society is obligated to take care of everyone. The researchers note that people who hold Individualist/Hierarchical values highly esteem technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

It was only within the past ten years that the NSA secretly subverted encryption standards meant to protect the public’s communications, hacked into the data networks connecting major cloud computing platforms, and installed massive data trawling equipment on the backbones of the U.S. telecommunications systems. A list of abuses such as these could fill an entire library. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that recent years have brought about a disturbing descent into authoritarianism, fuelled by and in turn driving income inequality in grotesque proportions and propelling the rise of a kind of transnational gangster economy. There is today a large and influential class of kleptocrats spread across the globe and supported by a professional service industry of lawyers, shell companies, accountants, and PR firms, the members of which move seamlessly between the private sector and agencies of the state.278 These are people who don’t care whether or not someone “has nothing to hide” or is “not doing anything wrong.”

While some e-waste is traded and shipped internationally between North and South, a sizable proportion of e-waste trade is actually highly regionalized, and more e-waste is actually sent from developing countries to developed countries, rather than vice versa.378 As Josh Lepawsky says, “There is definitely a topography to the e-waste trade, it’s just that the hills and valleys don’t match up to the overly blunt imaginaries of world geography that divide the planet up into North and South, developed and developing, or corollaries like OECD and non-OECD.”379 Within a country like India, which like most countries is characterized by massive and growing income inequality, the e-waste flows mostly inside the country and down the hills of wealth, from the rising middle class and a small number of elites, through the repair shops and recycling bazaars of Nehru Place, and finally, as a last resort, to the digital morgues of Old Seelampur. Then there is the issue of e-waste itself.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

He flew to Panama in March 2014 to speak at a World Economic Forum conference with the advertising guru Martin Sorrell. At the conference he lectured Latin American politicians on their dire economic performance, telling them that ten of the fifteen most unequal countries in the world were in their part of the world. “What you still have is enormous income inequality, and income inequality leads to social issues,” Arif said. “And that’s just a fact, right?” From Panama, Arif flew on to England to attend Skoll’s forum in Oxford. The university town was conveniently located for Arif as it was just a twenty-five-minute drive from his country house. On a Wednesday evening in April 2014, Arif settled into a front-row seat at Oxford’s New Theatre to watch the opening film of the Skoll conference.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

The advent of digital currencies could make it harder for the Fed to explain why its policies put trillions of dollars to work on Wall Street when millions of Americans are losing their jobs—and why it can’t do the same for households. The justification for Fed independence rests on a simple consensus: the White House and Congress won’t interfere with how the Fed chooses to control inflation, and in return the Fed does precisely that. But if the Fed’s job expands to include financial stability, climate change, income inequality, and any other number of well-intentioned policy imperatives, it’s very difficult to say that democratically elected leaders should have no say in how those policies are carried out. The case for Fed independence quickly disappears as these mandates grow. The danger for the Fed of being seen as an economic oracle or market magician is that the public demands unelected technocrats solve problems their tools can’t readily address.

In an era of lower interest rates across the globe, blaming the central bank primarily or exclusively for the widening gap between rich and poor gives a pass to every other actor in economic policy—excusing important but difficult decisions of taxation, regulation, and federal spending that aren’t handled by a small group of cloistered technocrats. And whereas growing wealth inequality can corrode politics, so too can high joblessness and income inequality. Critics who lay the blame for rising inequality solely at the feet of the central bank must confront the counterfactual scenario in which the Fed raises rates to prevent inequality, at the expense of growth and hiring. Would the economy be better off if the Fed resisted using its tools to spur a faster recovery?


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Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

The Randomness Assumption With very few of the factors that facilitate the creation of economic production being equally available to all— either among nations or within nations— it is hard to understand how the expectation of equality in economic outcomes has acquired such a fierce hold on contemporary thinking that income inequalities— “disparities,” “gaps” or “inequities”— are taken as being at least strange, if not sinister. But gross inequalities in outcomes are rampant in all kinds of human endeavors around the world, including those that can hardly be explained by discrimination, exploitation or the many other sins of human beings.

Our survey of peoples and places around the world in earlier chapters, in search of reasons for disparities in income and wealth— whether between nations or within nations— has been, implicitly, a search for reasons behind differences in productivity. Others who are more interested in redistributing incomes and wealth often leave the production of these incomes and this wealth somewhere in the dim background. By pushing the production process off into the background, redistributionists avoid confronting the question whether income inequalities might be matched by corresponding inequalities in economic productivity. What redistributionists seek to suggest, or to proclaim, is the injustice of existing rewards, given that so much of what a given individual receives originated in some windfall gain or windfall loss, of which “the accident of birth” is central.

Putting aside the case of literal equality between every individual or every individual adult, if by some miracle it were possible to have all individuals in all groups attain both the same quantitative levels of education, as measured by the number of years in educational institutions, and also the same qualitative levels as measured by mastery of subjects of the same difficulty and economic rewards, that would still leave intractable differences in age, which would mean inescapable differences in experience since, when the age of adulthood is eighteen, a forty-year-old worker has more than ten times as much work experience as a twenty-year-old workerc— and has probably advanced to successively more responsible and better rewarded positions, while compiling a longer track record on which prospective employers can judge a prospective employee’s qualifications. In these circumstances, even if every twenty-year-old Puerto Rican in the United States had identical incomes with every twenty-year-old Japanese American, and similar equality at every other age, that would still leave a major income inequality between these two groups, because the average Japanese American is more than twenty years older than the average Puerto Rican. In short, even extraordinary and unprecedented degrees of equalization among comparable individuals could still leave major statistical inequalities among groups. In one sense, the redistributionists can be said to be trying to do more than is possible, given the variety of factors that go into economic productivity and the many differences in the extent to which those factors are present in different groups and nations.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

This has been a job-rich, productivity-poor, recovery. 305 M ac roe c onom ic s i n t h e C r a s h a n d A f t e r , 2 0 0 7 – Moreover, the fall in worker productivity must lead to even greater income inequality, and, therefore (on the under-consumptionist argument), to even greater macroeconomic instability in future, as the economy relies even more heavily on debt. In Keynesian terms, a situation in which the inducement to invest is falling, but income inequality is rising, is the worst possible basis for both stability and growth. This is the situation in which we find ourselves today. 306 11 What Was Wrong with the Banks?

This was in line with the projections by the non-partisan Congressional Office of the Budget.41 Fiscal expansion was accompanied by monetary easing in the form of quantitative easing (QE). The US performance was not especially robust: the proportion of working-age adults in work fell from 72 to 67 per cent, income inequality widened, productivity fell. But it was much better than in Britain and Europe. It showed that Keynesian policy worked.42 The Eurozone has had the worst record, partly because EU fiscal rules mandated balanced budgets, mainly because austerity was imposed on Eurozone governments as a condition of loans from the ECB and IMF.


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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

It was not just a widening gap between workers with postgraduate degrees and those with low levels of education. Every dimension of inequality skyrocketed from 1980 onward. For example, the share of the richest 1 percent of US households in national income rose from around 10 percent in 1980 to 19 percent in 2019. Wage and income inequality tells only part of the story. The United States used to pride itself for its “American dream,” which meant people from modest backgrounds rising in terms of income and children doing better than their parents. From the 1980s onward, this dream came under growing pressure. For children born in 1940, 90 percent of them earned more than their parents did, in inflation-adjusted terms.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, Morris Llewellyn. 1929. “Some Observations on Workers’ Organizations.” Presidential Address Before the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Taylor Society, December 6, 1928. Bulletin of the Taylor Society 14, no. 1 (February): 2‒10. Corak, Miles. 2013. “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (Summer): 79‒102. Cowen, Tyler. 2010. The Great Stagnation. New York: Dutton. CQ Researcher. 1945. “Automobiles in the Postwar Economy.” https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?

New York: W.W. Norton. Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 11: 4086‒4091. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. 2003. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1: 1‒41. Pirenne, Henri. 1937. Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. New York: Harcourt Brace. Pirenne, Henri. 1952. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


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An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Much of this racism, indeed, is now recognized as “structural racism”: the frictions, institutions, and legacies of the past in their current shape of wealth and social network access performing the functions that personal racial animus used to perform. Most important in stalling progress toward economic equality for Black people, in my judgment, was a general, economy-wide factor: the growth in income inequality as employers’ relative demands for less-skilled and less-educated workers diminished. Also important were changes in family structure: a rise in divorce, a rise in births outside of marriage, and the consequent rise in single-parent households (almost inevitably female headed). By the later decades of the twentieth century, the poverty rate for two-parent Black families with children was 12.5 percent.

Bradford De Long, “Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 41–53. 12. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, available at Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower. 13. Thomas Piketty and Emmanual Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf. 14. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, New York: Basic Books, 1995. 15. J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for the East Today, ed.

Martín Carcasson, “Ending Welfare as We Know It: President Clinton and the Rhetorical Transformation of the Anti-Welfare Culture,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 655–692. 23. Alwyn W. Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, London: Aurum Press, 2013. 24. J. Bradford DeLong, “Private Accounts: Add-on, Not Carve-Out,” Grasping Reality, May 3, 2005, https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/private_account.html. 25. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf. 26. Takashi Negishi, “Welfare Economics and Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy,” Metroeconomica 12 (June 1960): 92–97. 27. Jeremiah 7:18. 28.


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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930). By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day. See “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” S&P Capital IQ, Global Credit Portal Report, August 5, 2014, https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/renderArticle.do?articleId=1351366&SctArtId=255732&from=CM&nsl_code=LIME&sourceObjectId=8741033&sourceRevId=1&fee_ind=N&exp_date=20240804-19:41:13. 44.

., “Shopocalypse Now: Consumer Culture and the English Riots of 2011,” British Journal of Criminology 53, no. 1 (2013): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs054; Tom Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting Against a Broken State,” Human Geography 4, no. 3 (2011): 106–15. 42. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010. The bulk of this increase comes from the top 1 percent, whose share rose from 9 percent to 20 percent, about half of which went to the 0.1 percent.

See also Michael Stolleis, History of Social Law in Germany (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), www.springer.com/us/book/9783642384530; Mark Hendrickson, American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Swank, “The Political Sources of Labor Market Dualism in Postindustrial Democracies, 1975–2011”; Emin Dinlersoz and Jeremy Greenwood, “The Rise and Fall of Unions in the U.S.” (NBER working paper, US Census Bureau, 2012), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18079; Basak Kus, “Financialization and Income Inequality in OECD Nations: 1995–2007,” Economic and Social Review 43, no. 4 (2012): 477–95; Viki Nellas and Elisabetta Olivieri, “The Change of Job Opportunities: The Role of Computerization and Institutions” (Quaderni DSE working paper, University of Bologna & Bank of Italy, 2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

Thus, there have historically been calls to tax away the rents from merely owning property, as opposed to the profits that come from doing something with it. There is an entire intellectual tradition, originating with the nineteenth-century economist Henry George, that makes this policy central to its theories and proposals. In his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, George insisted that “the true remedy” to the problem of income inequality was nothing more or less than to “make land common property,” thus eliminating the largest source of rents that existed in his day.4 His contemporary followers similarly argue that since land “is not the product of human labor, but … is needed for all production,” all rents on privately owned land should be appropriated through taxation and used for the common good.5 The existence of rentiers also troubled the great economist John Maynard Keynes.


pages: 128 words: 38,847

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

*There is a technical difference between “bigness” and “industry concentration”—the former refers just the size of firms, while the latter refers to the number of firms competing in each properly defined market. However, in practice, the two tend to overlap: When firms are larger in an industry, especially as a result of mergers, there tend to be fewer competing firms in the industry. *If industry concentration and income inequality are key features of our economic times, are they linked? Many economists think so. See Jonathan B. Baker & Steven C. Salop, Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Inequality, 104 Geo. L.J. Online 1 (2015). But the proposition is not uncontested. See Daniel Crane, Antitrust and Wealth Inequality, 101 Cornell Law Review 1171 (2016).


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

From 1975 to 1992 (see Table 7.1), while the average income of the lowest quintile of black families in the United States declined by 33 percent (from $6,333 to $4,255) and that of the second-lowest quintile by 13 percent (from $13,186 to $11,487), the average income of the highest quintile of black families climbed by 23 percent (from $55,681 to $68,431) and that of the top 5 percent by 35 percent (from $76,713 to $103,827). Although income inequality between whites and blacks is substantial—and the financial gap is even greater between the two races when wealth is considered (total financial assets, not just income)—in 1992 the highest fifth of black families nonetheless secured a record 48.8 percent of the total black family income, compared to the 43.8 percent share of the total white income received by the highest fifth of white families, also a record. So, while income inequality has widened generally in America since 1975, the divide is even more dramatic among black Americans.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Automation might initially put some people out of work, but it also creates new jobs in the medium to long term that are better paid and more interesting. Therefore, the ‘bounty’ brought by new technology does not only entail a degree of income inequality, but ultimately brings more prosperity to all. At the end of the day, it does not matter how much richer our neighbour becomes, as long as we become better off as well. Some income inequality is in fact socially useful, because it gives incentives to capable people to do their best, be innovative and take risks. Inequality becomes socially intolerable only when the bounty does not filter through.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It is indubitable that income is concentrating, the wealthy are accumulating enormous riches, and some are using money to gain political power. But that trend, as alarming as it is unacceptable, is not the only force shaping the workings of power among corporate leaders and wealthy investors. Indeed, even the vaunted 1 percent in the United States are not immune to sudden shifts in wealth, power, and status. For all the rise in income inequality, the Great Recession also had a corrective effect, disproportionately affecting the incomes of the rich. According to Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economics professor, it caused a 36.3 percent drop in the incomes of the top 1 percent of earners in the United States, compared to an 11.6 percent drop for the remaining 99 percent.11 Steven Kaplan at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has calculated that the proportion of income accounted for by the top 1 percent fell from its peak of 23.5 percent of income in 2007 to 17.6 percent in 2009 and, as Saez’s data show, it kept falling in following years.

Google, incorporated in 1998 with the informal hacker ethos and corporate motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” is now one of the world’s biggest corporations (as measured by market capitalization) and is seen in some quarters as akin to the Antichrist, single-handedly destroying newspapers, crushing rivals, and violating consumer privacy. Increasing wealth and income inequality in the United States in the last twenty years, along with the global trend toward massive CEO pay packages and banker bonuses, have fed the perception that those who get to the top stay there, remote and above the cares that afflict lesser mortals. The theorist Christopher Lasch, who died in 1994, called the policies and behaviors in the West that made these trends possible—deregulation and such social choices as private schooling, private security, and so on—the “revolt of the elites.”


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

In the contemporary period (the “second wave”), however, the primary destination countries of migrants have imposed new controls and limits on the movement of people—a notable departure from the period before 1914, when controls were minimal and often ineffective.2 Nevertheless, globalization sets in motion economic and social forces that are shaping the structures and networks that impact upon the migration decision. Convergence, deregulation, the growth of transnational corporations, the competition for skilled labor, growing income inequality, and the opening of emerging economies are introducing new risks, opportunities, and networks, as well as political and social change. Together, these transformations have helped to turn this period into another “age of migration.”3 Economic transformations are not the only manifestations of globalization.

The popular claim that globalization leads to the convergence of incomes between poor and rich countries has been shown to be demonstrably false, thus far.22 This is not to say that developing countries do not grow through their participation in the global economy or that people in developing countries do not make more than they would have otherwise. It means that when we compare whole countries, income inequality appears to grow wider through the process of globalization—primarily because growth among a subset of the poorest countries (including the failed states) stagnates compared to the rest. The income gap between the richest country and poorest country in the world about 250 years ago was about 5 to 1, whereas today it is around 400 to 1.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

The dotted line is the somewhat longer trail, which sometime departs from the corridor. INTRODUCTION ATLANTA’S LIVABLE FUTURE Atlanta is on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline. At the center of a perfect storm of failed American urban policies, Atlanta has the highest income inequality, and its metro area features the longest commutes, in the country; attempts at twentieth-century urban renewal blasted highways through the city center and destroyed neighborhoods; suburban sprawl impaired the environment even as it eroded the urban tax base and exacerbated a long history of racial injustice.

Unless Atlanta can reposition itself—no longer perceived as a congested, sprawling, auto-dependent area—it risks slowly dissolving into an amorphous urban shell, leaving isolated communities powerless to attract business, fix infrastructure, solve huge health problems, or resolve racial prejudice and income inequity. Atlanta is not alone in its attempts to adjust to new urban realities. In the era of the automobile, American cities evolved into places that inadvertently made lives more harried and less healthy. Inner cities decayed. People sat in cars rather than biking or walking. Junk food was cheaper and easier to find than fresh fruit and vegetables.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

In fact, more broadly, there is a philosophy called utilitarianism that expresses the view that the most ethical decision is the one that creates the most utility for all involved. Utilitarianism as a philosophy has various drawbacks, though. Primarily, decisions involving multiple people that increase overall utility can seem quite unfair when that utility is not equally distributed among the people involved (e.g., income inequality despite rising standards of living). Also, utility values can be hard to estimate. Nevertheless, utilitarianism is a useful philosophical model to be aware of, if only to consider what decision would increase overall utility the most. In any case, decision trees will help you start to make sense of what to do in situations with an array of diverse, probabilistic outcomes.

If your rich grandfather leaves his fortune to all his kids equally, that would probably be perceived as fair from a distributive justice perspective. However, if one of the kids was taking care of your grandfather for the last twenty years, then this distribution no longer seems fair from a procedural justice perspective. Many current political debates around topics such as income inequality and affirmative action revolve around these different formulations of justice. Sometimes this distinction is framed as fair share versus fair play. For example, in the U.S., K–12 public education is freely available to all. Because of this educational access, some conclude that everyone has an equal opportunity to become successful.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

See also data colonialism Hobbes, Thomas, 150, 254n23 human life: capitalization of human life without limit, defined, 5–6; data and emerging social order of capitalism, 30–32; data generated by human social life, 7; defending ecology of, 196–201; exploitation by data colonialism, 4; as resource, and social quantification sector, 41. See also autonomy Humby, Clive, 89 “hypernudge,” 140 iBeacon (Apple), 10 IBM, xx, 22, 47 Iceland, medical data of, 173 ICT. See information and communication technologies sector ideology of personalization, 16–17, 61 Idle No More, xiv–xv income inequality. See poverty India: Aadhaar unique ID system in, 11, 100, 134; Cambridge Analytica plans for, 3; Dutch East India Company, 95–96; East India Company (British), 97–101; on Free Basics (Facebook), 97; internal colonizing and social quantification sector, 55; and Opium Wars, 109; platform development by, 13–14; social quantification in, 53 indigenous people, ix–x, 45, 70, 88, 92, 195–96, 208–9, 264n7.

See also Cloud Empire; specific names of apps; specific names of companies “playbor” (part play, part labor), 59 Pogge, Thomas, 139 Polanyi, Karl, 116–17, 150, 156, 193, 226n66, 253n16 Porter, Theodore, 118–19, 122–23 Posner, Eric, 229–30n123 Posner, Richard, 255n50, 258n107 possessive specificism, 167, 256n56 postcolonialism: and decoloniality, 79–81, 240n44; and neocolonialism, 74–79, 223n2 Postone, Moishe, 31 poverty: autonomy issues of, 159–61; Cloud Empire and effect on vulnerable social groups, 67–68; discrimination and social knowledge, 121, 143–49; and environmental exploitation by Cloud Empire, 234n29; historical colonialism resulting in, 84; and social knowledge, 120, 124; technological advance and income inequality, 40 power: corporate control of resources, 41; corporate power and autonomy risk, 163–64; of monopoly-monopsony hybrids, 43–45; power relations between capitalism and colonialism, x; and surveillance, 155. See also social knowledge The Practice of Everyday Life (Certeau), 261n12 Pratt, Andy, 231n138 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 128 primitive accumulation, 45 privacy: attitudes toward, 248n120; autonomy and public debates about, 155; and consent, 28–30, 93–94, 129; legal issues of, 176–84; necessity of, 258n111; Posner on, 255n50; and social quantification sector, 52–53.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

After Delhi Riots, Muslims in India Fear What’s Next,” Time Magazine, March 3, 2020, https://time.com/5794354/delhi-riots-muslims-india/; Rana Ayyub, “Narendra Modi Looks the Other Way as New Delhi Burns,” Time Magazine, February 28, 2020, https://time.com/5791759/narendra-modi-india-delhi-riots-violence-muslim/. 17.Apoorvanand, “How the Coronavirus Outbreak in India Was Blamed on Muslims,” Al Jazeera, April 18, 2020, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-outbreak-india-blamed-muslims-200418143252362.html. 18.B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (New Delhi: Arnold, 1990). 19.Shreehari Paliath, “Income Inequality in India: Top 10% Upper Caste Households Own 60% Wealth,” Business Standard, January 14, 2019, www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/income-inequality-in-india-top-10-upper-caste-households-own-60-wealth-119011400105_1.html. 20.M. Zwick-Maitreyi et al., Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste among South Asian Americans, Equality Labs, 2018, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58347d04bebafbb1e66df84c/t/5d9b4f9afbaef569c0a5c132/1570459664518/Caste_report_2018.pdf. 21.Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 167. 22.The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, “The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva,” http://stopfundinghate.org/sacw/index.html. 23.Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades,” Outlook, March 29, 2010, www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/walking-with-the-comrades/264738. 24.Michael Safi, “How Love and a Taste of Honey Brought One Indian Woman’s 16-Year Hunger Strike to an End,” Guardian, November 11, 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/11/irom-sharmila-love-story-worlds-longest-hunger-strike. 25.Jaskaran Kaur and Sukhman Dhami, “Protecting the Killers: A Policy of Impunity in Punjab, India,” Human Rights Watch, October 2007, www.hrw.org/reports/2007/india1007/india1007webwcover.pdf; Romesh Silva, Jasmine Marwaha, and Jeff Klingner, Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances during the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India, Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group and Ensaaf, January, 2009, https://ensaaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ViolentDeathsReport.pdf. 26.Citizens for Justice and Peace, “Cornered Citizens Tribunal: An Inquiry into the Carnage in Gujarat,” 2002, www.sabrang.com/tribunal/. 27.Jess Franklin, “Globalizing the War on Indigenous People: Bolsonaro and Modi,” CounterPunch, January 24, 2020, www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/globalizing-the-war-on-indigenous-people-bolsonaro-and-modi/. 28.Forum against War on People, “24 April Meeting: Indian State’s War on People and the Assault on Democratic Voices,” Counter Currents, April 20, 2010, www.countercurrents.org/wop200410.htm. 29.Smita Gupta, “A Shiver Runs through It,” Outlook, February 22, 2010, www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-shiver-runs-through-it/264255. 30.Azad Essa, “India’s Annexation of Kashmir Is Straight Out of the Israeli Playbook,” Middle East Eye, August 7, 2019, www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/indias-annexation-kashmir-straight-out-israeli-playbook. 31.BDS Movement, “Solidarity and Unity in Opposing Global Militarization: BNC Statement on Kashmir,” August 13, 2019, www.bdsmovement.net/news/solidarity-and-unity-opposing-global-militarization-bnc-statement-kashmir. 32.Nitasha Kaul, “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti-) Nationalism,” Feminist Review 119 (2018): 131. 33.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9, no. 3 (2009): 105–19. Paulson, A. “Less Than 40% of 12th-Graders Ready for College, Analysis Finds.” Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2014. Pilon, M. “Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% about Income Inequality.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/. Pilon, M. “The Secret History of Monopoly.” Guardian, April 11, 2015. Porter, E. “School vs. Society in America’s Failing Students.” New York Times, November 3, 2015. Provini, C. “Why Field Trips Still Matter.”


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Mirvis, “Stewardship and Human Resources Management: From Me to We to All of Us,” in Mohrman, O’Toole, and Lawler, Corporate Stewardship, 134–55. 39.Patrick Jenkins, “Gaping Pay Divide between Head Honchos and the Hired Help,” Financial Times, March 27, 2018. 40.David Gelles, “Want to Make Money Like a C.E.O.? Work for 275 Years. A Telling Look at Income Inequality,” New York Times, Sunday Business, May 27, 2018, 1. 41.Attracta Mooney, “Managers ‘Asleep at the Wheel’ over Executive Pay,” Financial Times, March 5, 2018. 42.Patricia Cohen, “The Raise That Roared,” New York Times, August 2, 2015, Sunday Business. Conclusion: Difficile Est Bonum Esse 1.Sarah O’Conner, “Jaguar Land Rover Lay-Offs Highlight the Plight of UK’s Temporary Workers,” Financial Times, May 2, 2018, 9. 2.James O’Toole and Edward E.

., 78–79, 81, 82, 85–86, 88, 315 paternalism and, 87 Pennsylvania Dutch and, 71–72, 76, 84, 428 philanthropy and fame, 81–82 politics of, 83–84 revered by employees, townspeople, and public, 88 Taylorism and, 81, 430 wealth of, 76 workers’ education and, 88 workplace practices, reason for, 431–32 Hershey Chocolate Company, 395 advertising and, 89 Amish and Mennonite men working in, 80 CEO Lenny and changes at, 89–90, 92 community relations, 83, 90 Cuba sugar plantation and mill, 85 environmental issues and global sustainability efforts, 89 factory built, Lancaster county, 78–79 “Field Ration D,” 88 Hershey Trust and ownership of, 89–93, 433–34, 507n incorporation of, 85 institutionalization of practices, 435 job security and, 81, 86, 103 labor unions and, 87–88, 90 NLRB rulings and changes in pay policies, 88 profits and, 82, 86, 89 profit-sharing at, 82 recent news and stain on, 71 school trustees and scandal, 90, 91–92 “scientific management” system, 81, 107 social responsibility today and, 89 takeover attempts, 90–91, 92, 490n26 uncertain future of, 92 wages and, 80–81, 87, 92 working conditions at, 81 Hershey Foundation, 86 Hershey Industrial School, 82–83, 86, 87 endowment for, 89 renamed Milton Hershey School, 89 Hershey Trust, 83, 89, 90, 434, 507n Hertz, 279, 280 Hewlett-Packard, 424, 429, 473, 474, 476 Hill, Andrew, 440–41 Hirshberg, Gary “How to Make Money and Save the World,” 454 sale of Stonyfield Farms to Danone, 455 Hockney, David, 56 Hoffman, Philip, 163 Honeyman, Ryan, The B Corp Handbook, 458 Honeywell, 424 Hoover, Herbert, 149 “How to Make Money and Save the World” (Hirshberg), 454 human capital, 15, 408, 474 Hunt, Michelle, 235 IBM, 112, 174 Norris labels unethical marketing tactic as “FUD,” 245–46 idealism cooperatives and, 416 corporate social responsibility and, xxxviii–xl Credo Challenge meeting and, 167–69 enlightened capitalists as practical idealists, xli hard facts for, 466–67 history’s support of, xliii increased corporate interest in social responsibility and, 443–44 Levi Strauss and, 205 Lewis and, 131, 134–35 Lincoln and, 131 motivations for, 427–28 Owen and, 26, 131 practical, examples of, 427 realism vs., xxxvi tensions with practicality, 360 IKEA, 434, 507n7 Imitation Game, The (film), 244 incentive management, 97–105 income inequality, 123, 469–72 independent trust and foundation-owned companies, 434–35, 507n India, caste hierarchies in, xxii Industrial Revolution, xi, 51, 68, 432 effect on Britain’s economic and social order, 4–5 in England, 206 growth of cities and slums, 5 Manchester, UK and, 9 movement from farms to cities, 5 Owen’s reforms and non-exploitive capitalism, 6 innovation, xvii, xxxviii Arco and, 310 cultures that encourage, 328 De Pree on, 232 employee mobility and, 133 Google’s Quayside and, 450 Herman Miller Company, 231 Hershey and, 74 John Lewis Partnership and, 132 Land and, 328 Lever and, 51, 53, 58 Lewis’s system and, 133, 134 Lincoln Electric, 94, 95, 102, 109–12 loss of, 476 Nucor and, 266 smaller private companies as crucibles of, 397, 437, 440 SWA and, 289 Tom’s of Maine and, 368 W.

., heads, 180–82, 193 Haas brothers head, 182–89 handicapped workers hired, 185 homosexual employees and, 202, 204 job losses at, 198 Koshland as president, 193 labor practices, 178 labor unions and, 181–82 legend of, 176 long-term thinking and, 196–97 minority hiring, 183, 189, 203 minority-owned stores and suppliers, 184, 203 mission and aspirations statements, 201 new factory and industrial design, 179 nonfamily CEOs and current state, 204–5 ownership structure, 201 passes billion-dollar mark, 193 paternalism and, 178 pensions and, 183 plant closings, 198–99, 201 product quality department, 184 products, 177, 179, 190, 196, 198 profits and, 185, 192 promoting blue-collar workers to management, 189 public offering of stock, 188–89 quality of goods and, 401 rivet patent for jeans, 177, 179 San Francisco earthquake and, 179 Santone factory, 196, 198–99 severance packages, 199–200 social responsibility, 178, 184, 186–89, 195–96, 202–3 Stern heads, 178–81 stock granted to key employees, 183 stock price, 192–93 Strauss and, 176–79 Strauss’s heirs and, 178 “suggested pricing” issue, 187–88 Thigpen and, 191–92 tsuris (trouble) at, 197–200 wages and benefits, 185, 190 women workers, 185, 189 Levi Strauss Foundation, 184, 185 Lewis, John Spedan, 120–35, 219, 428 as capitalist, 131–32 commitment to free speech, 128 company ownership and, 144, 395 customer care and, 122 death of, 125 early career, 120–21, 123 economies of scale and, 122 employee committees and, 120–21, 138 employee well-being and wages, 121, 122 experiment in industrial democracy and, 121–22 income inequality and, 123 John Lewis Partnership and, 120, 123–35 lasting legacy of, 143–44 legal framework of governance and ownership developed by, 121, 124–28, 433, 434 motivation for a virtuous enterprise, 122 Owen’s ideas and, 430 personality of, 121–22, 127 political-economic philosophy, 131 sustainability of business model, 120, 122, 132, 134–35 Lewis, John, Sr., 120–21 Limited stores, 354 Lincoln, Abraham, xliii Lincoln, James, 150, 268, 396, 428 about, 95–96 as advocate of his philosophy, 96–97, 111–12 arguments against his system, 118–19 as capitalist, 131–32 Christian values and managerial philosophy, 110–11, 137, 360 “classless society” vision of, 112, 123 congressional questioning of, 102–3 customer service and, 96 death of, 116 “the development of latent ability” and, 96–97, 100 durability of system, 112–16, 395 ethics and, 111 Ford’s influence on, 96, 112–13 as free-trader, 111 idealism of, 131 incentive management, 94, 97–105, 111 influence of, 430 innovation and, 109 intellectual influences on, 430 Lincoln Electric and, 94–119 management style of, 115–16 message of, 96 as outspoken, 96, 116 product innovation and, 109–12 profound insight of, 95 reconciling the antagonistic interests of workers and owners, 94 study of management by, 96 system as alternative to socialism, 97 system not adopted by any other major company, 117, 117n trust of workers, 113 workplace practices, reason for, 431–32 Lincoln, John Cromwell, 95, 109, 110, 115 Lincoln Electric, 290, 406, 424, 476 advisory board, 97–98, 100, 106, 138, 413 average earnings, 100 community relations, 110, 113, 116 company today, 94, 116–19 critics of, 118–19, 134 culture of, 98–99 diversification resisted, 109–10 egalitarian work environments, 98 employee bonuses, 94, 102, 491n11 employee communication and participation, 97–99 employee retention, 104, 185 employee self-management and lowest total labor costs, 101 employee wages and benefits, 94–95, 98, 99–101, 158, 276 ethical behavior and, 111 expectations of employees, 104–5 foreign expansion, 98, 102 founding of, 95 Great Depression and, 100, 103 growth, 110 guaranteed employment/job security, 94, 95, 103–5, 111 incentive management, 97–105 influence on SAIC, 413–14 innovation and, 94, 95, 109–12 institutionalization of practices, 436 merit-based bonus, 101–3 number of employees, 94 ownership structure, 115, 116–17, 433, 436 piecework compensation, 99–101, 106–7, 117n, 229 productivity, 99–101 profits (2017), 94 profits reinvested, 109, 110 profit-sharing, 98, 101–3, 406 public offering of stock, 117 recent acquisitions, 117 recruitment and, 131 sustainability of business model, 134–35, 395, 433 trade union objections, 105–9 working conditions, 98 world’s largest manufacturer of electric arc-welding machines, 94 Lindt, Rodolphe, 77 Lister, Joseph, 145 living conditions of workers, xi ACIPCO housing, 138 Britain’s textile mills and, 6 Carnegie’s workers, xxxii Ford and, 113 Ford’s Fordlandia, xxviii Hershey and, 78–79, 80, 82, 85, 86 J&J and, 148 Lever and, 54–55, 56–57 Lever Bros. in the Congo and, 60 M&S employee lunchrooms and, 212 Miller and, 315 model towns, 18–19, 54–56, 78–79, 82, 84, 85, 113, 148, 315, 450 Owen and, 12, 13, 18–19 Pullman’s company town, 77 Locke, John, 9 Locke, Robert, 430 London Stock Exchange, 47 Long, Russell, 411 Lord & Taylor, 432 Lord Corporation, 424 L’Oréal, 357–59, 392, 394 Los Kass, 35 Lubetzky, Daniel, 404–5, 456, 457 Do the KIND Thing, 404 Luce, Henry, 154 Lucent Technologies, 318 Lyft, 474, 475 Macauley, Thomas, 7, 154 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xlii Mackey, John, 444, 447, 448, 455 Conscious Capitalism (CC) movement, 452–53 as pro-capitalism with libertarian convictions, 453 Macqueen, Adam, The King of Sunlight, 61–62, 488n Macy’s, 401 Madoff, Bernie, 468 Maersk, 507n7 Major Barbara (Shaw), 69–70 Malden Mills, 262–63, 427 Polartec and, 263 Maltby, Kate, xliv Manchester, UK, 5, 6, 8–10, 11, 208 as center for the Industrial Revolution, 9 Enlightenment ideas in, 9 Owen in, 8–10 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 10 Manchester University, 210 Man for All Seasons, A (Bolt), xlii Mann, Horace, 94 Margarine Unie, 65 Marks, Hannah Cohen, 207 Marks, Michael, 206–9, 395 death of, 209, 223 ethics and, 210, 222, 428 Leeds market stalls and, 207 marriage and family, 207 novel retail practices, 207 partnership with Spencer, 208 Marks, Miriam Sieff, 209 Marks, Simon, 209, 431 as Baron Marks of Broughton, 217 birth of, 207 concept of “superstores,” 210–11 death of, 217 economic philosophy, 209–10 friendship with Israel Sieff, 208, 209 institutionalization of practices, 435 as Marks & Spencer CEO, 209–17 marriage and family, 209 paternalism and, 213 personality of, 214, 215 Weizmann’s influence on, 210, 211, 428 Marks & Spencer (M&S), 206–23, 426 acquisitions, 220 bad decisions at, 220 as Britain’s dominant retailer, 211 business model, 210 Chapman heads, 209 community relations and, 213, 216 company ownership, 209, 211, 399, 436 crisis of 1999 and reorganization, 221 customer base, loss of, 221 customers and, 211–17 domestic sourcing of products, 214 employees and, 210, 216, 219 employees’ education and training, 212 employees’ health care, 212 employees’ lunchrooms, 212 employees’ profit-sharing and stock-ownership program, 212, 221 employment policies, 219 environmental practices, 222 ethical lapses and, 220 ethical standards, 210 first private brand in British retailing (St Michael), 213–14, 216, 221, 222 food sales, 214 founding of, 208 Greenbury as CEO and loss of business model, 220–21 growth, 211 incorporation of, 208 industrial research and, 211 as leader in informational labeling, 222 as limited liability corporation, 211 “Look Behind the Label” campaign, 222 management, 215–16 in Manchester, 208 Marks, Simon, heads, 209–17 as “Marks and Sparks,” 211 nonfamily CEOs and current state, 220–23 Norman as CEO and imperiling of enlightened culture, 223 paternalism and, 213 Penny Bazaars, 208 philosophies and practices (list), 216 philosophy of employment policies, 212 product line, 215 profits and, 220 Rayner as CEO, 220 refocus on core values, 222 relationships with manufacturers, 211, 216 reputation for quality, 215 Rose as CEO, 221–22 Sieff, Israel, leadership of, 209–10, 217 Sieff, Marcus, as CEO, 217–19 social responsibility, 210, 213, 216, 218 social responsibility and, 222 stock and lost value, 220–21 store closings, 223 transforming British retailing, 210 Vandevelde as CEO, 221 wages and benefits, 211, 212, 219 women managers and, 212 Woolworths as competitor, 210 World War II and, 214 Mars, 398–99 environmental practices, 399 line of healthy snacks, 399 long-term thinking and, 399 management philosophy, 399 number of employees, 399 progressive employee-and management-development practices, 399 Reid as CEO, 399 sales and earnings, 399 Wrigley acquired by, 399 Mars, Forrest, 398–99 Martineau, Harriet, 27 Marvin Windows and Doors, 396–97 Marx, Karl, xi, 5, 25, 432 criticism of Owen, 6–7 redistribution of wealth and, 132 Maslow, Abraham, 160, 431 Mattel, 286 Maximilian I, Emperor, xxv, xxvi Mayo, Elton, 154 Mayville, Gail, 385–86, 451 “Green Team,” 386 Mazzei, Ser Lapo, xxiv–xxv McGregor, Douglas, 160, 229, 430 Theory Y, 431 McKinsey & Co., 194, 411 McNabb, Bill, xiv, xv, 461 McWane, J.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530566/the-impact-of-the-internet-on-society-a-global-perspective/ 53 Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2015, October 2015. http://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E 54 OECD, “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising”, 2011. http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf 55 Frederick Solt, “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database,” Working paper, SWIID, Version 5.0, October 2014. http://myweb.uiowa.edu/fsolt/swiid/swiid.html 56 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2009. 57 Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “More unequal and more separate: Growth in the residential segregation of families by income, 1970-2009”, US 2010 Project, 2011.


pages: 177 words: 38,221

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection by Richard Pereira

banks create money, basic income, behavioural economics, carbon credits, carbon tax, income inequality, job automation, Lyft, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, quantitative easing, sovereign wealth fund, Tobin tax, transfer pricing, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Wall-E

Müller and Straub II, Analysis of Potential Several authors have dealt with the economic potential of the introduction of a BI; Müller and Straub have published during the voting campaign such an analysis in the form of a pre-study within their “Institut Zukunft” (Institute of the Future), calculating the positive effects as follows: the positive effects on mental and physical health are estimated at 13 bn CHF, the increase of output productivity at 31 bn CHF, additional consumption at 8.7 bn CHF, together with other minor factors a one-off contribution of about 55 bn CHF. The sustainable potential (from the reduction of income inequality and an increase of the creation of enterprises, is estimated at some 4 bn CHF.6 To be frank, I am not convinced of the reliability of these numbers and therefore cannot take them into account for the financing debate. Others In the course of the campaign for the popular initiative, various other attempts and proposals have been given birth, including a micro-taxation of financial transfers or a mix of the systems mentioned above, according to the creative potential of the respective authors.


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

If you are researching the problems of the Black or Latino inner city, put the debilitating effects of crime on the same level of importance as poverty, drug use, bad schools, and family breakdown. Take a hard look at what happened to crime rates and policing in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the aftermath of the protests in the summer of 2020. I could offer similar examples for research on other policy questions, such as the effects of income inequality, the efficacy of preschool and jobs programs, the causes of residential segregation, the voting behavior of the working class – take your choice. Research results on any domestic policy issue involving more than one race are seldom valid unless race differences in cognitive ability and crime are taken into account.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Unemployment fell sharply and workers’ buying power rose 22 per cent in a single year as price controls ensured that inflation fell. Chile’s growing economy was more equitable too: mandatory wage increases for low-paid workers were 56 per cent, higher than the (still generous) 23 per cent rise that professional Chileans received. The wage gap between the skilled and unskilled fell and income inequality was driven down. In just a year Allende’s promises seemed to be paying off. But the success of such a huge shift in economic approach should be measured in decades not years, and the short-term boom Allende delivered was both artificial and unsustainable. Rampant spending on house building and the public sector meant the government deficit soared from 3 per cent in 1970 to over 30 per cent by 1973.

For an example of the praise given to Chile and the urge for other countries to follow its path, see World Bank (1999); and for Chile’s ‘exemplary’ policies, see Brookings (2009). Poverty reduction For statistics on the reduction of poverty, see Altimir (2001) and Ffrench-Davis (2010); for the argument that official statistics mask hidden poverty, see Solimano (2012). Income inequality and growth On the persistent problem of poverty and increasing problem of inequality in Chile, see Ffrench-Davis (2010) and Solimano (2012). For a summary of the arguments that Chilean development and growth are not reaching the majority of its citizens, see COHA (2011). On the resilience of inequality in Santiago, see Fernández et al. (2016).


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion.35 Part III Deferred Dreams: Reflections on Politics and Society Chapter 12 Another Dream Deferred How Identity Politics, Intersectionality Theory, and Tribal Divisiveness Are Inverting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream Preamble In 2017/2018 there rose to cultural prominence an electronic magazine of extraordinary vision called Quillette (Quillette.com, @Quillete), founded by the equally visionary Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon), who curated into publication articles on topics almost no one else would touch, such as gender differences in cognition and career preference, sexual harassment and the #metoo/#timesup movement, income inequality, race and IQ, evolutionary psychology and human nature, human violence and its causes, social justice, intersectionality theory, and especially identity politics. Claire’s magazine has skyrocketed in online readership and with it crowd-funded financial support (www.patreon.com/Quillette) to enable her to hire top-notch editors like Jonathan Kay and regular contributors such as Coleman Hughes, Toby Young, and Clay Routledge.

And there’s no reason why persons with low status in these non-pecuniary categories will not suffer all the stress and envy now allegedly suffered by people with low incomes.24 In the end, then, following Frank’s line of reasoning, the government should give tax breaks to conservatives, the wealthy, and the working poor in order to reward their pro-social behavior and encourage more giving, and the government should stimulate income inequality in order to attenuate status seeking in other nonpecuniary traits. All liberals in favor of such policies please raise your hands. Other Hidden Costs: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen in Government Actions Even if evolutionary psychologists are wrong in this analysis of sexual selection and costly signaling theory, and it was determined that ostentatious displays of wealth, power, prestige, and creativity should be penalized through a consumption tax because of Frank’s analysis using Coase’s transaction models that reveal the hidden transaction costs of positional ranking and subsequent arms races, there are transaction costs of implementing such a tax.


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The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

This psychosocial criminological approach to behaviour can be especially useful in understanding crimes caused in part by the senses of grievance and frustration, such as terrorism and hate crime.1 ‘Instrumental’ crimes, such as burglary and theft, can often be understood as a product of wider social and economic forces. Economic downturns, cuts to state benefits, widespread unemployment, increases in school expulsions, income inequality and poor rental housing stock can all combine to explain much of the variance (the total amount that can be explained in a statistical model) in the propensity of someone to burgle a home or shoplift.*2 Their commission is often rational – ‘I have no money, it’s easier to get it illegitimately than legitimately, and the chances of getting caught are low.’

To test which of these explanations was most likely, the researchers controlled for a wide range of other potential contributory factors, including (at the county level) population growth, age, ethnic composition, number of hate groups, qualifications, poverty rate, unemployment rate, local income inequality, share of uninsured individuals, household income, vote share of the Republican party, salience of Muslim-related topics based on Google searches, viewership share of Fox News, cable TV spending, prime-time TV viewership and the number of mentions of Muslims on main US TV networks (Fox News, CNN and MSNBC).


pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

Fiscal policy involves the collection of taxes, the spending of public money, and regulation. America’s ability to conduct fiscal policy deteriorated slowly over the years as the Fed’s ability to conduct monetary policy strengthened. There were many reasons for this fiscal decay: money in politics, the rise of corporate lobbying, the birth of television cable news, and growing income inequality all played a role. But the one important fact about the deterioration of executive and legislative power is that it was not inevitable. For at least a century or so, fiscal policy led the way in America, and the Fed, with its money-printing power, followed. The largest burst of fiscal action in U.S. history happened after the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

The bottom half of all Americans owned only 6.5 percent of all assets. When the Fed stoked asset prices, it was helping a vanishingly small group of people at the top. The people who benefited most from this arrangement tended to talk about it the least. Very few hedge-fund operators seemed eager to complain about the way that ZIRP widened income inequality and fueled speculative debt bubbles. One of the unspoken rules of Wall Street, in fact, is that those who know, don’t show. If a trade is turning a profit, then people who know about it don’t talk about it because doing so might draw a crowd and risk the trade itself. So the public rhetoric around quantitative easing remained dominated by inflation doomsayers who focused only on price inflation, which never materialized.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

More than 32 per cent of the rented housing in these wards was classed as non-decent, with more than 18 per cent of them containing the most harmful hazards, including extreme cold, unsafe electrics and fire risks (a figure which is just above the national average). Economically, Weston is one of the most deprived areas in North Somerset. In fact, North Somerset is a predominantly rural area but it has high income inequality due to the concentration of deprivation in Weston. Every month, about 300 people apply to North Somerset Council for social housing. Every month, they join a growing waiting list which, in 2021, was 3,300 families long. But, as the council’s own guidance states, it is ‘unlikely’ that they will be offered social housing unless they are in ‘severe circumstances’, because only 600 properties become available each year.

But when the financial crisis hit, lending to them was cut in half and landlords were seen as a less risky bet by lenders. 20.3 per cent of households: www.statista.com/statistics/286444/england-number-of-private-rented-households the return of rentier capitalism: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (2013; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) is an important work though, of course, not everyone agrees with its contents. A key claim made by Piketty is that income inequality has increased sharply since the late 1970s, with a particularly dramatic rise in the share of total income going to the very highest earners in the US and Europe. He believes this trend towards greater wealth inequality is very likely to continue, because the returns from capital are likely to grow faster than the economy itself, and faster than the owners of that wealth are likely to be able to spend it.


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

No company form carries his name. He is not officially the director or owner of anything. Nevertheless, he is the North Star in a vast constellation of offshore companies. Putin’s authoritarian regime exists to enrich a minority at the expense of the majority. Russia has some of the highest income inequality in the world, with the top 10 percent of wealth holders owning 85 percent of all household wealth.1 Oil revenue, media monopolies, rigged courts, baton-carrying policemen, high-profile assassinations, and nationalism keep Putin’s ship of state afloat. Charting its course toward illicit riches for the chosen few requires the secrecy world.

Mossfon knowingly and repeatedly violated myriad laws worldwide, John Doe asserted, noting Jürgen Mossack’s misleading declaration in the Nevada court as an example. Mossfon’s “founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far,” John Doe said. The worst harm, John Doe seemed to suggest, was that Mossfon and the system within which it operated encouraged the growth of income inequality, “one of the defining issues of our time.” It was a system that had led to “society’s progressively diseased and decaying moral fabric.” The firm had not worked in a vacuum, he observed: “It found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation.” John Doe expressed willingness to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent possible.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Furthermore, although the potential of information technologies could have provided for higher productivity, higher living standards, and higher employment simultaneously, once certain technological choices are in place, technological trajectories are “locked in,”133 and the informational society could become at the same time (without the technological or historical necessity to be so) a dual society. Alternative views prevailing in the OECD, IMF, and government circles in major Western countries have suggested that observed trends of rising unemployment, underemployment, income inequality, poverty, and social polarization are by and large the result of a skills mismatch, worsened by the lack of flexibility in the labor markets.134 According to these views, while the occupational/employment structure is upgraded in terms of the educational content of the skills required for the informational jobs, the labor force is not up to the new tasks, either because of the low quality of the educational system or because of the inadequacy of this system to provide the new skills needed in the emerging occupational structure.135 In their report to the ILO’s research institute, Carnoy and Fluitman have submitted this broadly accepted view to a devastating critique.

It is much more convincing, we argue, that better education and more training could, in the longer run, contribute to higher productivity and economic growth rates.136 In the same sense, David Howell has shown for the US that while there has been an increasing demand for higher skills, this is not the cause of the substantial decline in average wages for American workers between 1973 and 1990 (a fall from a weekly wage of $327 to $265 in 1990, measured in 1982 dollars). Nor is the skill mix the source of increasing income inequality. In his study with Wolff, Howell shows that while the share of low-skilled workers in the US decreased across industries, the share of low-wage workers increased in these same industries. Several studies also suggest that higher skills are in demand, although not in shortage, but higher skills do not necessarily translate into higher wages.137 Thus, in the US, while decline in real wages was more pronounced for the lowest-educated, salaries for the college-educated also stagnated between 1987 and 1993.138 The direct consequence of economic restructuring in the United State s is that in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s family income plummeted.

Much has been made of the shareholders democracy in the new forms of capitalism, but table 4.29 shows the extreme concentration of stock ownership in 1995, even when we include stock plans, mutual funds, individual retirement accounts, and other instruments of popular capitalism. While America is an extreme case of income inequality and declining real wages among the industrialized nations, its evolution is significant because it does represent the flexible labor market model at which most European nations, and certainly European firms, are aiming.141 And the social consequences of such a trend are similar in Europe. Thus, in Greater London between 1979 and 1991 real disposable income of households in the lowest decile of income distribution declined by 14 percent, and the ratio of real income of the richest decile over the poorest almost doubled in the decade, from 5.6 to 10.2.142 Poverty in the UK substantially increased during the 1980s and early 1990s.143 And for other European countries, taking the incidence of child poverty as an indicator of the evolution of poverty, on the basis of data collected by Esping-Andersen, between 1980 and the mid-1990s child poverty increased by 30 percent in the US, by 145 percent in the UK, by 31 percent in France, and by 120 percent in Germany.144 Inequality and poverty increased during the 1990s in the US, and in most of Europe.145 I take the liberty of referring the reader to volume III, chapter 2, for a summary presentation of data and sources on inequality and poverty, both for the United States and for the world at large.


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The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

., 575. 6.Eric Hoffer, “Notable & Quotable: The Young,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017. 7.Mike Isaac, “Upstarts Raiding Giants for Staff in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, August 19, 2015. 8.John Tamny, “Fear Not, Millennials Are Not Embracing Bernie Sanders Style Socialism,” Forbes, August 3, 2016. 9.Adam Shell, “In Quest for Millennials, Financial Firms Try to ‘Crack the Code,’” USA Today, May 10, 2017. Chapter Seven: My Story 1.Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then (New York: Crown Books, 1999), 200. 2.Mark Bechtel, “Farewell,” Sports Illustrated, December 28, 2015. 3.Steve Forbes, “Powerful Antiterror Weapon,” Forbes, October 6, 2006. 4.George F. Will, “How income inequality benefits everybody,” Washington Post, March 25, 2015. 5.Charisse Jones, “Many Companies Force Workers to Use Time Off,” USA Today, August 19, 2016. 6.John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 12. 7.Ibid., 130. Chapter Eight: The “Venture Buyer” 1.John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books), 100–101. 2.Allana Akhtar, “U.S.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

Since 2009, and in particular in 2011, the Republicans have shown themselves to be less willing to compromise than the Democrats. And the issue they have sacralized is, unfortunately, taxes. Sacredness means no tradeoffs, and they are willing to sacrifice all the good things government can do to preserve low tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. This commitment exacerbates the rapidly growing income inequality that is poisonous to social trust, and therefore to moral capital (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). As a Durkheimian utilitarian, I see much to like in conservatism, but much less to like in the Republican Party. 37. Putnam 2000. 38. That’s Putnam’s definition. 39. Coleman 1988. 40. Sosis and Bressler 2003; see chapter 11. 41.

“The Effect of Physical Appearance on the Judgment of Guilt, Interpersonal Attraction, and Severity of Recommended Punishment in a Simulated Jury Task.” Journal of Research in Personality 8:45–54. Ehrenreich, B. 2006. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Metropolitan Books. Ekman, P. 1992. “Are There Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 99:550–53. Elgar, F. J., and N. Aitken. 2010. “Income Inequality, Trust and Homicide in 33 Countries.” European Journal of Public Health 21:241–46. Eliade, M. 1957/1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. W. R. Task. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Ellis, J. J. 1996. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Vintage.


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Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead at the WEF, believes blockchain technology is a general-purpose technology, like the Internet, which we can use to make markets radically more efficient and improve access to financial services. The WEF predicted that within a decade, we could store 10 percent of global GDP on blockchains.71 As an organization, the WEF has championed and advanced big issues, such as income inequality, climate change, and even remittances. Other networked institutions, from the smallest groups to the biggest foundations in the world, such as the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, would be wise to champion this technology to advance such big issues as financial inclusion and health care delivery.

Interview with Hernando de Soto, November 27, 2015. 15. www.tamimi.com/en/magazine/law-update/section-6/june-4/dishonoured-cheques-in-the-uae-a-criminal-law-perspective.html. 16. www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. To be precise, it was 1.91 billion in 1990. 17. http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=gfsb. 18. http://reports.weforum.org/outlook-global-agenda-2015/top-10-trends-of-2015/1-deepening-income-inequality/. 19. Ibid. 20. Interview with Tyler Winklevoss, June 9, 2015. 21. Congo, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Niger, Madagascar, Guinea, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Tanzania; http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FB.CBK.BRCH.P5?order=wbapi_data_value_2013+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=asc. 22. www.aba.com/Products/bankcompliance/Documents/SeptOct11CoverStory.pdf. 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/business/dealbook/banks-reject-new-york-city-ids-leaving-unbanked-on-sidelines.html. 24.


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The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

Among children a relatively high frequency of non-lethal physical aggression is found to be reactive. Proactive aggression is more characteristic of indirect, non-physical aggression (e.g. gossip) (Frey et al. 2014, pp. 287–88). 19. Wilson and Daly (1985). 20. Fights over honor more frequent among lower class men: Polk (1995), Brookman (2003). Income inequality and reactive aggression: Daly and Wilson (2010). 21. Nisbett and Cohen (1996) showed experimentally that young men from the American south reacted with more aggression to a standardized experimental insult than those from other regions of the United States. They proposed that the southerners’ high emotional reactivity resulted from their being derived from populations that had immigrated from parts of Europe where honor was especially highly valued.

They proposed that the southerners’ high emotional reactivity resulted from their being derived from populations that had immigrated from parts of Europe where honor was especially highly valued. Daly and Wilson (2010) accepted the principle of a southern culture of honor, but showed that it could equally well be explained as resulting from high income inequality. 22. Keedy 1949, p. 760. 23. Ibid., p. 762. 24. Shimamura 2002. 25. LaFave and Scott 1986, p. 654, cited by Bushman and Anderson 2001, p. 274. 26. Bushman and Anderson 2001, p. 274. 27. Berkowitz 1993. 28. Dodge and Coie 1987. There remain some variants in the system of categorization.


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Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

According to sociologist Dennis Gilbert, if income were a national pie sliced into portions, the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. households would receive almost 50 percent of the total pie, whereas the poorest 20 percent would receive only 3 percent.31 In fact, the income share received by the wealthiest fifth of households is seventeen times that received by the poorest 20 percent.32 The average pretax income of people in the top 1 percent of households was $1,743,700 in 2006 as compared with an average pretax income of $17,200 in the bottom 20 percent of households.33 These figures look only at income inequality; they do not take into account wealth inequality, which has also increased dramatically in the twenty-first century. It is estimated, for example, that the top 1 percent of wealth holders in this country owned about 34 percent of net worth in 2007. As Gilbert explains, “The concentration of wealth at the top is so great that the top 1 percent now holds more net worth than the bottom 90%.”34 Consensus framing ignores the fact that few people in the top tiers of the upper class derive their income from a paycheck for hours worked, that the wealthy are not likely to experience the economic and psychological hardships of the unemployed or homeless, and that wealth may afford some people more leisure time, better security, better health care, and better connections and opportunities for their children than are available to people with less wealth.

Consider the following figures for 2008: The highest median income was for Asian households ($65,637), as compared to white (non-Hispanic) households ($55,530), Hispanic households ($37,913), and African American households ($34,218). As these figures show, African Americans and Latinos are overrepresented among those in the bottom income levels. Over half of African American and Latino households fall within the lowest income categories.23 Wealth inequality is even more pronounced than income inequality. Wealth includes property such as buildings, houses, land, farms, factories, and cars, 9781442202238.print.indb 219 2/10/11 10:47 AM 220 Chapter 7 as well as other assets such as bank accounts, corporate stocks, bonds, and insurance policies. Wealth is computed by subtracting all debt obligations (what you own minus what you owe) and converting the value of remaining assets into cash.


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Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

We, the citizens, are often left to pay the bill (recall the financial meltdown) or the side effects (from your pay slip to your social rights). With most of the benefits pocketed by these fortunate few, income inequality around the globe reached its highest level for the past half century by 2018.3 Wealth inequality (a measure of how much we have rather than how much we earn) was even worse—twice the level of income inequality.4 The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts by the Trump administration, as the United Nations noted, overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality: “The consequences of neglecting poverty and promoting inequality are clear.


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The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

As Internet access was high and rising in all these countries during that time, an Internet-based explanation of affective polarization is unlikely, although “the fact that in many countries polarization rose faster in the post-2000 period than the pre-2000 period is consistent with a role for digital media,” as they note. These trends can’t explain why polarization also rose in the 1990s and why it rose in some countries and fell in others after 2000. This suggests multiple factors contribute to the rise of affective polarization and that country-specific trends, like rising income inequality, growing racial divisions, and the rise of cable news in the United States, for example, could combine with digital and social media to create polarization. In the last few years, many have wondered what the Hype Machine has to do with all this discord. Automated, personalized targeting and trending algorithms seem tailored to drive us toward greater homogeneity and polarization.

Automated, personalized targeting and trending algorithms seem tailored to drive us toward greater homogeneity and polarization. The hypersocialization of society itself may reduce diversity because, as we coalesce or herd around others’ opinions, we may be clustering into tight-knit thought bubbles with those like ourselves. Could the Hype Machine combine with country-specific factors like income inequality, racial division, and increasing party affiliation to create online echo chambers that accelerate affective polarization? Do these factors make homogeneous, party-affiliated groups easier to target on Facebook and other social media? These are complicated questions. Newsfeed-ranking and friend-suggestion algorithms may well combine with our own choices to shape what we read and believe to further divide us.


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How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Farming also requires technologies for food storage, because its whole point is to produce more food than you can eat at once. This again is more work, but thanks to Section 10.2.4: Preserved Foods, you at least have the advantage of knowing exactly what to do. Farming creates the first income inequality, because not everyone can be farmers or share equally in the land required for it. Farmers have the most food and (initially) the most to trade, and everyone who doesn’t want to become a skeleton needs to continue eating food. You have just created rich and poor people, or at the very least the potential for them.

See skins, tanning high-voltage wires, 201, 201n Hindu/Arabic numerals, 22 Hippocrates, 108 Hippocratic Oath, 324 hoe, 131 Hogan, Linda, 179 Holmes, Sherlock, 188, 188n honey as antibacterial, 339, 339n domesticating bees for, 94 fermenting, 62n honeybees, 93–94 Hooke’s wheel, 346–47 hops, 145 horsehair, 238 horsepower, 129, 129n horses, 94–95 horseshoes, 125–27 hot-air balloons, 289–91, 291n hourglasses, 205 human flight, 288–98 humans anatomy of, 406 baselines for health of, 330 modern, 6–7 Hunt, Mary, 154–55 hunting and gathering, 35–36, 38 hushing (mining technique), 159 hydraulic cement, 238 hydrocarbon chain, 217n hydrochloric acid, 70, 390 hydrogen atom, 307–8, 307f in Big Bang, 310 production of, 292–94, 293f, 294n hydrophilic, 217n hypernovae, 311 hypothesis, 33 hysteria, 326n ideograms, 18, 18f imaginary numbers, 27t immune system, 327 incandescent lightbulbs, 199n income inequality, 38 incubators, 234–36 Industrial Revolution, 185, 194, 202, 298 infections, 328, 339 information language for disseminating, 7, 15–16 transmission of, 274, 277, 277n, 279 infrastructure, 38 ink roller, 256 inks, 255–56 insulators, 195 internal combustion engine, 190–91, 191f, 298 iodine in diet, 150, 387 production and uses of, 386–87 in wound care, 339, 387 ionic bonds, 309 ionosphere, 280–81 iron formation of, 311 in hydrogen production, 292–93, 293f magnets and, 198, 264, 264n ore sources, 166 smelting, 166 iron pyrite, 279, 390 irrational numbers, 25t irrigation, 287 isotopes, 307 Jackson, Frank, 277n Jefferson, Thomas, 185 joule, 44 kangaroos, 85 keel, 286 Kelvin temperature scale, 40 kiln for extracting metals, 165–66 for making glass, 173, 173n for producing charcoal, 118–20 for producing pottery, 164–66, 165f for producing tar, 120 kilograms, 40–41 kindling, 114n King Jr., Martin Luther, 182 kites, 291 koji (mold), 144 Korobeiniki, “The Peddlers,” 357–58 lactic acid, 229 language(s) arbitrariness of, 13n constructed, 19n pictograms and ideograms in, 17–18, 18f signed, 12n spoken, 11t, 12–15 as technology, 7–9 universals in, 13, 14t–15t written, 11t, 16–20 Last Supper, The, 317f latex, 72–73 latitude, 205, 266–74, 267f, 268f, 275t laws of motion, 183n of thermodynamics, 186, 186n lead, 195–96 lead-acid batteries, 196–97 lead dioxide, 196, 197n leeches, 103–4 Le Guin, Ursula K., 248 legumes, 49t, 50–52 lemon juice, 139n, 154 lenses, 169–70, 169f, 169n levers, 159–60, 159n–60n lice, 104–5 lift, in aircraft, 296–98 light, bending, 169 light spectrum, 275–76, 275n lignin, 249n lime.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Rollback of highspeed rail: Romy Varghese, “California’s Newsom Scales Back Plans for High-Speed Rail Line,” Bloomberg, February 12, 2019, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/california-governor-says-he-s-dropping-high-speed-rail-plan; last California reservoir: Paul Rogers, “California Drought: Why Doesn’t California Build Big Dams Any More?,” Mercury News, August 31, 2014, www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/31/california-drought-why-doesnt-california-build-big-dams-any-more. 44. Ranking of inequality in California: “Income Inequality by State, 2021,” World Economic Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/income-inequality-by-state. The Homeless: Jacob Passy, “Nearly Half of the U.S.’s Homeless People Live in One State: California,” MarketWatch, September 29, 2019, www.marketwatch.com/story/this-state-is-home-to-nearly-half-of-all-people-living-on-the-streets-in-the-us-2019-09-18; California’s percentage of the nation’s poor: Kerry Jackson, “California, Poverty Capital,” City Journal, winter 2018, www.city-journal.org/html/california-poverty-capital-15659.html.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

CARES Act was a short-lived emergency improvisation, constrained by the limitations of U.S. public administration, it had in its own way even more dramatic implications. Though it did not build new structures or solidify America’s fragile labor market institutions, the sheer scale of spending was head-turning.31 A major contributor to the extreme income inequality that distinguishes the United States from other rich countries is its ungenerous welfare system. In 2020, for a brief moment, that changed. U.S. household disposable income Based on Mizuho Securities, BEA Thanks to the combination of stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits, many millions of Americans who lost their jobs saw their incomes increase.

Biden had no intention of “demonizing” wealth, but “you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. . . . We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change . . . When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in.”49 With Trump, the demagogic nightmare had arrived. If Trump’s attorney general had accused American business of selling out democracy to China, now it was the turn of big business to demand that the president and his party abide by America’s democratic rules.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

Instead of the taxes raised in London being used to support high levels of public spending in the regions, they should be used instead to reduce taxes on income and corporate taxes for economic activity being generated in the regions. This huge amount of money being transferred from London to the rest of the UK should be used to make the rest of the UK more competitive. The ‘Barnett formula’ which tries to guarantee spending levels should be replaced by an incentive formula based on the real level of income inequality (i.e. after adjusting for the cost of living) between the regions so that weaker regions would have lower taxes on both personal and corporate incomes. This will turn the economically weaker parts of the UK into tax havens. It is pretty obvious that this is likely to help rebalance the UK economy – indeed it could do so remarkably quickly.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

It was formed by representatives of the Occupy movements and surviving leaders of the original civil rights movement, including Benjamin Chavis.1 The dream that they’re talking about is not the one that people refer to on Martin Luther King Day, the civil rights dream. It’s King’s real dream: end war, end poverty, deal with the real suffering of people, not just civil rights, which is hard enough. There has been an increase in the use of terms such as “income inequality,” “concentrations of wealth,” “CEO pay,” “poverty,” “unemployment” since the Occupy Wall Street movement began in September 2011. The idea of the 1 percent and 99 percent has become common. The Occupy movement has succeeded in tapping feelings, attitudes, and understandings that have been latent, hidden right below the surface.


pages: 162 words: 51,473

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

Moreover, to the extent that you think some industries are more important than others—for example, because they yield technological spillovers—the jobs the United States gains by rolling back Japanese and European market shares in computers or semiconductors are surely more likely to produce those benefits than the jobs we give up by allowing in Chinese shirts and footwear. The downside—which is significant—is that precisely because our more open markets lead us to gain high-wage jobs but lose low-wage employment, our disproportionate role as a market for Chinese exports may exacerbate the problem of growing income inequality. The important thing to bear in mind is that the bilateral imbalance between the United States and China does not mean that the Chinese are taking advantage of our naiveté. (Which is not to say that they wouldn’t if they could.) It is mainly the result of the restrictions third parties place on China’s exports, not the restrictions China places on ours.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

One thing hasn’t changed, though—if you have money, you have access. Global trade has slowed as countries such as China stop exporting and seek to hold on to their own resources. Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its increasing scarcity, food can now be wildly expensive. Income inequality has always existed, but it has never been this stark or this dangerous. Entire regions suffer from epidemics of stunting and malnutrition. Reproduction has slowed overall, but most acutely in those countries where food scarcity is dire. Infant mortality has rocketed, and international aid has proven to be politically impossible to defend in light of mass poverty.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Its fragmented members hover about the organization in multifarious ways – running specialty shops, trying to teach or to give other professional services, robbing banks, landscape gardening, and so forth – but they find it hard to get along, for they do not know the approved techniques of promoting, getting foundation grants, protecting themselves by official unions, legally embezzling, and not blurting out the truth, or weeping or laughing out of turn.161 The much greater income inequality in the US compared to Western Europe, which goes hand in hand with rising labour productivity, can be explained by the drop of the federal minimum wage. Still the highest in the world in the 1950s/1960s, it has dropped by 30 per cent since the 1970s and 1980s.162 In the European countries, to a certain extent, the ‘Rhine Economic Model’163 is upheld against the neoliberal model of Reagan and Thatcher, with social justice versus efficiency; compromise, consensus and cooperation versus confrontation and competition; long-term stability versus dynamism and change focusing on short-term results; and finally, a concept of government as a difficult yet vital partner, with a mutual dependency between government and the economic actors, versus a modest government that should be kept at arm’s length.

In France, for example, ‘those [working-class] children and grandchildren who managed to make it to the university (and particularly those who earned the more advanced university degrees) are the ones who continued to vote for the parties of the left with the same frequency as the less educated voters of 1956’. And, as he shows, this does not only apply to France.166 The growth of income inequality within countries is now even becoming a global phenomenon. At the same time, the deep gap in economic performance between the different parts of the world is closing, in the first place due to the rapid rise of China, but now also due to India – with a completely different political system – having made gains.

Prior to this, the incomes of wage workers had increased; subsequently, they stagnated, while, at the same time, the top incomes skyrocketed. But the story does not end here. Against this stagnation of labour income stands the long-term growth of other forms of income for the ordinary man and woman, as we have seen in Chapter 7 (pp. 409–21). The pronounced disparity in income inequality in the North Atlantic, ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher’s long-prepared ideological victory march, should not close our eyes to the almost paradoxical growth of social security expenditure and transfer payments, through taxes in the form of housing benefits, tax credits, child benefit and national insurance benefits, as demonstrated for England by Peter Sloman, who calls this ‘the paradox of rising welfare spending in an age of neoliberalism’.15 This entails a substantial shift in the portion of income of working-age adults with children being paid not by employers but by or via the government; the latter being less in the form of cash benefits and increasingly in the form of social insurance, housing subsidies, good free or state education and the like.


pages: 172 words: 54,066

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

“Total Consumer Spend 2010.” Newzoo. http://www.newzoo.com/ENG/1575-Total_Consumer_Spend_2010.html Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2010. “Employment Outlook 2010: Moving Beyond the Job Crisis.” Paris: OECD. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 2011. “Growing Income Inequality in OECD Countries: What Drives It and How Can Policy Tackle It?” Paris: OECD. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/20/47723414.pdf Pear, Robert. 1997. “A.M.A. and Colleges Assert There Is a Surfeit of Doctors.” New York Times. March 1. Pew Research Center. 2010. “Americans Are of Two Minds on Trade.”


pages: 189 words: 52,741

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

The best universities make their best courses available for free online, allowing anyone with enough self-discipline to get a world-class education and shorten the learning curve to gain new skills. Social networks and software platforms let us stay in contact with friends and family as well as customers and suppliers all over the world. OK, so I’m an optimist. But what about widening income inequality, chronic unemployment and lackluster economic growth in developed countries? Well, if there is any downside to all the exciting changes and opportunities taking place, it is that you need to be more versatile and adaptable than ever before. Being a Lifestyle Entrepreneur is about pursuing your passions in creative and engaging ways Gone are the days of life-long employment with a blue chip firm.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

From the point of view of the liberal technocrat the solution to the problem lies in strengthening the federal government (the “radical centralizer” goes further, insisting that all power be vested in the central state authorities and the “vanguard party”). Only thus can the military-industrial complex be tamed and controlled: “The filter-down process of pump-priming the civilian economy by fostering ever-greater economic concentration and income inequality must be replaced by a frank acceptance of federal responsibility to control the tide of economic bigness, and to plan the conservation and growth of all sectors of the economy and the society.”48 The hope lies in skilled managers such as Robert McNamara, who “has been the unflinching hero of the campaign to reform and control the ‘Contract State.’”49 It is probably correct to suppose that the technostructure offers no greater hope than McNamara, who has clearly explained his own views regarding social organization: “Vital decision-making, in policy matters as well as in business, must remain at the top.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and Donald Trump each represents a group shouting, “Stop the ride, I want off.” The details of their shouting are different, but they’re all shouting—at least in part—because stuff isn’t working for them within the context of the post-war expectation that stuff should work roughly the same for roughly everyone. You can scoff at linking the rise of Trump to income inequality alone. And you should. These things are always layers of complexity deep. But it’s a key part of what drives people to think, “I don’t live in the world I expected. That pisses me off. So screw this. And screw you! I’m going to fight for something totally different, because this—whatever it is—isn’t working.”


pages: 380 words: 153,701

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

It has created the conditions for the rise of luxury consumption by fostering higher incomes among the wealthy in what has been called the “new Gilded Age.”23 It is these astronomical incomes that allow consumers of luxury service to spend hundreds of dollars on lunch at five-star restaurants or on designer clothes at exclusive boutiques. High levels of income inequality are reflected in the relations between workers and clients in luxury sites, where workers can rarely, if ever, afford to purchase the services they produce.24 Furthermore, in these sites, people who occupy increasingly distant positions in “social space” come together in “physical space.”25 The “top 1 percent,” as one luxury manager often put it, stand face to face with the members of the middle and working classes.

Intense competitive pressures in this period led to diversification of the whole industry through segmentation and branding, which further codified the luxury segment.13 Favorable tax laws led to the building or acquisition of upscale “trophy hotels,” even when they might not have been profitable. In the 1980s, a period of increasing income inequality, demand for “high-priced” lodging, including luxury, outpaced that for lower-priced hotel rooms.14 New ideas of luxury came to the fore, including innovations in design and available services. One general manager I interviewed attributed the “invention” of the “perfect luxury bathroom” to a particular hotelier in the 1980s, for example.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The lesson of the crash is that a hundred regulators and encyclopedic sets of rules could not replace one Hank Greenberg, the man who built AIG and was thrown out by the regulators before that firm ever wrote a single credit default swap contract on a single bogus AAA bond. That hundred-regulators-to-one-entrepreneur mismatch is the real meaning of the “one percent”—the tiny minority that gives capitalism its name. The discovery of the “one percent” by pols and pundits and their resurgent obsession with income inequality misunderstands both the source and the purpose of great wealth in a capitalist economy. Driving the obsession is the idea that the difference between people is what they own rather than what they know. But wealth is only valuable if it is combined with information. If it is combined with ignorance or greed it quickly dissolves, like the fortunes of lottery winners or Vegas jackpot millionaires.

Conversely, a condition of widespread illegitimacy and family breakdown can be a sufficient cause of persistent poverty, separating men from the extended horizons embodied in their children. An analysis of poverty that begins and ends with family structure and marital status would explain far more about the problem than most of the distributions of income, inequality, unemployment, education, IQ, race, sex, home ownership, location, discrimination, and all the other items usually multiply-regressed and correlated on academic computers. But even an analysis of work and family would miss what is perhaps the most important of the principles of upward mobility under capitalism—namely, faith.


pages: 468 words: 145,998

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System by Henry M. Paulson

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Doha Development Round, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, price discovery process, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, too big to fail, trade liberalization, young professional

To support unprecedented consumer spending and to make up for its low savings rate, the U.S. was borrowing too much from abroad, while export-driven countries—notably China, other Asian nations, and the oil producers—were shipping capital to us and inadvertently fueling our spendthrift ways. Their recycled dollars enriched Wall Street and inflated tax receipts in the short run but undermined long-term stability and, among other things, exacerbated income inequality in America. How long could this situation last? My number one concern was the likelihood of a financial crisis. The markets rarely went many years without a severe disruption, and credit had been so easy for so long that people were not braced for a systemic shock. We had not had a major financial blowup since 1998.

Though we took care to observe this separation, Ben, Tim Geithner, and I developed a spirit of teamwork that allowed us to talk continually throughout the oncoming crisis without compromising the Fed’s independence. Ben was always willing to cooperate and a pleasure to work with. He is, easily, one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known, astonishingly articulate in his spoken word and in his writing. I read carefully his speeches—on a wide range of subjects, from income inequality to globalization. And he was kind enough to look over some of my speeches before I gave them. He explained complex issues clearly; a chat with him was like a graduate school seminar. Ben shared my concern with the developments in Europe. We agreed to keep our staffs in close contact, while I would talk directly to bankers and relay to Ben what they thought of the problem.


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The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

The Real Test: From the Pyramid to the Diamond Although we have discussed the nature of social transformation that is possible at the BOP, the real test of the entire development process of development is poverty alleviation. How will we know it is taking place? Simply stated, the pyramid must become a diamond. The economic pyramid is a measure of income inequalities. If these inequalities are changing, then the pyramid must morph into a diamond. A diamond assumes that the bulk of the population is middle class. The morphing that we must seek to accomplish is shown in Figure 6.3. There will always be “the rich,” but a measure of development is the number of people in a society who are considered middle class.

It is the growing evidence of opportunity, role models, and real signals of change that allow people to change their aspirations. Our goal is to rapidly change the pyramid into a diamond. To be confident that this transformation is occurring rapidly, we should be able, at a minimum, to measure the changing patterns of income inequities in a society. This is a relative measure. We can also measure the income levels over a period of time. This is an absolute measure of change in that society. Needless to say, modeling this change requires reliable measures of income, appropriate sample size, and longitudinal data. These are hard to come by.


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Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Economic Development Civil war experts Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis write that the “most robust empirical finding in the literature” on civil war is that “low levels of per capita income . . . significantly exacerbate the risk of civil war.” Stanford’s James Fearon independently reaches the same conclusion: “Per capita income is the single best predictor of a country’s odds of civil war outbreak, empirically dominating other factors . . . such as level of democracy, degree of ethnic or religious diversity, . . . or level of income inequality.” Geographically, all today’s wars are in the poorer regions of the world. Economic development—people having more wealth in the future than the past—supports peace. In China, the “peaceful rise” strategy has succeeded because prosperity and peace have proven mutually reinforcing. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to stop fighting Russia in 2008, when he was losing badly, also reflects the appeal of prosperity over war.

Ethnicity may make mobilization of people into a rebellion easier (by increasing trust and cohesion within the group), and therefore enable civil war in societies with a few polarized ethnic groups that are geographically concentrated. But Collier, like Fearon and Laitin, found no connection between political repression of minority groups and the risk of war. Nor did intergroup hatreds, income inequality, or colonial history affect the chances for war. Norwegian researchers looked at the risk of civil war to countries whose neighbors had a civil war, using the Uppsala data for 1950–2001. They found the risk did not come from just sharing a border, but rather from “transnational ethnic ties” especially in the context of secessionism.


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Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

When they examined the relationship between the level of air pollution and increasing income in a cross section of urban areas in forty-two countries, they found that for two pollutants—sulfur dioxide and “smoke”—concentrations increased with per capita gross domestic product (GDP) at low national income levels but decreased with GDP growth at higher levels of income.35 The graph of the SO2 finding in their influential 1991 paper looks like this: Smog obscuring the George Washington Bridge, New York City, 1973. The curve on the Princeton economists’ graph happened to resemble a Kuznets curve, a visualization of a controversial economic theory named after the twentieth-century Belarussian American economist Simon Kuznets. Kuznets had related increasing income and income inequality, a different relationship entirely. The Princeton economists’ version thus came to be called an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). In its standard form, it looks like this: Environmental Kuznets curve. An environmental Kuznets curve models a relationship such as the one the Princeton economists had found: increasing pollution in the earlier stages of industrialization and then, at a threshold point of rising personal income, increasing efforts to reduce pollution.

Kutz, Charles W., and American Members of the International Waterways Commission. Reports on the Existing Water-Power Situation at Niagara Falls, So Far as Concerns the Diversion of Water on the American Side. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1906. Kuznets, Simon. “Economic Growth and Income Inequality.” American Economic Review 45, no. 1 (1955): 1–27. Kyvig, David E. Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived Through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. Labouchere, Rachel. Abiah Darby 1716–1793 of Coalbrookdale, Wife of Abraham Darby II.


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Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Part Three FAUX CLASS WARFARE n recent times economists and media observers have used income statistics to make the case that there is a widening gap between rich and poor. Statistics, as the saying goes, can be tortured and they will say anything. There is no doubt that income inequality has developed to some extent since the 1950s. It may be attributed to the rising returns on human effort aided by education combined with technology or by opportunities created by the “tournament effect,” as described by Nassim Taleb. But income inequality might mainly be attributable to fiat currencies having spawned massive profitability to those involved in the financial markets, which by 2007 accounted for nearly 40 percent of the operating earnings of the S&P 500.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The average Englishman’s income, having apparently stagnated for three centuries, began to rise around 1800 and by 1850 was 50 per cent above its 1750 level, despite a trebling of population. The rise was steepest for unskilled workers: the wage premium for skilled building workers fell steadily. Income inequality fell, and gender inequality, too. The share of national income captured by labour rose, while the share captured by land fell: the rent of an acre of English farmland buys as many goods now as it did in the 1760s, while the real wage of an hour of work buys immensely more. Real wages rose faster than real output throughout the nineteenth century, meaning that the benefit of cheaper goods was being garnered chiefly by the workers as consumers, not by bosses or landlords.

Incidentally, the individualisation of life that brought personal freedom after the 1960s also brought less loyalty towards the group, a process that surely reached crisis point in the bonus rows of 2009: see Lindsey, B. 2009. Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics: Economic Policy, Social Norms and Income Inequality. Cato Institute. p. 19 ‘As Hayek put it’. Hayek, F.A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago University Press. p. 19 ‘Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn who first drew attention to it’. Flynn, J.R. 2007. What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press.


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Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

9 Too many left-of-centre writers take it as axiomatic: a) that the case for more equality as an entitlement is unanswerable; b) that the state must thus deliver it; c) that the definition of equality must be broadened well beyond income to include work satisfaction, compensation for tedious tasks and being able to choose lifestyles – like staying home to raise children – in the same way as the wealthy can; and d) that this is so obviously the good society that the better-off will willingly accept whatever transfer of resources is required to achieve it and will give up bourgeois ideas that desert should be proportional to effort and contribution. I understand why the left makes these arguments, and even have some sympathy for them. The current level of inequality is offensive and the damage being done goes well beyond mere income inequality. But that does not mean that society is prepared to flip to a world of complete equality. It might just want more equality – while maintaining a degree of inequality based on due desert – but is very wary about how to get there. This seems to be borne out by opinion polls. In one British poll, 76 per cent of respondents felt that the gap between those on low and high incomes was ‘too large’, but only 34 per cent believed that the government should redistribute money from the better-off to tackle inequality.10 Over time, there has been a substantial drop in support for higher taxes and spending: from 65 per cent in 1997 to 38 per cent in 2005.

: Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, Collins. 7 Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo (2009) ‘Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy’, IZA DP No. 4365. 8 Clive Cookson, ‘Bank Crises Kill, Says Study’, Financial Times, 26 February 2008, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/170ca8d6-e40e-11dc-8799-0000779fd2ac.html. 9 See the DCLG’s Indices of Deprivation (2007 is the latest available year) at http://www.communities.gov.uk/communities/neighbourhoodrenewal/deprivation/deprivation07/. 10 Mike Brewer, Luke Sibiet and Liam Wren-Lewis (2007) ‘Racing away? Income Inequality and the Evolution of High Incomes’, IFS Briefing Note No. 76. 11 Stewart Lansley (2006) Rich Britain: The Rise and Rise of the New Super-Wealthy, Politico’s. See also George Irvin (2008) Super Rich: The Rise of Inequality in Britain and the United States, Polity; and David Rothkopf (2008) Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Farrar, Straus Giroux. 12 Oliver James (2007) Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane, Vermilion; Avner Offer (2006) The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950, Oxford University Press. 13 Cabinet Office (2009) Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, HMSO. 14 Christopher Foster (2005) British Government in Crisis or the Third English Revolution, Hart. 15 Ian Jack, ‘Fear and Loathing in Dagenham’, Guardian, 21 November 2009. 16 Susan Neiman (2009) Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Bodley Head, p. 4. 17 Tom MacInnes, Peter Kenway and Anushree Parekh, ‘Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2009’, report, Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 18 Jonathan Grant and Joachim Krupels, ‘Science and Technology Policy’, in Varum Uberoi, Adam Coutts, Iain Mclean and David Halpern (eds) (2009) Options for a New Britain, Palgrave Macmillan. 19 Dominic Sandbrook, ‘The Death of Ideas’, New Statesman, 6 August 2009. 20 Charles Tilly (2008) Credit and Blame, Princeton University Press. 21 J.


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The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin argues ‘In rich countries such as the United States, we find that economic performance has become dominated since 1980 by the credit cycle; financial booms and busts drive the performance of employment and thus prosperity is associated with rising income inequality.’41 Finally, Raghuram Rajan, now governor of the Reserve Bank of India, argues: Recognizing the need to find new sources of growth, the United States towards the end of Jimmy Carter’s term, and then under Ronald Reagan, deregulated industry and the financial sector, as did Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom.

Greater competition, freer trade, and the adoption of new technologies, increased the demand for, and incomes of, highly skilled, talented, and educated workers doing non-routine jobs like consulting. More routine, once well-paying, jobs done by the unskilled or the moderately educated were automated or outsourced. So income inequality emerged, not primarily because of policies favoring the rich, but because the liberalized economy favored those equipped to take advantage of it. The short-sighted political response to the anxieties of those falling behind was to ease their access to credit. Faced with little regulatory and supervisory restraint, sometimes based on the faith that private incentives worked best in this best of all worlds, the financial system overdosed on risky loans to lower middle class borrowers, aided and abetted by very low policy interest rates.42 What is interesting is the similarity of the underlying analysis among analysts with quite different ideological perspectives: liberalization, particularly of finance, led to massive rises in inequality.


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More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie, “NAFTA’s economic impact”, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact 41. Milanovic, Global Inequality, op. cit. The Gini coefficient measures the concentration of income. The nearer the figure gets to 1, the more unequal the distribution. 42. Brian Keeley, “Income inequality: The gap between rich and poor”, December 15th 2015, https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/income-inequality_9789264246010-en 43. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA 44. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, op. cit. 45. David Card and John DiNardo, “Skill-biased technological change and rising wage inequality: some problems and puzzles”, 2002, http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/skill-tech-change.pdf 46.


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Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The coalition government cut New Labour policies designed to reduce poverty, claiming ‘austerity’ demanded this. By 2016 22 per cent of UK population were living in poverty – 55 per cent of them in households with at least one wage-earning adult.36 But the government also cut the income tax paid by Britain’s wealthiest people. Income inequality, which had grown since the late 1990s, rapidly increased. In 1998 the highest earners were paid forty-seven times the earnings of the lowest paid. In 2015 they were paid 128 times more. By then, the wealthiest 10 per cent owned 45 per cent of Britain’s household wealth.37 None of this assisted upward mobility.

., 26 Hoque, Nurul, 183 Horlick, Nicola, 274–5 Horn, Carol, 168 House of Commons, 4 House of Lords, 4, 28 housing breakthrough generation (1920–34), 127, 137, 145, 154, 155, 176, 183, 184 golden generation (1935–55), 208, 218, 219, 257–9, 263 magpie generation (1956–71), 293 millennial generation (1986–99), 338 pioneer generation (1880–99), 36, 62, 63 precarious generation (1900–19), 77, 85, 91, 94, 99 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 335–8 Housing Act (1919), 63 Housing Act (1982), 257 Howard’s End (Forster), 41, 50 Hull University, 134, 272 Hundal, N. S., 185–6 ICI, 92, 178 immigrants, 365 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 172, 173–8, 180–88 golden generation (1935–55), 209 magpie generation (1956–71), 275–77 millennial generation (1986–99), 313 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 306, 313, 325 income inequality, 6, 77, 214, 231–2, 243, 245, 250, 330 Independent Labour Party (ILP), 17, 18, 21, 30, 36, 38, 53 India, 70, 180, 181, 275–7 Indian Workers’ Association (IWA), 184, 185 industrialisation, 42 inequality, 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 359 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 119, 127, 147, 150, 155 golden generation (1935–55), 196, 201, 231, 239 magpie generation (1956–71), 296 millennial generation (1986–99), 329, 330, 346 pioneer generation (1880–99), 18 precarious generation (1900–19), 93, 100 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 300, 308, 313, 316, 325, 344, 347–8 Inequality and the 1% (Dorling), 348 inferiority complex, 100 inflation, 163, 235 influenza epidemic (1918–19), 71 Inner London Education Authority, 354 innovation, 6, 8, 208 Institute of Community Studies, 144, 154–5 Institute of Education, 153 Institute of Personnel Management, 116 intelligence, 123 as hereditary, 196, 213 school selection and, 148–9, 194, 196, 197 tests, 122, 123, 197 International Marxist Group, 234–5 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 247 International Socialists, 234 Ireland, 173, 180, 183 ITV, 223, 327 Jackson, Brian, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 197, 203, 205, 208 Jackson, David, 122 Jackson, Eddie, 131 Jamaica, 173, 180, 181, 187 James, Eric, 196 Japan, 70, 234 Jennings, Philip, 94, 95, 97, 98–9, 140, 141 Jewish people, 174–7, 209 Jim Crow laws, 222 job-title inflation, 321 Johnson, Alan, 323 Johnson, Alexander Boris, 300, 329–30 Johnson, Dee, 243–4 Johnston Press, 327 Jones, Bryan, 311 Jones, Chris, 216–17 Jones, Owen, 348 Jouhl, Avtar Singh, 183–5 Kandler, Peter, 238, 246 Kaur, Jodha, 276–7 Keele University, 73, 150, 151, 208, 210 Kemp, Peter, 94, 97, 98, 100 Kenya, 276 Khan, Yasmina, 186 King, Martin Luther, 232 King’s College London, 327 Knowles, Freda, 84 Knowles, Graham, 286–8, 291, 292, 295 Kusnir, Nina, 178 Labedz, Zdzislaw, 177 Labour Party, 4, 5, 16–17, 27, 34, 35, 36, 92, 99 Attlee government (1945–51), 5, 38, 127, 132–4, 139, 144, 173, 192, 251, 367 Beveridge Report (1942), 125–6, 156 Blair government (1997–2007), 300, 303, 307–8, 313, 322, 327, 329, 333, 344 Brown government (2007–10), 300, 307–8, 322, 323, 327, 329, 344 Callaghan government (1976–79), 247–8, 267 Corbyn’s leadership (2015–19), 349 Donovan Commission (1968), 234 Emergency Teacher Training Scheme, 132–4 Further Education and Training Scheme, 131 general election (1918), 63 general election (1945), 5, 38, 127, 192 general election (1951), 137 general election (1955), 157 general election (1959), 147 general election (1966), 214 general election (1974), 241–2 general election (2017), 349–50, 362 MacDonald government, first (1924), 39 MacDonald government, second (1929–35), 39 nationalisation, 131, 156, 160–61, 241, 255 technological innovation and, 149 trade unions, relations with, 234 unemployment and, 73, 74–5 upward mobility and, 146–7 Wilson government, first (1964–70), 150, 191, 213, 214, 232, 234, 236 Wilson government, second (1974–76), 241–2, 247, 267 World War II (1939–45), 109–10, 125–6 Young Socialists, 226 Labour Representation Committee, 27 Lampl, Peter, 340 Lancaster University, 208, 227, 228, 229, 230 Last, Nella, 62, 95, 97, 138 Latvia, 175 Lausanne, Switzerland, 222 law, careers in, 83, 86, 108, 136, 170, 180, 211, 238, 331 Lawson, Jack, 25, 28, 36, 38 Lee, Jennie, 39 Leeds University, 124, 228 Leeson, Nick, 273–4, 280, 281 Leicestershire, England, 198 Let Us Face the Future, 126 Lewis, Roger, 26–7 Liberal Democrats, 300, 322–3, 324, 326, 329–32 Liberal Party, 4, 18–19, 28–9, 34, 63, 69, 74 Listener, 88 Liverpool General Transport Strike (1911), 28 Lloyd George, David, 63, 71 Lloyds Bank, 43, 49 local government, 36, 40, 93, 101, 135, 154, 327, 363, 365, 368 Local World, 327 Location, Location, Location, 335 London, England arts in, 278 clerical work in, 85 finance in, 42, 48, 112, 249, 258 office work in, 79 public sector in, 236, 237 regions, divide with, 326, 328–9, 362 secondary education in, 29 unemployment in, 77 London County Council (LCC), 33, 93, 110, 363 London School of Economics (LSE), 118, 131, 136, 142–3, 152–3, 233 London Transport, 93 London–regions divide, 326, 328–9 Longton, Staffordshire, 23 Love on the Dole (Greenwood), 88 Ludwig, Caradog, 50, 51 Luke, James, 47, 55 Luton, Bedfordshire, 248 MacDonald, Ramsay, 93 Macmillan, Harold, 145, 207, 210, 213 magpie generation (1956–71), 267–96 do it yourself, 267, 268, 270, 279 downward mobility, 267, 285–96 education, 267–73, 276, 278, 280, 282, 283, 287, 292, 293 immigrants, 275–7 welfare and, 267, 268, 271, 273, 277–8, 283 Major, John, 300, 303, 315, 327 managerial work breakthrough generation (1920–34), 156–71, 271 golden generation (1935–55), 214, 234, 241, 252, 254, 259 magpie generation (1956–71), 276, 282, 284, 286, 289, 290, 291, 294 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 321 Manchester, England clerical work in, 85 engineering in, 111 immigrants in, 176, 184 managers in, 158 ‘northern powerhouse’, 326, 362 secondary education in, 29, 30, 176, 196 Manchester Evening Chronicle, 224 Manchester Guardian, 33, 196 Manchester University, 30, 224 Mann, Thomas, 27, 28, 38, 110 Mansbridge, Albert, 21–3 manual work 15, 16, 195 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 8, 111, 130, 158, 172 golden generation (1935–55), 196, 203, 245, 252 millennial generation (1986–99), 323 pioneer generation (1880–99), 26, 32, 36, 47, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65 precarious generation (1900–19), 71–2, 75, 77 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 301, 302, 323 Markham, Fiona, 87–8 marriage, 8, 15 bars, 59, 62, 64, 78, 82, 87 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 154, 165–71 golden generation (1935–55), 205, 242, 250, 263, 286 magpie generation (1956–71), 271, 286 pioneer generation (1880–99), 16, 55, 58–61, 62, 64 precarious generation (1900–19), 78, 82, 87 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 305 Mars, 167, 202 Marsden, Dennis, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 197, 203, 204, 205, 208 Marxism, 3 Mass Observation, 7 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 107–8, 110, 112, 114, 116, 120, 123, 125, 128, 137, 140 golden generation (1935–55), 199, 200 millennial generation (1986–99), 306 precarious generation (1900–19), 94–102 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 306 May Days (1968), 232, 235 May, Theresa, 300 McBey, James, 52, 55, 57, 58, 274 McBryde, Brenda, 115 McCluskey, Len, 349 McCurran Act (1952), 181 McKay, Alister Macbeth, 48, 49 Means Test Man (Brierley), 89 media, careers in golden generation (1935–55), 223–4, 240, 255 magpie generation (1956–71), 278, 309 precarious generation (1900–19), 86–7 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 326–7, 334 medicine, careers in, 358 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 108, 136, 137, 150, 158, 170, 179, 180 golden generation (1935–55), 211 millennial generation (1986–99), 332 pioneer generation (1880–99), 46 precarious generation (1900–19), 83, 86 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 332 meritocracy, 3, 19, 24, 353 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 125, 126, 135, 140, 146–50, 155, 157 golden generation (1935–55), 196, 206, 207, 213, 215, 217 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 308, 319 Meysey Thompson, Henry, 35 Michaels, Walter Benn, 344 middle class, 2, 4, 356 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 108, 112, 118, 122–4, 136–41, 152, 154, 158 golden generation (1935–55), 196–210, 221, 226–30, 240, 244, 259, 261–2 immigrants, 174–7, 181, 182, 187 magpie generation (1956–71), 278, 283, 287, 293, 295 millennial generation (1986–99), 347 pioneer generation (1880–99), 26, 32, 33, 41–66 precarious generation (1900–19), 74, 77, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 94, 98–9 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 304–6, 308, 311, 314, 317–18, 336–8, 343, 345, 347 Victorian period (1837–1901), 16 Middle Classes’ Union, 63 migrant workers, 80 Milburn, Alan, 322, 326 millennial generation (1986–99), 6, 309–20 celebrity and, 309 downward mobility, 299, 329, 344, 348 education, 300, 307, 312–20, 324, 325, 330–31, 332 femininity and, 311–12 housing, 338, 339 Milligan, Don, 218–19, 221–2, 225–6, 228, 236, 244, 288, 335 minimum wage, 359 mining, 75, 90, 241, 280 Ministry of Education, 18, 121, 133, 194–5, 197, 199 Mirza, Heidi Safia, 307, 341 monetarism, 249 Moon, Arthur, 212, 259 Moore, Martin, 327 Morgan Stanley, 274 Morgan, Debbie, 327–8, 347 Morris, William, 24 Morrison, Herbert, 53, 93, 109, 139, 363 Morrissey, Stephen, 278 motor production, 234 Moyle, Anwyn, 51 Murdie, James, 66 Murdoch, Rupert, 255, 327 music, 223, 225, 268, 278–9 National Health Service (NHS), 127, 129, 140, 158, 273, 289, 294, 317, 332, 333, 337 National Labour College, London, 25 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), 78, 88 National Union of Clerks (NUC), 57 National Union of Students, 97, 234 National Union of Teachers, 192 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 31 nationalisation, 131, 156, 160–61, 241, 255 Nationality Act (1948), 173 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 101, 105, 109, 174, 177, 209 Nelson Thomlinson Grammar School, Cumbria, 205 Netherlands, 236 New Left Review, 144 New Left, 147 New Society, 216 New Zealand, 179, 180 Newcastle University, 186 Newcastle upon Tyne, 182 News International, 255, 327 Newsquest, 327 Nissen huts, 124, 210 nonconformist religion, 29 Norman, Paula, 319 Norris, Andrew, 132 Northcote–Trevelyan Report (1853), 42–3 ‘northern powerhouse’, 326, 362 Norwood, Cyril, 194 Nottingham University College, 78 nursing breakthrough generation (1920–34), 115, 116, 175, 188 golden generation (1935–55), 191, 208, 214, 217, 241, 242, 243 magpie generation (1956–71), 273, 282 precarious generation (1900–19), 83–5 O levels, 195, 200, 256, 272 O’Connor, Sarah, 359 O’Reilly, Lyn, 218, 221, 230–32, 237–8, 244–5, 259 obesity, 317 occupational hierarchy, 4 oil-supply crisis (1973), 235 Olisa, Kenneth, 339 Open University, 328 Oppenheim, Edward Phillips, 63 Osgood, Pearl, 89 Oxford University breakthrough generation (1920–34), 108, 109, 113, 118, 134, 135, 150, 152, 154 golden generation (1935–55), 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 223, 226 magpie generation (1956–71), 278 millennial generation (1986–99), 340 pioneer generation (1880–99), 22, 24 precarious generation (1900–19), 86 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 305, 315, 316, 340 Pahl, Jan and Ray, 122, 161–6, 168, 169, 170, 198 Pakistan, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 276, 277, 314 Paris, France, 222, 235 Parliament Act (1911), 28 Parr, Tessa, 302–3, 333, 337, 338, 344 Patterson, Sheila, 180 People in Production, 114, 116 Percy, Eustace, 92 Peston, Robert, 339 Pettifor, Wendy, 222, 232, 239, 244, 354 photography, 186, 225, 226, 227, 239 Pickett, Kate, 348, 354 Pilgrim Trust, 76 pin money, 74–5, 85 pioneer generation (1880–99), 10, 15–40, 41–66 clerking, 16, 21, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41–66 collective help and, 16, 17, 19, 22, 37 conservatism and, 40, 63, 65, 91, 92 education and, 16, 18, 20, 22–7, 29–31, 33–7, 41, 45–6 socialism and, 19, 21, 24–5, 27–8, 31, 37, 38, 53, 229 trade unions and, 16–18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 55, 57, 63, 64 Plebs’ League, 25 polytechnics golden generation (1935–55), 213, 228, 229, 237, 315 magpie generation (1956–71), 292 Pontypridd, Wales, 26 Poor Law, 31, 78 Pope, George, 19, 20 Pope, Mary Jane, 19 poverty, 6 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 110, 118, 138, 145, 169, 171, 177, 178 golden generation (1935–55), 203, 208, 213, 218, 221, 231, 238, 239, 240, 252, 254 magpie generation (1956–71), 275, 286, 294 millennial generation (1986–99), 323 pioneer generation (1880–99), 20, 21, 30, 31, 43, 65 precarious generation (1900–19), 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 80, 81, 89, 90, 99, 100 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 306 Prague Spring (1968), 232, 235 precarious generation (1900–19), 69–90, 91–102 ‘blind-alley’ jobs, 72 downward mobility, 69, 75, 79, 83, 86, 88, 92, 197 education, 73–4, 81–3, 86, 92, 93–8 housing, 77, 85, 91, 94, 99 publishing, 88 socialism and, 88, 91, 92, 98, 100, 101 trade unions, 73, 76, 78, 80–81, 86, 88, 100 unemployment, 70–71, 73, 74–80, 88, 89, 100 welfare, 74, 81, 85, 89, 92, 93, 99 Premier League, 309, 310, 320 Prior, Darren, 267, 268, 269, 273, 279, 280, 282, 285, 288, 289 Pritchett, Victor Sawdon, 52, 57 private education, 357 breakthrough generation (1920–34), 108, 120, 122, 123, 135, 150, 160, 161, 168 golden generation (1935–55), 196, 199–200 magpie generation (1956–71), 274, 281 millennial generation (1986–99), 309, 323, 331, 357 pioneer generation (1880–99), 34, 45, 46, 47 precarious generation (1900–19), 99 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 303, 304, 318, 323 privatisation, 156, 255, 256, 257, 258, 273 Problem of Leisure, The (Durant), 366 professions, 2, 4, 7, 358 professions, breakthrough generation (1920–34), 106, 107, 118–19, 129, 130, 131, 158, 170 academia, 149–55, 164 education and, 122, 124, 143 family background and, 137 housing, 139, 163 immigrants and, 174, 175, 179, 184, 185 income, 136–7 teaching, 129, 132 war and, 108–9, 117 welfare state and, 136, 141 women and, 116, 117, 135, 152–4, 166 professions, golden generation (1935–55), 191, 196, 213–14, 235, 239, 242, 248, 259 earnings, 214 education and, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207 housing, 245 policy consultation and, 241 social networks and, 211 trade unions and, 240, 242 unemployment and, 252 welfare state and, 213, 217 women and, 202, 207, 217, 243, 260, 261, 262 professions, magpie generation (1956–71), 275–7, 279, 281, 282, 286, 289, 290, 291 professions, millennial generation (1986–99), 321, 322, 323, 331–2, 338, 340, 348, 349, 350 professions, pioneer generation (1880–99), 16, 29, 33, 37, 40–43, 45, 60, 62 professions, precarious generation (1900–19), 73–4, 76, 81–8, 97, 98 professions, Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 299, 302, 306, 312, 316, 317, 321, 324, 325, 332, 340 prostitution, 164, 345–6 psychological testing, 121–3 public schools, see private schools public sector breakthrough generation (1920–34), 127, 140 golden generation (1935–55), 212, 213, 235, 236–9, 242, 260–63 magpie generation (1956–71), 268, 269, 272, 273, 276, 279, 281–4, 290, 293–4 Thatcher’s children (1972–85), 332, 333 Punch, 50 punk era (c. 1974–84), 268, 270, 279 Pye, Richard, 133, 134 Pygmalion (Shaw), 281 Quakers, 33 Quigley, Janet, 87 racism, 172, 177, 180, 184, 185, 187, 232, 307, 365 railways, 156, 236, 255, 360 Ramsay, John, 54 Ramsgate, Bill, 94, 95, 99, 101, 161 Reay, Diane, 219, 220, 226, 230, 236, 245, 311, 312 received pronunciation, 122 Reed, Adolph, 344 Rees, Alan, 56 Registrar General, 4, 32 Reith, John, 86–7 Representation of the People Act (1918), 35, 62, 63, 91 Rigg, Arthur, 76, 77 Right to Buy, 257–9, 263 Rise of the Meritocracy, The (Young), 147 Robbins’ Report (1963), 207–8, 313 Robinson, Joan, 212–13 Rochdale, Lancashire, 17 Room at the Top (Braine), 145, 146 Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount, 91 Royal Air Force (RAF), 107, 120–21, 158 Royal College of Nursing (RCN), 84 Royd, Hazel, 94–5, 97, 98, 99, 100 Royston, Sam, 339 Ruskin College, Oxford, 24–6, 30, 36, 101, 227, 230, 233, 239, 243 Russell Group, 315–16, 318, 320, 324, 325, 328, 339, 340, 341, 355 Russell, Kit, 136 Russian Revolution (1917), 38, 39 Sackville West, Vita, 66 Sage, Lorna, 197 Said, Ali, 186 Salford Grammar School, 204 Salveson, Paul, 225, 226, 229, 230, 236, 242 Samson, Anthea, 209–10 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe), 145 School Certificate, 73, 84, 113, 114, 195 Scotland, 35, 45, 193 Education Act (1872), 45 Education Act (1918), 35, 192 Education Act (1945), 192 secondary schools breakthrough generation (1920–34), 114–15, 117, 119–22, 127, 132–4, 140, 146, 148, 158, 165 golden generation (1935–55), 192–202 pioneer generation (1880–99), 18–19, 29–30, 34–6, 45–6, 52, 62, 65 precarious generation (1900–19), 73, 80, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 93–9 self-employment, 78, 167, 184, 253, 263, 276–7, 324 Self-Help (Smiles), 15, 16, 22, 41, 105 self-help, 15, 19, 41, 78, 89, 176, 268, 279, 361 semi-skilled work breakthrough generation (1920–34), 105, 110–11, 158 golden generation (1935–55), 196 pioneer generation (1880–99), 28, 47 precarious generation (1900–19), 81 Seven Up!


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Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose

blue-collar work, centre right, confounding variable, creative destruction, delayed gratification, digital divide, George Santayana, income inequality, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, new economy, Ronald Reagan, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

A particularly trenchant critique of the standard line on education and jobs is offered by political economist Gordon Lafer who argues that the fundamental problem with the economy is the shortage of jobs and the absence of vigorous job creation policies. It is a political “charade,” as he puts it, to push job training as the solution to unemployment, for this approach shifts the blame for unemployment and income inequality onto workers themselves, onto their lack of “higher-order thinking skills,” or “soft skills,” or the “mismatch” between their skills and the skills that industry demands. In fact, the jobs aren’t there, and short-term training in job-seeking strategies or basic skills does not make an appreciable difference in helping people get the limited number of jobs that do exist. 27 I N T RO D U C T I O N Lafer is targeting a particular set of policies and training programs primarily connected to the Workforce Investment Act, not necessarily the kinds of educational experiences I’m concerned with in this book, though there can be some overlap.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

One survey found that nearly three-quarters of Americans thought hard work was a “very important” component of success, while just 62% put it down to a good education and less than a fifth to inherited wealth. But the United States ranks poorly compared with other advanced economies when it comes to income inequality and social mobility. So what must an ambitious young American do to get rich? A new study by Raj Chetty of Stanford University and a collective of other economists helps answer this question. By matching data from the Department of Education with 30m tax returns, Mr Chetty and his colleagues have constructed a data set that reveals to researchers both the income distributions of graduates of particular colleges, and how incomes vary depending on how rich the graduates’ parents were.


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The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

Much less government spending would result in a dramatic increase in poverty and, consequently, in crime. This would combine to produce a crisis of the current two-party political system. Astonishment, frustration, and anger at the economic breakdown would radicalize politics. New parties would form at both extremes of the political spectrum. Given the great and growing income inequality going into the crisis, the hungry have-nots would substantially outnumber the remaining wealthy. On the one hand, a hard swing to the left would be the outcome most likely to result from democratic elections. In that case, the tax rates on the top income brackets could be raised to 80 percent or more, a level last seen in 1963.


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Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

The children, referred to as satellite children, may stay with one parent, relatives, family friends, or on their own. Theories of Immigration As mentioned in the introduction, migration is currently explained as an inevitable consequence of economic globalization. Economic globalization leads to greater income inequality between developed and developing countries (Brah, 2002). Pressure for better employment opportunities arises as levels of human capital in developing countries increase, and the movement of skilled labor from developing countries is supported by the increasing need for skilled labor in developed countries.

Studies of economic and social outcomes for immigrants are too numerous to cite; however, recent topics include the job displacement effects of immigration (Roy, 1997); immigrant occupational mobility (Green, 1999); earnings of immigrant men (Green & Worswick, 2002); 105 immigrant poverty (Kazemipur & Halli, 2001); immigrant occupational status and earnings, as compared to those in Israel (Lewin-Epstein, Semyonov, Kogan, & Wanner, 2003); the earnings of self-employed immigrants (Frenette, 2004); role of immigration in income inequality in urban and rural areas (Moore & Pacey, 2003); immigrants’ labor market integration (Hum & Simpson, 2003); and impact of fields of study and educational credentials on the earnings of immigrants who are visible minorities (Anisef, Sweet, & Frempong, 2003). The studies outlined below provide a more holistic picture of immigrants’ relationship to the labor market and economy in Canada.

Michalski, J. (1997). A study of Iraqi refugees: Final report. Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto, Centre for Applied Social Research. Montgomery, J. R. (1996). Components of refugee adaptation. International Migration Review, 30(3), 679–697. Moore, E. G., & Pacey, M. A. (2003). Changing income inequality and immigration in Canada, 1980–1995. Canadian Public Policy, 29(1), 33–52. Retrieved February 8, 2005, from EconLit database. Reitz, J. G., (Ed.) (2003). Host societies and the reception of immigrants. San Diego: University of California, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Reitz, J.


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Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup by Andrew Zimbalist

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

They also present an aesthetic issue, for they are ultramodern facilities surrounded by a sea of parking lots anomalously situated in open areas or in communities with older, more modest construction. These massive sports facility and infrastructure expenditures are taking place against a backdrop of sharp income inequality, a relatively low level of economic development, poor social services, increasing prices, and rising expectations. At $11,300, Brazil's per capita income is approximately one-fifth that of the United States. Measured by the Gini coefficient, Brazil's income distribution is roughly 40 percent more unequal than in the United States.28 Approximately 20 percent of Brazil's 200 million-plus people live in poverty.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012). 9.Tax Justice Network Blog, ‘Tax Evasion Is Worth $3.1 Trillion a Year – Over 5% of World GDP’, 25 November 2011, at taxjustice.blogspot.co.uk. 10.Tax Justice Network Blog, ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited and Inequality Underestimated’, 22 July 2012, at taxjustice.blogspot.co.uk. 11.James S. Henry, The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes, at taxjustice.net, July 2012. 12.Kevin Rousell, ‘Tax on the “Private” Billions Now Stashed Away in Havens Enough to End Extreme World Poverty Twice Over’, Oxfam, 22 May 2013, at oxfam.org. 13.G. Zucman, ‘The Missing Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and the US Net Debtors or Net Creditors?’


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The crucial observation demonstrated by the West is that it does not just grow linearly, that is, if you double the number of people, you assume you’d double the number of different types of restaurants, for example. It scales superlinearly with 15% more than would be expected from linear growth. It is simply more exciting to live in cities, and it keeps getting better as it grows. Unfortunately, bad things such as crime, income inequality, disease, and pollution also scale in the same way. With increases in size also comes an increased need for infrastructure. This is where it gets interesting, for this property does not scale superlinearly, but rather sublineally. This means that whereas average income increases more than expected from a linear growth model, the costs and needs of roads, pipes, and telephony grow less than would be expected from a linear growth model.


pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Impact Entrepreneurial Networks For any new business starting up, mentorship and seed investment are crucial. Recent decades have given rise to numerous kick-starter organizations that foster impact entrepreneurship in the early stages, as their groundbreaking innovations take shape. The non-profit Ashoka is a good example. Founded by Bill Drayton in 1980 with the aim of mitigating income inequality through social entrepreneurship, it identifies entrepreneurs who have large-scale solutions to social challenges, supporting them as they strive to achieve their vision. ‘Ashoka Fellows’ receive a financial stipend that allows them to devote themselves to implementing their social innovation, with the eventual aim of creating a self-sustaining institution.


pages: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

In his conceptualization, Musical.ly was like a newly discovered continent in need to entice new immigrants, much as the American colonies had been at one time. With few people, the new continent had a small gross domestic product. Distributing this pool of wealth evenly would result in everyone living miserably and failing to attract more immigrants. According to Alex, the solution was to deliberately foster an economy with a high degree of income inequality, which allocated most of the GDP to a small group of pioneers—in Musical.ly’s case, early users. Once this group got rich, the news would then spread to trigger a gold rush with others following in the footsteps of the first wave of immigrants, eager to test their fortunes in this new world.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Housing might simply be too expensive close to where people work, so they’re forced to live farther away from their jobs than they would like, out past the billboards that chide, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now.” The economist Robert H. Frank, comparing U.S. Census data between 1990 and 2000, found that commuting grew the most in counties in which income inequality had grown the most. He calls this the “Aspen effect,” after the affluent Colorado city, which keeps expanding because the middle-class people who work in the town keep having to move farther away to find affordable housing. But there is a paradox here as well: Statistics show that commuting miles rise, not fall, with income.

., in both poor, and, to a lesser extent, wealthy countries, the traffic fatality rate may be affected by the level of income equality. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Scandinavian countries, among the leaders in income equality, also rank near the top in traffic safety. See Nejat Anbarci, Monica Escaleras, and Charles Register, “Income, Income Inequality and the ‘Hidden Epidemic’ of Traffic Fatalities,” No. 5002, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of Business, Florida Atlantic University. Retrieved from http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/falwpaper/05002.htm. and traffic fatalities: This relationship is argued in, among other sources, D.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

After paying: Insurance Federal & State taxes Social Security Medicare I am left working for the gas money to get to work. I AM PISSED! Read by the dozens, these compressed, homemade life stories amassed the moral force of documentary research from hard times, or a Steinbeck novel. And they explained why Occupy Wall Street became an instant brand name. Uses of the phrase “income inequality” quintupled in the media, and President Obama gave a speech on the subject, talking about the 1 percent. Every celebrity and public figure had an opinion about Occupy. Colin Powell expressed guarded sympathy and recalled an earlier time when his parents in the South Bronx could always count on having a job.

Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge, published in 1967, the year of Thiel’s birth. Servan-Schreiber argued that the dynamic forces of technology and education in the United States were leaving the rest of the world behind, and he foresaw a postindustrial utopia in America by the year 2000. Time and space would no longer be barriers to communication, income inequality would shrink, and computers would set people free: “There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation … All this within a single generation.” The information age arrived on schedule, but without the utopia. Cars, trains, and planes were not much better than they had been in 1973.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Downton manages to affront both the nation’s liberal origins and, given its theme and state sponsorship (PBS), also runs counter to the muddled anti-elite, anti-government populism of the Republican proletariat. It succeeded nonetheless. There is something decidedly odd about a nation ostensibly tied in knots over income inequality drooling over, as the critic Robert Hughes remarked in another context, “the spectacle of privilege enjoying its own toilette.”2 Maybe America is okay with inequality after all. Or maybe the Boomers are. Or maybe TV has simply narcotized the population into accepting a fait accompli. TV, America’s defining leisure/cultural activity and thus of immense sociological importance, no longer offers the relatively realist middle-class of Leave It to Beaver (c. 1960), the blue-collar grit of All in the Family (c. 1970s), or the aspirational movin’-on-up-ism of The Jeffersons (c. 1975), to say nothing of the edifying splendor showcased in Kenneth Clark’s Civilization (c. 1969), one of the last shows to assume viewers’ ability for, and predisposition to, being uplifted.

The rest of these notes are not essential for understanding anything in the text—I present them for completeness and because many of the topics discussed are complex, controversial, and the subject of surprisingly… vigorous… academic discussion. (Many think that Picketty and Saez are the last word on income inequality, and while they have done good work, that work is highly controversial—not just in its conclusions, but in its methodologies and data selected.) Figures presented in this book may also vary from figures cited in the daily news; the latter are often not annualized, not inflation adjusted, and not final—this is no criticism of newspapers, which operate on a different time scale.


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

It’s estimated that up to 60 percent of rural Botswanans received some DRP assistance during the severe mid-1980s drought. (To put that in perspective, Medicaid, the largest U.S. social program providing health care for poor families, covers only 13 percent of the population.) In those difficult years, DRP helped preserve social stability by keeping rural poverty and income inequality in check. But Botswana’s government got its money’s worth: the country hasn’t had a single year of armed conflict since independence in the 1960s. Botswana has been Africa’s economic superstar for the past forty years, and it’s likely that the drought insurance played at least some role in this success story.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

(Sure, if your goal is to kill off the business—for the data show it’s generally better to bring in an outside manager.*) Whatever happened to the carpal tunnel syndrome epidemic? (Once journalists stopped getting it, they stopped writing about it—but the problem persists, especially among blue-collar workers.) Some questions were existential: What makes people truly happy? Is income inequality as dangerous as it seems? Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace? People wanted to know the pros and cons of: autonomous vehicles, breast-feeding, chemotherapy, estate taxes, fracking, lotteries, “medicinal prayer,” online dating, patent reform, rhino poaching, using an iron off the tee, and virtual currencies.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/news/economy/middle_class_income/index.htm. 11 22 Statistics That Prove That The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America, Michael Snyder, 2010. Business Insider. http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7 12 US Congressional Budget Office, 2011. Graphics adapted from Mother Jones. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph 13 Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time, Michael I. Norton, Dan Ariely. Journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/1/9 14 I highly recommend the four-part video series Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson, one of the best piece of work I have ever seen on this subject.


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Time, March 14, 2005. Sadique, M., and M. Asadullah. 2006. “Identifying the Effect of Public Health Programs on Child Immunisation in Rural Bangladesh.” Mimeo, City University, London. Paper presented at the 2005 UKFIET Conference, Oxford, UK. Sala-i-Martin, X. 2002. “The Disturbing ‘Rise’ of Global Income Inequality.” NBER Working Paper 8904. Schaffer, L. 2004. “Economic Growth and Civil War: A One-Way Street?” Paper presented at the Fifth Pan-European International Relations Conference in The Hague, Netherlands, September 9–11. Seabright, P. 1997. “The Effect of Inequality on Collective Action.” Mimeo, World Bank.


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Knowledge and knowhow are geographically circumscribed, and this circumscription contributes to international differences in the ability of countries to make. Differences in the ability of countries to make, however, also explain differences in the capacity of countries to buy. So to understand the global puzzle of income inequality and differences in consumption, we need to first understand the global mechanisms that limit the diffusion of knowledge and knowhow. The diffusion of knowledge and knowhow explains differences in the ability of countries to make products, which are essentially differences in the ability of countries to make information grow. 9 The Evolution of Economic Complexity Why are knowledge and knowhow geographically circumscribed?


pages: 235 words: 65,885

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

See also David Cohen, “Earth Audit,” New Scientist May 23, 2007 issue 2605. 6 Energy Watch Group. “Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy.” December 2006. energiekrise.de/news/docs/specials2006/REO-Uranium_5-12-2006.pdf (Cited June 11, 2007) 7 Ivan Illich. Energy and Equity. Calder & Boyars, 1974, p. 17. 8 World Income Inequality Database. wider.unu.edu/wiid/wiid.htm 9 James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks, Edward N. Wolff. The World Distribution of Household Wealth.wider.unu.edu/research/2006-2007/2006-2007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/wider-wdhw-report-5-12-2006.pdf (Cited June 11, 2007) 10 We know this from the field research of anthropologists.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

The protesters have also accused Wall Street and corporations of risky lending practices that eventually caused the economic crisis of 2008, and have protested against corporate money in politics. These claims are not without merit. A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) pointed out that income inequality in America has risen dramatically over the past 20 years. Between 1979 and 2007, the incomes of the top 1% of Americans grew by an average of 275%. During the same time period, the 60% of Americans in the middle of the income scale saw their income rise by 40%. By 2007, the top 20% of Americans owned 85% of the country’s wealth, and the bottom 80% of the population owned 15%.


pages: 212 words: 68,690

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite by Carne Ross

Abraham Maslow, barriers to entry, blood diamond, carbon tax, cuban missile crisis, Doha Development Round, energy security, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Global Witness, income inequality, information security, iterative process, meta-analysis, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, stakhanovite, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

The arms race of neologisms to describe our situation must stop. So perhaps instead of talking about asymmetric warfare, we should talk about conflict between grossly unequal parties; instead of globalisation, we should talk about the growth in international trade, or the liberalisation of national capital markets, or global income inequality or the homogenisation of national cultures, whichever it is that we mean; and instead of the post-modern world order, we should talk about the way the world is organised in the early twenty-first century. Simple language is needed to get to grips with a complicated world. There are methods to help us understand and arbitrate the non-empirical.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

It pioneered a style—which it called the “curiosity gap”—that explicitly teased readers, withholding just enough information to titillate the reader into going further. Classic example: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” Six million readers couldn’t contain themselves and followed that link. (The mind-blowing fact: income inequality is far worse than most Americans think.) The headline is, of course, an ancient journalistic art form. But Upworthy—and its legions of imitators—subjected it to positivistic rigor. With every item it posted, Upworthy would write twenty-five different headlines. Software allowed Upworthy to automatically publish all twenty-five, and then determine the most clickable of the bunch.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

We fight harder and more viciously over smaller and smaller matters—the more frivolous the topic, the harsher the battles. What in the world happened? There are some trendy answers. Some blame our current political and social disintegration on heightened economic divides. Many commentators and politicians argue that income inequality has generated unprecedented conflict in American life. They say that too many Americans feel left behind by the new, globalized economy, and that either mild protectionism or redistributionism will heal those ills. They argue that the 1 percent have outpaced the 99 percent, that urbanites have outpaced rural Americans, that white-collar jobs have outpaced blue-collar jobs.


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy (2017) ‘Classification situations: life-chances in the neoliberal era’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 38/8 (pp. 559-72). Franck, Georg (1998) Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Ein Entwurf, Munich: Hanser. Frank, Robert H., and Philip J. Cook (1995) The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life, New York: Free Press. Franzen, Martina (2015) ‘Der Impact Faktor war gestern. Altmetrics und die Zukunft der Wissenschaft’, Soziale Welt 66/2 (pp. 225-42). Freidson, Eliot (2001) Professionalism, the Third Logic: On the Practice of Knowledge, University of Chicago Press.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

“Top Economist: China’s Growth Model Unsustainable,” Fox Business, December 23, 2010, http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/12/23/economist-chinas-growth-model-unsustainable/. 32. “The Long Arm of the State,” Economist, June 23, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18832034. 33. Tong Yanqi and Lei Shaohua, “Large-Scale Mass Incidents in China,” East Asian Policy, http://www.eai.nus.edu.sg/Vol2No2_TongYanqi&LeiShaohua.pdf; and “Wen Pledges to Curb Graft, Income Inequality as Police Head Off Protests,” by Bloomberg News, February 28, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-27/china-police-blanket-planned-jasmine-protest-sites-in-beijing-shanghai.html. 34. Davis Lin, Laxman Narasimhan, and Jun He, “Understanding China’s Digital Consumers,” McKinsey & Company, February 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/greaterchina/mckonchina/reports/understand_china_digital_consumers.pdf.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

But since poor countries now grow faster than rich, we see convergence for the first time in modern economic history. A study from the Peterson Institute tries to measure inequality between all the world’s citizens, by looking at inequality both between countries and within countries. Their conclusion is that global income inequality started to decline significantly at the turn of the century. According to their estimates, the Gini coefficient, a measure where 0 means everyone has the same wealth and 1 means one person has all the wealth, fell from 0.69 in 2003 to 0.65 in 2013. It is still extremely unequal, on a par with domestic inequality in South Africa, perhaps the most unequal country on the planet.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Nowhere does he talk about how wealth is created in the first place, about productivity, or about progress. That stuff is too complicated. So get used to it. It’s never going to change. Populist rhetoric sometimes works (it didn’t for Edwards). So does paying off voters with social programs and checks from the government. But it doesn’t lead to societal wealth. Sure, there is income inequality. We pump a trillion dollars into education and some 70 percent of high school graduates go off to college so that we lead the industrialized world in GDP at $14.2 trillion (the International Monetary Fund’s 2009 numbers have the European Union in first place, where Norwegian McDonald’s charge $13 for a Big Mac, but that’s kind of cheating, isn’t it?).


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

It takes a lot to make a difference across the $17 trillion American economy, and Krugman is acknowledging that the current wave of technology—big data and smart machines—may well be a significant force. A big data–powered lift in productivity would not solve the “headwinds” problems Gordon identifies, including an aging population, income inequality, and a struggling public education system. But without higher productivity and growth, those challenges only loom larger. GE opens a window onto the industrial economy, much as IBM does with information technology. GE’s industrial Internet strategy is based on the well-informed assumption that seemingly small steps in efficiency can have a big impact—in savings and profits for companies, and in productivity for the economy.


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

But since they formulated the HDI in 1990, climate change has become far more evident and the need to address it with new environmental accounting measures is more pressing, hence Sen’s willing involvement in Sarkozy’s commission. And in March 2008, at long last—forty years after his speech questioning GDP accounting—Robert Kennedy’s questions were taken up by the US government in Washington. A United States Senate Committee discussed the GDP’s failure to measure environmental damage, poverty, income inequality, health and the quality of life, as well as the danger of using the GDP to express national wellbeing. At the time of the Senate hearing, there was no US legislation to accommodate a possible revision to US national accounting. But two years later, on 23 March 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which contains one small section—section 5605—which requires that Congress help fund and oversee the creation of a new ‘key national indicators system’.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Given the havoc it wreaked, the Great Recession might have provided an occasion for critically reassessing the supposed imperatives of globalization. Obama’s approach to saving the system ensured that no such reassessment occurred. By the time he prepared to leave office, neoliberal precepts had regained their status as nonnegotiable. The assumption of more growth providing an eventual remedy to income inequality remained intact. And the United States remained what it had been: a nation in which the needs of corporate capitalism take precedence over the common good. The second element of Obama’s legacy relates to the uses of U.S. military power. During the Bush years, militarized global leadership had taken a beating, due largely to the frustrations produced by the Iraq War.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Democracies are built to defend human rights and maintain egalitarian principles so that even when a group falls from power or never had it to start with they are protected. Democratic countries are more likely to have better human rights records. They are more likely to support the freedoms of religion, the press, and speech,7 all of which protect democracy’s egalitarian spirit. Democracy can reduce income inequality,8 and the pioneering democracies of the eighteenth century were the first to see substantial economic growth during the Industrial Revolution. Democracies tend to have better health care with lower child mortality and better maternal health. Democracies also spend more on education, have a higher teacher-student ratio, and have more of an incentive to lower school fees.9 Democracy is crucial to the well-being of its citizens, and one of the main prerequisites of lasting peace.5, 8, 10, 11, 12 * * * — As they constructed their new government, the American Founders understood that people tend to form group identities along arbitrary lines, and they were painfully familiar with the cycle of dehumanization.


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

His work has found that people of different political affiliations place different importance on these dimensions. Of particular relevance here is that liberals place more weight on the fairness/cheating dimension than conservatives.14 Reflecting this, Hillary’s campaign stressed many issues related to fairness: women’s rights, campaign finance reform, and income inequality. Given the importance of fairness to liberals, Hillary needed to be seen by Democratic Party members to have won the party nomination fairly. Any such violations were likely to trigger rage. Unfortunately, she did not achieve this aim. Her battle with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries led some to perceive that she had gained the nomination unfairly.


pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

On the level of politics and social change, it becomes tempting to conclude that only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for—that it would be meaningless to spend your time, say, caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden while the problems of global warming and income inequality remain unsolved. Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill. Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

If you’re thirty and haven’t made your mark, you’re late to the party. The problem is that the richer the cities get, the more unequal they get. Specifically, the more young, male, and white they get. And their diversity is being squeezed onto the streets and into distant suburbs by ever-rising rents and living costs. San Francisco’s income inequality grew faster than any other American city, making it the most unequal city in the nation in 2015. Salaries in the Bay Area have been on the rise, but the number of people living in poverty has also grown. Now the region is peppered with pairs of twin cities—one rich, one poor, neighboring each other.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Thus, the vast worldwide trend toward concentration of income and wealth since the 1990s is the playing out of a neoliberal script to produce a more efficient and vibrant capitalism. Here again we touch upon the recent crisis. This particular neoliberal precept dictates that the widely noted exacerbation of income inequality in the United States since 1980 cannot possibly have played a role in precipitating the crisis in any way.101 Indeed, attempts by the state to offset or ameliorate the trend toward inequality of wealth—especially through attempts to expand home ownership and consumer credit—become themselves, for neoliberals, major root causes of the crisis.102 This then gets translated into the preferred neoliberal story of the crisis, which attributes culpability to the Democrats by lodging blame for the housing bubble via securitization with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (see chapter 5)

“Rethinking Macroeconomics: What Failed, and How to Repair It,” Journal of the European Economic Association 9 (2011): 591–645. Stiglitz, Joseph. Selected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Stiglitz, Joseph, and Bruce Greenwald. “Financial Market Imperfections and Business Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (1993): 77–114. Story, Louise. “Income Inequality and Financial Crises,” New York Times, August 21, 2010. Story, Louise. “A Rich Education for Summers,” New York Times, April 5, 2009. Subramanian, Arvind. “How Economics Managed to Make Amends,” Financial Times, December 28, 2009. Summers, Lawrence. “The Great Liberator,” New York Times, November 19, 2006.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It was collective, face-to-face efforts to bridge the differences between Islamists and secularists after the fall of the Tunisian dictatorship that won several of these organizations the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Elsewhere, the difficulty of achieving genuine political order has led to growing numbers of “un-free” people in the world. Income inequality is destabilizing, “but so is freedom inequality,” said Seidman. When “freedom from” outstrips “freedom to,” amplified actors in the grip of destructive ideas “will cause more harm and destruction, unless they become inspired and enlisted in constructive human endeavors,” he argued. “They will be like inmates on the loose.”

The February 2015 annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) looked at productivity growth in America post–World War II and labeled the years from 1948 to 1973 “The Age of Shared Growth,” because of the way that all three factors—productivity growth, distribution, and participation—aligned to benefit the middle class from 1948 to 1973 … Income inequality fell, with the share of income going to the top 1 percent falling by nearly one-third, while the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rose slightly. Household income growth was also fueled by the increased participation of women in the workforce … The combination of these three factors increased the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households by 2.8 percent a year over this period … This period illustrates the combined power of productivity, income equality, and participation to benefit the middle class.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

They all agree with the fact that as a result of increased inequality brought about by technological progress, some measures have to be taken by governments to compensate. All of them believe this has to do with fiscal policy in the form of taxing, and wealth and income redistribution. This income inequality is something that is particularly apparent in the US, but also to a smaller scale in Western Europe. The Gini index—a measure of income inequality—of France or Scandinavia is around 25 or 30. In the US, it’s 45, and that’s the same level as third-world countries. In the US, Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at MIT, wrote a couple of books with his colleague from MIT, Andrew McAfee, studying the impact of technology on the economy.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Because the day will come when it is on Tuesday, and you’ll be saying, “Damn, why did I say yes to that?” Forethought is a virtue; remember that one day, that distant future will be now, and the choices you make today will have shaped the choices you are able to make then. This obviously has wide applications to social and environmental issues (ahem, climate change or income inequality) as well. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Disrupt!” When Clayton Christensen introduced the term “disruptive technology” in his 1997 business classic, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, he was asking a very different question than “How can I get funded by convincing VCs that there’s a huge market I can blow up?”

Just like transistor radios or the early World Wide Web, these new markets are often too small for established companies to consider them worth pursuing. By the time they wake up, an upstart has taken a leadership position in the emerging segment. But more important, the idea that we should focus on disruption rather than the new value that we can create is at the heart of the current economic malaise, income inequality, and political upheaval. The secret to building a better future is to use technology to do things that were previously impossible. That was true in the first industrial revolution, and it is true now. It isn’t technology that eliminates jobs, it is the shortsighted business decisions that use technology simply to cut costs and fatten corporate profits.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

But accommodating the upward mobility of a state that by itself accounts for POSTSCRIPT 383 about one-fifth of the world population is an altogether different matter. It implies a fundamental subversion of the very pyramidal structure of the hierarchy. Indeed, to the extent that recent research on world income inequality has detected a statistical trend towards declining inter-country inequality since 1980, this is due entirely to the rapid economic growth of China (see, among others, Berry 2005). Having noted the structurally subversive nature of the continuing economic expansion of China, in C/mos and Governance we pointed out two major obstacles to a non-catastrophic transition to a more equitable world order.

., Semzperzp/reral States in the W/orld-Economy, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1990a, pp. 11-47. “Marxist Century-American Century: The Making and Remaking of the World Labor Movement,” in S. Amin, G. Arrighi, A.G. Frank, and I. Wallerstein, Yransforming t/7e Revolution: Social Movements and the W/orld System, New York: Monthly Review Press 1990b, pp. 54-95. “World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism,” New Lcfi Review, 189,1991,pp.39-64. —— Adam Smit/7 in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century, London: Verso 2007. Arri hi, Giovanni, Kenneth Barr, and Shuji Hisaeda, “The Transformation o? Business Enterprise,” Binghamton, NY: Fernand Braudel Center, State University of New York 1993.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Finance—including straightforward debt but also a range of tradable securities—is an important part of this, crucial to the liquidity and mobility of capital as well as to expansion and spreading costs over time. Entrepreneurial dynamism depends on financial backing. But lopsided financialization can be distorting in a variety of ways. It has brought dramatic increases in domestic income inequality in all the major capitalist economies; it has channeled funds away from investment in productive enterprises. It fueled a long “megabubble” in asset prices, including the more specific bubble in mortgage-backed housing prices that helped precipitate the 2008–2009 crisis. It encouraged speculation.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

“The profile of the Canadian banks on the global scale has been heightened exponentially over the course of the last year,” a Toronto-based headhunter doing the recruiting told Bloomberg News. “They look more powerful and are able to attract talent that was historically not available to them.”8 None of this is to say that Toronto has somehow sidestepped all the stubborn problems that infect most rapidly growing metropolitan centers. Income inequality is increasing, and the population is becoming more segmented by class, ethnic, and racial lines, according to a landmark report on the “three Torontos” by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies.9 The study paints a stark portrait of a city increasingly divided into three distinct geographic regions: a wealthy core; inner suburbs increasingly characterized by disadvantage, disconnection, and poverty; and outer suburbs populated by a shrinking mix of working- and middle-class families.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Recently Thomas Piketty has analyzed the long-run trends in inequality in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He finds evidence of long cycles of 40 to 50 years. Thus the share of labor income in Britain peaks in 1920 and again in 1970. In France the wage share exhibits a 40-year cycle with peaks in 1900, 1940 and 1980. In the US, Piketty’s data show a fall in income inequality from a peak in 1940 which is regained in the mid-1990s.1 Given the average length of 40 to 50 years, there can only have been about four or five cycles since the Industrial Revolution. The accuracy of prediction with such a small sample is problematic. But the idea is not statistical precision (the mainstream models have plenty of that) but some intuition as to what shaped the catastrophic event.


pages: 200 words: 72,182

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

In which case, it can't possibly matter whether demented diabetics eat cupcakes or not, because from a purely soteriological standpoint, they're already dead. The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful “amens.” It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

(In fact, the Centre for Effective Altruism, the main international promoter of the movement, happened to occupy an office in Oxford just down the hall from the Future of Humanity Institute.) It seemed to me odd, though not especially surprising, that a hypothetical danger arising from a still nonexistent technology would, for these billionaire entrepreneurs, be more worthy of investment than, say, clean water in the developing world or the problem of grotesque income inequality in their own country. It was, I learned, a question of return on investment—of time, and money, and effort. The person I learned this from was Viktoriya Krakovna, the Harvard mathematics PhD student who had cofounded—along with the MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark and Skype founder Jann Tallinn—the Future of Life Institute, which earlier that year had received an endowment of $10 million from Musk in order to establish a global research initiative aimed at averting AI catastrophe.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

It stands to reason that assortative mating reflects economic inequality, but recent research also offers evidence that the phenomenon is a driving force behind disparities in wealth as well. A study by economists Raquel Fernández and Richard Rogerson, published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, concluded that increased marital sorting (whereby high earners marry high earners) “will significantly increase income inequality.” 11 Likewise, a 2003 analysis by Brookings economist Gary Burtless found that increased marital sorting between 1979 and 1996 was behind 13 percent of the growth in economic inequality during that period. Burtless cautions, however, that he does not believe assortative mating is necessarily more pronounced than it used to be: men have long married women of their own social class.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

It has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty – at the cost, however, of environmental damage and the renewed widening of the gap between the coastal region and the interior, the rich and the poor. The wage difference between rural and urban workers has narrowed slightly in the past few years, but even now someone in a city can expect to earn three times as much as a country worker. Levels of income inequality in China are among the highest in the world, leading to a feeling that China’s wealth-making machine has served the few, not the many – or in Chinese slang, for ‘the Zhao family’, an idiom similar to ‘the top dogs’. The expression has its popular roots in a 1921 novel, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun, which includes the line ‘You think you’re worthy of the surname Zhao?’


pages: 265 words: 77,084

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure by Alex Honnold, David Roberts

carbon footprint, do what you love, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, income inequality, risk tolerance, short squeeze, side project, trade route

It was climbing, starting with our expedition to Chad in 2010, that awakened me to the plight of those impoverished peoples, and it was the money I made as a high-profile climber that allowed me to try to do something about it. Long before I started the Honnold Foundation, when people asked me which nonclimbers I most admired, I cited guys like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Billionaires who used their riches to address problems of environmental degradation and income inequality, and to provide educational opportunities to the disadvantaged. Today I’d add Elon Musk to the list—a business magnate and engineer who’s reinventing the world. With my Honnold Foundation, what I really hope to do in the coming years is to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world in a way that helps the environment.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Nothing Works’, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2018. 38Dinçer Gökçe, ‘Kiler, Sapphire’de 47 daire birden sattı’, Hürriyet, 21 February 2017. 39Faseeh Mangi, ‘135 Million Millennials Drive World’s Fastest Retail Market’, Bloomberg, 28 September 2017. 40Euromonitor International, 10 Facts about India, 12 January 2014. For income distribution to the top earners, see L. Chancel and T. Piketty, ‘Indian income inequality, 1922–2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, World Inequality Database Working Paper Series No. 2017/11. 41Boston Consulting Group, The New Indian: The Many Facets of a Changing Customer (March, 2017). 42Bain & Co., Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, Fall–Winter 2017, 22 December 2017; Yiling Pan, ‘Luxury Spending to Double in China Over Next 10 Years, Says McKinsey’, Jing Daily, 15 June 2017. 43CPP Luxury, ‘Prada Group opens seven stores in Xi’an China’, 25 May 2018. 44Astrid Wendlandt, ‘Chanel snaps up four companies to secure high-end silk supplies’, Reuters, 22 July 2016; Yiling Pan, ‘China Wants Fewer Burberry and BV Handbags, More Chanel and Hermès’, Jing Daily, 23 April 2018. 45Angelica LaVito, ‘Starbucks is opening a store in China every 15 hours’, South China Morning Post, 6 December 2017. 46Cleofe Maceda, ‘UAE’s residents’ luxury goods spending to reach more than $8 billion in 2017’, Gulf News, 20 November 2017. 47Associated Press, ‘China’s new baby policy lifts stocks, sinks condom maker’, 30 October 2015. 48Credit Suisse, Spotlighting China’s new two child policy, 30 October 2015. 49CLSA, Chinese Outbound Tourism – New 2017 Report (2017). 50World Bank, GDP Growth (annual percentage) at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG 51Wouter Baan, Lan Luan, Felix Poh, Daniel Zipser, ‘Double-clicking on the Chinese consumer. 2017 China Consumer Report’, McKinsey & Company, 2017. 52Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Project (Phase 3) in the State of Karnataka, India.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Michalet, Charles-Albert (2004) Qu’est-ce que la mondialisation? Petit traité à l’usage de ceux et celles qui ne savent pas encore s’il faut être pour ou contre [What is Globalisation? A Short Treatise for Those Who Haven’t Yet Made Up Their Minds] (Paris: La Découverte). Milanovic, Branko (2006) ‘Global Income Inequality: What It Is and Why It Matters’, World Economics 7(1): 131–57. Milanovic, Branko (2010) The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books). Miller, Debra A. (eds) (2010) Fair Trade (Current Controversies series; Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press).


pages: 283 words: 77,272

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

To Paine, a system of legally enforced inequality would enable the elite to exploit the law to entrench unearned prerogatives or shield ill-gotten gains. And those counterfeit nobles would turn the law into a tool to promote and protect injustice rather than to correct it. Though Paine’s liveliest polemics were devoted to scorning the accumulation of wealth, he had no quarrel with income inequality provided that there was no such inequality under law. The rich could buy what they desired, dress and eat as they wished, and wallow in the most effete comforts and luxuries. But the law was the one realm where their money and property would count for nothing. One point is vital to acknowledge: like all of the other principles espoused by the founders, equality under the law was not always observed in practice.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

Greenhouse gases Greenwald, Glenn Grossman, Vasily Guantánamo Bay, Cuba Gulf War Hackett, James Halliburton Hansen, James Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment (Ben-Shahar) Happiness and celebrity and culture of illusion and Huxley and Lane and positive psychology and self-deception Hard Rock Cafe Hardcore, Max Hare, Robert Harmony Hartley, Nina Harvard University Business School Divinity School and donors and alumni and endowment and entitlement and elitism Medical School and positive psychology and student applications Have More Money Now (Layfield) Hawn, Goldie Hayes, Ira Hazlitt, William Head Start Health Affairs (journal) Health care and corporations and Democrats for-profit and optimal worker and poor and pornography universal Heart of Darkness (Conrad) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers) Hebdon, Chris Hedonism Hefner, Hugh Heil, Russell Alex Henry, Mark Hersh, Seymour The Hills (television show) Hilton, Paris Hitler, Adolf Hoggart, Richard Holly, Buddy Hollywood Forever Cemetery Holocaust See also Nazi Germany Home foreclosures Homeless Honest, Steve Hooker, Richard Hornswoggle (wrestler) The Hot Network Household wealth How to Win at College (Newport) The Howard Stern Show (television show) Human Capitalism (Ozaki) Human Comedy (Balzac) Humanities Indicators Prototype Hume, David Hunger Hussein, Saddam Hustler Video Group Huston, John Huxley, Aldous Ignatowski, Ralph (Iggy) Illiteracy and academic specialists and divide with literate minority epidemic of and images and slogans in media and lack of understanding Illusion and America and Auden and celebrity culture and Christian Right and comfort creators of culture of and death of cultures and economy and historical amnesia and illiteracy and language and love and pornography and positive psychology and pseudo-events and Sands of Iwo Jima and war The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Boorstin) Immigration Imperialism Income inequality India Individualism Inflation Infrastructure Inside Higher Education Institute of Medicine Interface Corporation International Monetary Fund Internet. See Celebrity culture: and Internet; Pornography: and Internet Internet Filter Review Interrogations Irani, Ray Iraq and corporations and journalists and mercenaries occupation War and withdrawal The Irony of American History (Niebuhr) Israel J.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

When they were implemented, we were told that, while these 'reforms' might increase inequality in the short term and possibly in the long run as well, they would generate faster growth and eventually lift everyone up more effectively than the interventionist policies of the early postwar years had done. The records of the last two decades show that only the negative part of this prediction has been met. Income inequality did increase as predicted, but the acceleration in growth that had been promised never arrived. In fact, growth has markedly decelerated during the last two decades, especially in the developing countries, when compared to the 1960-1980 period when 'bad' policies prevailed. According to the data provided by Weisbrot et al. in the 116 (developed and developing) countries for which they had data, GDP per capita grew at the rate of 3.1 per cent p.a. between 1960 and 1980, while it grew at the rate of only 1.4 per cent p.a. between 1980 and 2000.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

Comparative studies of Brazil and Mexico between 1830 and 1930 show that Brazil’s more aggressive financial liberalization loosened firms’ access to external sources of capital and delivered faster industrial expansion than in Mexico. A 2002 analysis of Italy showed that an individual’s odds of starting a business increased by a third if he moved from the least financially developed region in the country to the most developed. Cross-country comparisons suggest that financial development reduces income inequality. A study of households in Tanzania showed that a temporary shock to living standards through a loss of crops leads many families to put children to work to mitigate the hit to their income—but families who have access to credit are better able to avoid pulling their kids out of school.28 The industry’s critics have a ready response to this argument: finance may well be useful but only up to a certain point.


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

A more balanced distribution, which had been thought to be normal especially in the United States, was actually an exception due to the effects of World War II’s massive capital destruction. A second surprise was how deeply and broadly his work resonated. Clearly, the outcomes and processes Piketty described were of great concern to a wide range of people. Ameliorating wealth and income inequality is now discussed as an important political objective, appearing in various guises across the platforms of Democratic presidential candidates. We expect this trend to accelerate and intensify in the coming years. When it is seen in this light—inequality intensifying as a political concern, while the carry regime and the current monetary system reinforce it—history tells us that we must expect change. 220 THE RISE OF CARRY The Opportunity to Lean Against Carry Was Lost We have stressed in this book that carry is a naturally occurring phenomenon and is not in itself wholly bad.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

An aging society and declining workforce after decades of the Chinese government’s one-child policy, which was eased to two children by 2016 but still has resulted in lagging birthrates. Censorship of information and blocks of American net brands in China that restrict knowledge, hinder creative expression, and promote conformity rather than the out-of-the-box thinking that drives innovation. And to top it off, China has to deal with pollution, income inequality, and Chinese banks’ nonperforming loans. Whether you are a panda lover or dragon slayer, it’s hard to ignore Chinese tech ascent into the spotlight. China now represents about one-third of exhibitors at the mega annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where dozens of companies from all over the world display their wares.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

The extent to which machine learning can grapple with plat- form-based work, however, is much more contested than some authors would have us think. Upon closer inspection, it is not at all clear to what extent the latest wave of technological unemployment will affect the gig economy. The Limits of Automation Automation does have huge impacts on the labour market—not least in terms of accentuating income inequality. But is it really a looming threat to the low-skill, low-wage work characteristic of many gig-economy plat- forms? There are good reasons to doubt claims that the rise of the robots * * * 138 Epilogue will spell the end of the gig economy. Given the nature of most platform- based tasks, automation’s disparate impact on the labour market will have little effect on gig-economy workers.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Masood’s book helps raise those questions and others in a thought provoking manner. That’s much needed in every endeavor these days, and needed in few places more than in the economics profession.” — Simon Constable, Forbes “In lively prose, Masood argues that GDP is flawed because it ignores volunteering, housework, environmental degradation, job satisfaction, and income inequality.” — Kirkus Reviews “An interesting book. Masood doesn’t merely criticize the overreliance on GDP: he also explores ongoing efforts to develop a satisfactory substitute or supplement that would yield a more accurate picture of economic activity and its effects.” — Foreign Affairs “Masood contends that GDP is a bill of goods the developed world foisted on emerging nations.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

., “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” working paper 22910, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, 2016, revised 2017. 7. Richard V. Burkhauser, Jeff Larrimore, and Kosali I. Simon, “A ‘Second Opinion’ on the Economic Health of the American Middle Class,” working paper 17164, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, 2011. 8. Gerald Auten and David Splinter, “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, December 20, 2019. 9. Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). Chapter 1 1. Svetlana A. Kaliadina and Natal’ia Iu. Pavlova, “The Family of W.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

Macron insists that with that era now over, Europe must act urgently to secure the primacy of democracy and fight back against authoritarian tendencies gaining momentum at home and abroad. “The profound crisis in Western democracy is at the heart of my battle for Europe,” Macron declared emphatically. “We cannot afford any sense of complacency or futility. Our democracies are in serious trouble because we have not managed to reduce income inequalities in our society made worse by globalization. That is why Europe must prove it can serve as a humanist model for the world in making far-reaching reforms, whether in terms of education, creating jobs for young people, or scaling up our research into new technologies. Otherwise, voters will be tempted to turn to the shortsighted and dangerous ideas of the nationalists, which often bring wars and destruction in their wake.”


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

., 100, 101 Fukuyama, Francis, 171 Gardner, Sue, 108–109 gay marriage, 27, 188, 199, 214 gay rights issues, 2–3 gender identity, 173, 188 general case against nonprofits, 99–106 generational politics, 17–18 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 38–39, 49–51 German Ideology, The (Marx), 176 Gitlin, Todd, 192 GiveWell, 102–103 globalization, 171 Good White Men, 157–158 Gray, Freddie, 46 Great Recession, 15–16 Guevara, Che, 93 Haider, Asad, 169, 173–174 Hartford city government, 3 Harvard University, 108 health care system, 27, 31, 40 Heard, Amber, 40, 120–121 Heideman, Paul, 187 Hess, Diana, 146 Hispanic Americans, 64, 185 Hobsbawm, Eric, 175, 183 Hollywood Reporter, 122, 123 home ownership, 47–48 homophobia, 168–169, 172–173, 176–177 Hood, John, 143 horizontal organizing, 21–24 housing activism, 113 “How Calling Someone a ‘Class Reductionist’ Became a Lefty Insult” (Haider), 169, 173–174 Humphrey, Hubert, 152 hypocrisy, 152–155, 159 identity politics within broader coalitions, 177–179, 198 and class-first leftism, 168, 196–197 as default frame for global politics, 171 deference politics as by-product of, 158–159 lack of specific, material goals in, 170–173 language used in, 40, 202 liberals’ chasing of, 135 as limited and exclusionary, 174–175 motivation in, 182–183 right-wing, 183–187 segregation in, 192 shielding of the moneyed and powerful in, 166 in 2016 Democratic primaries, 166 values in, 153 imprisonment rates, 48 INCITE! Collective, 111 income inequality, 148–151, 188–189 “In Defense of Destroying Property” (Nation), In Defense of Looting (Osterweil), 83 “Insanely Overpaid Nonprofit Execs” (Fiscal Times), 108 internal locus of control, 139–140 internet, 130, 204 intersectionality, 165, 166, 192 Iran, 92 Iraq war, 3 “iron law of institutions,” 104–105 “iron law of oligarchy,” 104 Jackson, Regina, 71–72 Jacobin magazine, 26, 187 January 6 Capitol riot, 41 Jefferson, Margo, 65 Johnson, Lyndon, 208 Kaba, Mariame, 38, 53 Kelly, R., 120, 128 Kerry, John, 25, 214 King, Martin Luther, Jr. assassination of, 34 on limited change, 70 and Malcolm X, 84–87, 93 and March on Washington, 182 on riots and rioting, 80–81, 84–85 tactics of, 90 Klein, Paul, 114 labor market, 18 labor movement, 9, 78, 170, 180, 194–196 labor unions, 180, 194–196 language identity politics’ fixation on, 173 left’s academic vocabulary, 200–202 nonsensical, 204–207 progressive politics games in, 155–156 in race politics, 67–70, 75 of the unheard, riots as, 81, 84–85 leadership structures, 21–24, 113–114 leaders of social movements, 9 the left academic vocabulary of, 200–202 boundaries of, 25 case against nonprofits in, 107–118 demands of, 79 disdain for white working class in, 10 and education polarization, 144–151 elitism associated with, 145 focus of, 203 galvanized by Floyd’s murder, 6 and labor movement, 9 lack of uniting vision in, 185–187 need to regain standing among other majorities by, 162 power of, 10 stereotypes of, 145 left activism, 9–11 balancing structure and chaos in, 116–117 common problems in, 23 cultural issues in, 10 disdain for white working class in, 10 horizontal decision-making in, 21–24 idea of armed resistance in, 90 identity niches in, 175–176 infighting and squabbling over priorities in, 20 lack of coherent demands in, 19–21 nonprofits’ role in, 111–112 “progressive stack” in, 156–157 recruiting for, 9–10 left-of-center left, 29–30 dedication to division, 198 and identity politics, 184–185 infighting over oppression hierarchies, 177 lack of coherence in, 149 setting conversations of, 150 tendency to denounce people in, 154 see also liberals left-of-liberal left, 25, 26 left politics atmosphere of 2020 in, 35 class politics in, 175 class reductionist, 168–174 current state of, 78–79 drift from material/concrete to immaterial/symbolic in, 8–9 endorsement of violence in, 80 foundation of, 187–188 and locus of control, 143 people who speak in, 8–9 reorienting (see class-first leftism) Levitz, Eric, 147 liberalism attachment to discipline and self-improvement in, 138–139 desire to please in, 153 nonprofits as vehicles for, 107 racial framing in, 181–182 liberals, 134–163 analyses of, 134–135 changing the orientation of, 162–163 contemporary, 137–143 Democrats identifying as, 136, 137 and education polarization, 144–151 fixation on race among, 74, 75 hypocrisy and cowardice of, 152–155, 159 and locus of control, 139–143 and politics of deference, 155–163 in racial discourse, 62–63 self-accusation by, 154–155 technocratic, 25 libertarians, 134 life span, 47 Llorente, Renzo, 175 locus of control, 139–143 “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (Ochs), 152–153 Lowery, Wesley, 36 mainstream conservative movement, 10 Malcolm X, 84–87, 93 marginalized groups academic work concerning, 74 “centering” of, 176 efforts to reward, 7 further divisions within, 198 politics of deference toward, 155–163 represented in race politics, 8–9 Martin, Trayvon, 37, 46, 49 Marx, Karl, 153, 176, 188, 215 Marxism class politics in, 175 class reductionists in, 170 external locus of control in, 141 and partisan politics, 208 preeminence of self-interest in, 176, 180 and revolution, 193 Masterson, Danny, 128 material security/abundance, 147–148 Maxwell, Ghislaine, 40 Maxwell, Zerlina, 167 McAlevey, Jane, 195 McAvoy, Paula, 146 McCarthy, Eugene, 152 media activist rhetoric in, 35, 36 Black employees in, 66 Depp/Heard case in, 120 elite, 144 income of workers in, 149 insiderism and patronage in, 161 language codes for, 67 liberal bias in, 35–36 liberals’ deference to wisdom of, 135 “moral clarity” argument in, 37 and news cycle as power source, 126 race and racism discussion in, 65–66 and race of actors in shows, 68 racial disparity of workers in, 151 right-wing, 184 self-critical dominant groups in, 157–158 Trump’s attention from, 30 during 2016 Democratic primaries, 166–167 Medicare for All, 40, 178, 213–215 memes, 121, 126–128, 133 meritocratic system, 26, 135, 142–151 #MeToo movement, 14, 32, 119–133 and consequences for accused men, 124–126 current state of, 133 fading impact of, 120–121, 126–128, 130–131 inconsistency in, 123–126, 130 lack of specific policy goal in, 130–132 as a meme, 121, 126–128 news cycle as power source for, 126 potential misuse of, 129 rise of, 119 structural problem with, 123–124 target of, 119 Time’s Up arm of, 122–123 in 2020, 40 as version of canceling, 132 Michels, Robert, 104 millennials, 18 Minneapolis police department, 6, 7, 14, 39 moderates, Democrats as, 136 “moral clarity” argument, 36–37 moral imagination, 187 Movement for Black Lives, 64 “Myth of Class Reductionism, The” (Reed), 169–170 Nation, The, 83, 182 National Association of Nonprofit Organizations & Executives, 103–104 National Association of Scholars, 144 National Council of Nonprofits, 98–100 National Geographic, 84 National Lawyers Guild, 112 Nation of Islam (NOI), 86 Negroland (Jefferson), 65 neoliberal politics, 25 Netflix, 7 New Inquiry, 26 New Republic, 25 “New Sense of Direction, A” (King), 85 New York magazine, 71, 72, 84 New York Times on boundaries of the left, 25 Cotton op-ed in, 56 on election of 2020, 40 Kaba opinion piece in, 38, 53 Lowery opinion piece in, 36 on Occupy movement, 19, 20 Time’s Up ad in, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 159 Nixon, Richard, 34 non-hierarchical decision-making, 19, 21–24 nonprofits, 96–118 activist brain drain due to, 116 concept of “deserving” groups in, 111 criticisms of, 96, 99–106 donors as ultimate stakeholders in, 109–110 general case against, 99–106 ideological makeup of, 107 influence of, 98–99 informal organizing vs., 112–113 institutionalization of, 129 internal elites in, 105 left case against, 107–118 in left organizing, 111–112 local activism organized by, 97 organization and formal legal recognition of, 113–114 political energy blunted by, 79 power in, 104–106 progressive “bias” of, 107–108 public-sector burdens taken on by, 110–111 public support for, 99 and racial justice movement, 6–7 radical activists working for, 115–116 regulatory constraints on, 97 revenue generation by, 108–109 the right’s critiques of, 107 sense of absolution provided by, 117 size of sector, 97–98 social problems perpetuated by, 105–106 spending by, 101–104, 109 staffing vs. structure of, 114 tax issues with, 97, 109–110 nonsense, 204–207 nonviolent protest, 35 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 28 No Shortcuts (McAlevey), 195 Novicoff, Marc, 181 Obama, Barack, 10, 15–18, 26–28, 41–42, 72 Occupy Wall Street, 18–26 ancillary protests inspired by, 19 class focus in, 171–172 fizzling out of, 24–25 framing in, 188 influence of, 25–26 intensely non-hierarchical decision-making in, 21–24 lack of coherent demands from, 19–21, 172 lack of concrete consequences of, 19 Ochs, Phil, 152–153 organization along class lines, 194–197 formal, of nonprofits, 113–114 informal, limits of, 112–113 intelligent, 117 lack of, in 2020, 42–43 Osterweil, Vicky, 83 Paradise Suite, The (Brooks), 142 Pelosi, Nancy, 52 Perez, Tom, 41 personal relationships, 22–23 Piketty, Thomas, 144–145 police and policing crime reduction with, 59 defunding, 38, 51–54, 58, 62–63 racial bias in, 57–58 reforming, 58–59 police violence, 47, 199–200 against Black people, 47–49, 55–57, 199–200 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 38–39 “moral clarity” about, 36–37 at protests, 81 qualified immunity for, 50, 54 Scott’s policing reform bill, 39 against whites vs.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

In May 2019 the company announced that it would increase the minimum wage for contract workers in the Bay Area, New York, and Washington, DC, to $20.9 Shuttle drivers at Loop Transportation and Compass Transportation, whose buses ferry workers at Apple, Yahoo, eBay, and others, voted to unionize, and security guards at Apple and Google won recognition as full-time employees. The tide is turning. Over the past few years, over 5,000 tech service workers have voted to unionize. Many blue-collar tech workers are organizing through Silicon Valley Rising, a community-, faith-, and labor-based coalition created to fight occupational segregation and income inequality. SVR sees the struggles of tech workers as rooted in the broader dislocations and disruptions caused by tech companies’ rapid and unrestrained invasion of Santa Clara County over the past few decades. The coalition calls not only for wage gains but also affordable housing, and an inclusive tech industry; right now only one in ten permanent employees of tech companies are Black or Latino.


pages: 296 words: 78,227

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, delayed gratification, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, inventory management, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, The future is already here, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

What he called his “law” was in fact a mathematical formula (given in note 4), which is some way removed from (although the ultimate source of) the 80/20 Principle as we know it today. 3 Living with the car, (1996) The Economist (22 June): 8. 4 Vilfredo Pareto (1896/7) Cours d’Economique Politique, Lausanne University. Despite the conventional mythology, Pareto did not use the “80/20” phrase in his discussion of income inequality or anywhere else. He did not even make the simple observation that 80 percent of income was earned by 20 percent of the working population, although this conclusion could have been distilled from his far more complex calculations. What Pareto did discover, and what greatly excited him and his followers, was a constant relationship between the top earners and the percentage of total incomes they enjoyed, a relationship that followed a regular logarithmic pattern and could be charted in a similar shape whatever time period of country was taken.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Although hard to analyze, typically a rise in inventories signals a slowing economy. Officially, we were out of the recession, but the economy was still not doing well as of the first quarter of 2011. Did the stimulus help boost GDP in the aftermath? The answer is a little and only temporarily. TABLE K.5 Prosperity and Income Inequality To put the recent crisis in perspective, one might ask what has happened to the prosperity of different classes of people by income; that is the rich, the middle-class, and the poor. Table K.5 shows the growth in median income for the richest Americans, middle-class Americans, and the poorest Americans.6 One should remember that this does not include migrations across categories.

Fortune, October 27, 1997. Avdjiev, Stefan, Christian Upper, and Nicholas Vause. “Highlights of International Banking and Financial Market Activity.” BIS Quarterly Review, December 2010. Bakija, Jon, Adam Cole, and Bradley Heim. “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data.” Working Paper, November 2010. Balzli, Beat and Michaela Schiessl. “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” Spiegel Online, July 8, 2009. Barr, Alistair. “Sowood loses more than $1 billion in July. Facing margin calls, hedge fund firm sells portfolio to Citadel.”


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

In the twentieth century, capital markets democratized investing and stimulated novel solutions to major social problems: social security, sovereign funds, and personal savings accounts are all mechanisms intended to reduce household economic risk. They have deep roots in the history of finance. Along with these important contributions to humankind, finance has also created problems: debt, market bubbles, devastating crises and crashes, exploitative corporations, imperialism, income inequality—to name only a few. The story of finance is the story of a technology: a way of doing things. Like other technologies, it developed through innovations that improved efficiency. It is not intrinsically good or bad. TIME AND MONEY The power of finance to effect such important transitions in world history is that it moves economic value forward and backward through time.

In a quest for the solution to the Needham Puzzle, the financial cofactor deserves serious consideration. At least one leading historian of the Industrial Revolution has argued that the financial system of Europe in the nineteenth century was an essential cofactor. The Industrial Revolution resulted in rising income inequality in Europe and a shift in income toward investors. Robert Allen is one of the leading economic historians of technology. In his 2005 study of rising inequality in the British Industrial Revolution, he writes: “The shift of income to capitalists was necessary in order to provide the savings needed to implement the new factory methods … it was the rising share of profits that induced the savings that met the demand for capital and allowed output to expand.”4 In short, a financial system that could reward investors with profits—albeit at the expense of rising inequality—induced further investment and sustained technological development.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This was the ultimate goal, and it was not attained, productivity growing at a historically torpid rate until the mid-1990s. As for American workers, who so strongly supported Reagan politically, their wages, as noted, generally stagnated or at best grew slowly. Male wages were especially weak. In this period, income inequality started to climb to the levels reached in the 1920s. Typical family incomes rose only because spouses went to work. Female incomes rose consistently, but not robustly, and a typical woman of the same age and experience as her male counterpart still earned far less. Meanwhile, the public goods of America were neglected.

., August 24, 2004. 22 THE RATE OF ACTUAL FEDERAL TAXES: Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009, The Economic Policy Institute (Washington, D.C.: ILR Press, 2009), pp. 71–76. (The better-off paid a higher proportion of total American taxes because they were far richer. Income inequality expanded sharply in the 1980s and the better-off enjoyed much more rapid increases in income than the rest. They paid a lower rate, in other words, on a higher level of income.) 23 THE OTHER MAJOR FEDERAL SPENDING INCREASE: James M. Poterba, “Budget Policy,” in Feldstein, ed., American Economic Policy in the 1980s, pp. 238–40. 24 MEANTIME, BUSINESS DID NOT SPEND: Benjamin M.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Williamson, eds, Migration and the International Labour Market (London, 1994), pp. 35–54. 6. See, for instance: Ian R. G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain (London, 1997); Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-war Era (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 7. Greater London Authority, London Divided: Income, Inequality and Poverty in the Capital (London, 2002), p. xii. See Chapter 6 for more on racism. 8. Jon May, Jane Wills, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert and Cathy McIlwaine, ‘Global Cities at Work: Migrant Labour in Low-Paid Employment in London’, London Journal, vol. 35 (2010), pp. 85–99. 9.

First Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System (London, 1888). GLA Economics, The Contribution of Asian-Owned Businesses to London’s Economy (London, 2005). GLA Intelligence, Census Information Scheme, Local Areas of Ethnic Group Concentration (London, 2014). Greater London Authority, London Divided: Income, Inequality and Poverty in the Capital (London, 2002). Greater London Authority, Londoners Born Overseas, Their Age and Year of Arrival (London, 2013). Greater London Authority, The World in a City: An Analysis of the 2001 Census Results (London, 2005). House of Commons, Second Report from the Home Affairs Committee, Session 1984–5, Chinese Community in Britain, vol. 1, Report together with Proceedings of the Committee (London, 1985).


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

To my family CONTENTS Introduction: Nobody Likes a Middleman, But Most of Us Are Middlemen 1The Bridge: Spanning the Chasm 2The Certifier: Applying the Seal of Approval 3The Enforcer: Keeping Everyone Honest 4The Risk Bearer: Reducing Uncertainty 5The Concierge: Making Life Easier 6The Insulator: Taking the Heat Conclusion: The Middleman Economy Acknowledgments Notes Index INTRODUCTION NOBODY LIKES A MIDDLEMAN, BUT MOST OF US ARE MIDDLEMEN IN JANUARY 2014, AFTER PRESIDENT OBAMA DELIVERED his annual State of the Union address to Congress, several Republican senators responded with predictable disappointment. One detractor, Mike Lee, the junior senator from Utah, focused his carefully prepared critique on what the government should do to make the American Dream a reality for more people. To show that the president had failed to keep his word about the problem of income inequality, Lee said that for the past five years, the president “has promised an economy for the middle class, but all he’s delivered is an economy for the middlemen.”1 It wasn’t clear who these “middlemen” were—Lee didn’t explain2—but his choice of words was shrewd. Though the divide between the country’s rich and poor grows ever wider, many Americans continue to consider themselves part of the middle class, which is why “the middle class” dominates rhetoric across the political spectrum,3 but few think of themselves as middlemen.4 And why would they identify as middlemen when the word carries so much ugly baggage?


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

Data and code for this study can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Baseball.” 170 the single most important year: Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman, “The Great Society, Reagan’s Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting,” unpublished manuscript. 173 Chetty explains: I interviewed Raj Chetty by phone on July 30, 2015. 176 escape the grim reaper: Raj Chetty et al., “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014,” JAMA 315, no. 16 (2016). 178 Contagious behavior may be driving some of this: Julia Belluz, “Income Inequality Is Chipping Away at Americans’ Life Expectancy,” vox.com, April 11, 2016. 178 why some people cheat on their taxes: Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Emmanuel Saez, “Using Differences in Knowledge Across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings,” American Economic Review 103, no. 7 (2013). 180 I decided to download Wikipedia: This is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Geography of Fame,” New York Times, March 23, 2014, SR6.


pages: 288 words: 85,073

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

USAID-DHS[2]. Bietsch, Kristin, and Charles F. Westoff., Religion and Reproductive Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa. DHS Analytical Studies No. 48. Rockville, MD: ICF International, 2015. gapm.io/xdhsarel. van Zanden[1]. van Zanden, Jan Luiten, Joerg Baten, Peter Foldvari, and Bas van Leeuwen. “World Income Inequality: The Changing Shape of Global Inequality 1820–2000.” Utrecht University, 2014. http://www.basvanleeuwen.net/bestanden/WorldIncomeInequality.pdf. van Zanden[2]. van Zanden, Jan Luiten, and Eltjo Buringh. “Rise of the West: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe: A long-term perspective from the sixth through eighteenth centuries.”


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

And inequality is also likely to undermine the benefits of wealth to society at large, an idea made familiar recently by works like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.21 According to Wilkinson and Pickett, among wealthy societies, those where income inequality is greater suffer more from a variety of social ills, including higher rates of physical illness, mental illness, and violence, along with lower levels of education, social mobility, and trust. Hence countries like Denmark and Costa Rica report higher levels of happiness than countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, because while there is less wealth swishing around in these societies, the economic and social inequalities are less extreme.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

It initiated a public-private partnership with Microsoft that involved lowering the cost of buying legal software to Cairo residents who could demonstrate that they were responsibly paying their utility bills. Schools and libraries got internet terminals. New fiber-optic cables were laid. The price of making cell phone calls dropped quickly. For practical reasons, Cairo was the main beneficiary of all this. Egypt has modest income inequalities, but the fastest technologies went to wealthy urban elites of Cairo and Alexandria. Most of the infrastructure investment went to those cities, and not every Egyptian could afford to get online anyway. People around the country found mobile-phone services a great new way of connecting to family and friends.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

There’s every reason to hope that in the coming decades, we’ll be able to design even better school choice systems, although they may continue to rest on the same basic principles of making it safe and simple for families to participate and using preference information efficiently. This matters deeply to me because schools play a critical role in some of the biggest issues facing our democracy, from income inequality to intergenerational mobility. We need to use schools better, so that our kids can get the education they need, whether it is provided at the closest school or not. School choice helps us deliver on the promises we make to all our children. That being said, school choice systems, even if they are efficient, simple, and safe, don’t solve the problems created by not having enough good schools.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Preferential attachment, network effects, and the power laws they produce matter, in part, because they intensify and epitomize the old inequities we hoped the Internet would overthrow, from the star system to the hit-driven manufacturing of movies, music, and books. Winner-take-all markets promote certain types of culture at the expense of others, can make it harder for niche cultures and late bloomers to flourish, and contribute to broader income inequality.26 More specifically, where cultural production is concerned, the persistence of power laws refutes the myth of independent creators competing on even ground. The most vocal proponent of this myth, Chris Anderson, has declared the end of the “water cooler era” when we “listened, watched, and read from the same relatively small pool of mostly hit content,” for an age when “we’re all into different things.”


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Balancing the budget and aggressively pushing trade liberalization went hard against liberal intentions and the party’s working-class base. But when Clinton’s second term ended in booming prosperity, full employment and rising wages, most Democrats told themselves, Listen to Bob Rubin and good things happen. So it’s a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as “a deeply troubling fact of American economic life” that threatens the trading system, even the stability of “capitalist, democratic society.” More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequen-tial—globalization’s role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of U.S. wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

For surely the most famous feature of this kind of enlightened capitalism, which requires little description because it is so ubiquitous, is the way it links profits to progressive causes. You can save the rainforest, ease global warming, nurture Native American values, support family farms, spread world peace, and reduce income inequality, all without leaving the refrigerated aisles of the supermarket. It used to be thought that the pursuit of profit inevitably crushes values. But now many companies have determined that good values lead to greater profits—as long as there is a large educated populace willing to pay a little extra for the sake of social progress.


pages: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Paul mixed-use development; building types and; developers and; in inner city; in new towns and villages; parking and; in regional planning Mizner Park (Boca Raton, Florida) modernist architecture Montgomery County (Maryland) Montreal Morrish, Bill mortgages: affordable housing and; FHA and VA; government policies and; qualifying for Moses, Robert mothers, suburban moving municipalities: fiscal impact of sprawl on; income inequalities of; policies of Nader, Ralph Nantucket (Massachusetts) National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) National Highway Safety Administration National Resources Defense Council National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Program Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) neighborhoods, see traditional neighborhoods Nelessen, Anton Nelson, Gaylord neotraditionalism New Jersey Newman, Oscar Newpoint (South Carolina) new towns and villages; architectural style of; building types in; connectivity of; mixed-use development in; neighborhood structure of; parking in; pros and cons of; public transit for; regional considerations for; site plans for; streets of New York City; Regional Plan of 1929; see also Manhattan New York Regional Planning Association New York Times, The Nichols, J.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

We will give you numbers to text this information.12 The problem of hate messages was so severe that the government attempted to circulate its own messages of peace and reconciliation, and humanitarian NGOs blamed the worsening cycle of violence directly on the escalating rhetoric within the closed, inaccessible communities created by cell phones. Subsequent studies have found that across the continent, even when income inequality, ethnic fractionalisation and geography are taken into account, increases in cell phone coverage are associated with higher levels of violence.13 None of this is to argue that the satellite or the smartphone themselves create violence. Rather, it is the uncritical, unthinking belief in their amoral utility that perpetuates our inability to rethink our dealings with the world.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

They suggested several possible reasons, including that Americans might be developing more intense political beliefs, that the media might be airing more polarized opinions, and that people tended to romanticize the past and forget how conflicted they used to be. See Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 3 (1996): 690–755. that confirm their beliefs: On inequality and class segregation, see Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 4 (2011): 1092–153. On the filter bubble, see Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). “discrimination based on race”: Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2015): 690–707.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

It is postulated that the major advances in productivity of the recent past will not be replicated in the future. In addition, the availability of much-cheaper labor elsewhere makes it unlikely that the U.S. will be able to compete on price to produce the manufactured goods it requires; this has obviously negative implications in the U.S. for employment among less-skilled and less-educated Americans, income inequality, and standards of living relative to people in other countries. These issues, of course, played an obvious part in the 2016 presidential election. Changes in population growth and productivity growth can require decades to take effect, but clearly they can affect countries’ economic growth rates.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

The International Labour Organization reached a similar conclusion, finding that: People in countries that provide citizens with a high level of economic security have a higher level of happiness on average, as measured by surveys of national levels of life-satisfaction and happiness… The most important determinant of national happiness is not income level – there is a positive association, but rising income seems to have little effect as wealthy countries grow wealthier. Rather the key factor is the extent of income security, measured in terms of income protection and a low degree of income inequality.20 Table 7.4 HDI and HPI rankings for the G8 countries and other nations with high gross GDP, 2007 Country Ranked by GDP GDP per capita HDI HPI US China Japan India Germany UK France Italy Brazil Russia Canada 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 4 97 13 119 14 18 15 19 66 61 7 10 84 11 125 20 15 16 18 62 61 4 150 31 95 62 81 108 129 66 63 172 111 Note: More details on how the index is compiled are available here: www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/zeyhlcuhtfw0ge55lwnloi4520082007141551.pdf.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

By contrast, a social policy agenda that sets aside stiff means testing in favor of the more universalistic models found in northern Europe could have a moderating effect on our politics. Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example. Other examples include a much more aggressive raising of the minimum wage, or a universal basic income—a policy that was once seriously considered, and even introduced into Congress, by the Nixon administration.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In return for these cash transfers, parents undertake to keep their children in school and take them for regular health checks. Bolsa Familia now reaches 12 million families, making it the largest CCT program in the world. It is also one of the most successful, having helped to cut poverty and rural child malnutrition, reduce income inequality and boost school attendance – all at a fraction of the cost of traditional welfare. Brazil’s mainstream political parties all favour expanding the program, which has been lauded by the World Bank and copied by more than 20 countries. Why does it work? By combining several ingredients of the Slow Fix that we have already encountered.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Research also demonstrates that “countries that have the greatest gender equality also have…the most positive aggregate attitudes toward lesbians and gay men.”227 So declining religiosity leads to increased tolerance toward LGBT citizens, greater equality for women, and a declining birth rate. Fertility rates are declining in Latin America because religiosity is on the decline as well. But there is a nagging problem with this thesis. Brazil has an extremely high level of income inequality. While the top 10 percent of Brazilians own half of the country’s wealth,228 at least a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line.229 Surely poor Brazilians are having more children than their middle-class counterparts. And if so, then how can Brazil’s fertility rate be so low? This is the mystery that most needs answering.


pages: 449 words: 85,924

Lonely Planet Maldives (Travel Guide) by Planet, Lonely, Masters, Tom

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, haute cuisine, income inequality, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, sustainable-tourism, trade route, women in the workforce

While on paper the country continued to grow economically, thanks to the now massive tourism industry and the stable fishing industry, much of this wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, and almost none of it trickled down to the population of the atolls. At the same time, the Maldives experienced many of the problems of developing countries, notably rapid growth in the main city, the environmental effects of growth, regional disparities, youth unemployment and income inequality. The 1998 El Niño weather event, which caused coral bleaching throughout the atolls, was detrimental for tourism and signalled that global warming might soon threaten the existence of the Maldives. When Gayoom began a fifth term as president in 1998, the environment and sea-level rises were his priorities.


pages: 290 words: 82,871

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

There might be very little regularity of cause and effect – even if the big picture seems clear. In the same speech, Andy Haldane discussed what others have called ‘ground truth’, in contrast to what he has described as ‘the view from 30,000 feet’. He was mindful that the UK economy had low rates of unemployment, jobs were plentiful and income inequality had actually been falling since the recession, yet still a majority voted for Brexit – not all for economic reasons, but often related to a feeling of being left behind or ignored. He told of meeting charities in Nottingham, to whom he spoke about the recovery: I was stopped in my tracks by a forest of furrowed brows and a phalanx of probing questions, not all of them gentle.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Canada Speaking purely for myself, quite a few places high on the left-hand list are places I have no desire to live, which probably reflects the fact that the per capita GDP figures are skewed towards small countries that either are rich in resources or are tax havens. Gini coefficient A numeric technique for measuring a society’s inequality. It’s used to measure income inequality in particular. A Gini coefficient of 0 would mean perfect equality, in which everyone had the same income; a Gini coefficient of 1 would be perfect inequality, in which one person had all the money and everybody else had nothing. Here are the top ten least-equal countries in the world, as measured by the CIA, with the most unequal at the top:39 1.


pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

Steven Balsam, “Taxes and Executive Compensation,” Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper no. 344 (August 14, 2012). 20. David Hizenrath, “Clinton Proposes Limit on Executive Pay Deduction,” Washington Post, April 9, 1993. 21. Lawrence Mishell and Natalie Sabadish, “CEO Pay and the Top 1%: How Executive Compensation and Financial Sector Pay Have Fueled Income Inequality,” Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper no. 331 (May 2, 2011). 22. Christopher Cox, “Testimony Concerning Backdating” (US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, September 6, 2006). 23. Internal Revenue Service code, Section 162(m). 24. Elliot Blair Smith, “Companies Use IRS to Raise Bonuses with Earnings Goals” (Bloomberg, September 13, 2013). 25.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

There are many reasons for this, such as rising food and energy prices, the halt in pay rises for the average worker, the loss of low-paid but reliable work in the public sector, and the more draconian changes during the current austerity measures in welfare benefits, including tax credits, housing benefits and disability payments. At the same time, however, the highest earners are seeing their income levels rise. A study from the High Pay Centre, a think tank set up in the wake of an inquiry into escalating executive pay, says that the nation has returned to levels of income inequality last seen in the 1930s, with the share of the national income going to the top 1 per cent more than doubling since 1979, to 14.5 per cent (Hirsch, 2013). Danny Dorling’s book Injustice (2010) gets to the heart of why social inequality and social injustice persists, but also explains that when levels of inequality are this stark, there is always a devastating effect on society as whole.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

What concerns him is that history is repeating itself in the sense that—as in the first blush of the industrial revolution—technology might be enlarging the economic pie but is failing to establish a “new prosperity shared by all.”39 Sachs’s concerns are increasingly shared by Silicon Valley notables as well as by politicians traditionally sympathetic to the tech industry. Gavin Newsom, California’s current lieutenant governor, has gone as far as to say that it’s the job of Silicon Valley technologists to “exercise” their “moral authority” in fighting income inequality and job losses, which he describes as a “code red, a firehose, a tsunami” that is rapidly approaching us. “The plumbing of the world is radically changing,” Newsom said in 2017, rendering his own rousing version of More’s Law to graduating computer science students at the University of California, Berkeley; “your job is to exercise your moral authority.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

The worse outcomes with Covid-19 among disadvantaged racial minorities in the US suggest that, unsurprisingly, this applies to pandemic disease too. A massive British study released in May found the poorest patients with Covid-19 were almost twice as likely to die as the richest, and it mostly wasn’t because they had pre-existing illnesses. Meanwhile, say economists, income inequality already showed every sign of continuing to deepen, while research has found that epidemics disproportionately hurt the poor, making things worse. That means more people in poverty, which in turn means more people who are extra vulnerable in a pandemic—including many of the people responsible for critical infrastructure.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

But they don’t serve us as well, and at a minimum this kind of thinking is shortsighted, as when older people complain about school taxes. Don’t they want the guy delivering their oxygen tank to be able to read the instructions? Having an educated workforce is better for everyone: individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole. Pitting the generations against each other also obscures the key fact that income inequality does not discriminate by age. The wealthiest “one percent” consists of people of all ages, just like the ninety-nine. As leading economists have been arguing for years, growing wealth disparity within different age cohorts (not between them) underlies the shrinking prospects of ordinary Americans.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

Recent crime increases and social unrest in places like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Charlotte attest to the failure to end abusive policing or produce safety. The most segregated and racially unequal cities in the country are its most violent. Decades of deindustrialization, racial discrimination in housing and employment, and growing income inequality have created pockets of intense poverty where jobs are scarce, public services inadequate, and crime and violence widespread. Even with intensive overpolicing, people feel unsafe and young people continue to use violence for predation and protection. Any program for reducing crime and enhancing social wellbeing, much less achieving racial justice, must address these conditions.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

When those with means or technical ability realized that they could profitably hack systems, they quickly developed the resources and expertise to do so. They learned to exploit vulnerabilities. They learned to move up and down the hacking hierarchy to achieve their goals. They learned how to get their hacks normalized, declared legal, and adopted into the system. This is being made even worse by income inequality. The economist Thomas Piketty explains that inequality produces surplus resources for the winners, and that that surplus can be mobilized to create even more inequality. Much of that mobilization is hacking. Now we have more people with more knowledge of hacking and more resources to hack with than ever before, and with that knowledge and resources comes power.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Moving towards the middle, the state should stop subsidizing mortgages in the form of interest deductions. At the bottom, better access to health care and education was essential. But the small print involved much the same entitlement cuts Coggan wanted. Sweden was the upmarket model cited for tax reform and budget discipline. It was true, she granted, that income inequality had leapt by 25 per cent there since 1980. But the Swedes were still among the most equal of peoples, in part because market reforms had boosted growth without sacrificing services (improved, in their turn, by charter schools and private health providers). Latin America, on the other hand, was a bargain option.

The anti-Western attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and the financial crash of 2008 were certainly, each in their different ways, sobering events. But liberals should bear in mind that liberal self-confidence has always had its ups and downs, and that its strength lay in its proven capacity for self-criticism. With plenty of that today, its underlying vitality seems assured. The growth of income inequality and fiscal overstretch are also worrying problems, which need to be addressed. But it would be a mistake for liberals to abandon their values in the face of them. A seductive belief in spontaneous economic order, or reliance on providential narratives of the end of history, should be avoided.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

One writer disagreed with the Federalists’ presumptions of inherent human self-interestedness—the belief that government officials, as he put it, will ever be actuated by views of private interest and ambition, to the prejudice of the public good; that therefore the only effectual method to secure the rights of the people and promote their welfare is to create an opposition of interests [within the government]. For this Antifederalist, a better way to guarantee public integrity was through personal morality (and the absence of acute income inequality): “A republican or free form of government can only exist where the body of the people are virtuous, and where property is pretty equally divided.” 48 The Federalists’ more jaundiced view of human nature won out. Indeed, the most widely accepted argument against the draft constitution was its lack of explicit safeguards of basic rights, such as those in the Dutch charters or the Magna Carta.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. New York: Verso, 1999. Sternberg, Adam. “Hey There, Lonelygirl.” New York, August 28, 2006. Sun, Eric, et al. “Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion Through Facebook News Feed.” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2009). Szymanski, Stefan. “Income Inequality, Competitive Balance and the Attractiveness of Team Sports: Some Evidence and a Natural Experiment from English Soccer.” Economic Journal 111 (2001): F69–F84. ———. “The Economic Design of Sporting Contests.” Journal of Economic Literature 41 (2003): 1137–87. Taylor, Marvin J., ed. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984.


pages: 278 words: 93,540

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos

bank run, Berlin Wall, centre right, death of newspapers, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, income inequality, moral hazard, plutocrats, urban planning

Or were they suffering the effects of austerity policies and economic ruin? After a while, I realized I should stop trying to choose between the two narratives, because both were true. Economic collapses have the unfortunate tendency to disproportionately impact the most vulnerable people in any society, and this was certainly the case in Greece, where income inequality had already long been high by European standards, and the welfare system, which often served special-interest groups rather than the most needy, was piecemeal and fractured. Greece was one of only two EU countries—Italy being the other one—with no nationwide minimum income benefit. While family bonds in Greece provided an informal safety net, this too increasingly frayed as the economic downturn endured.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In the UK, for example, it is estimated that nearly 5 per cent of the working population is presently on zero-hours contracts.66 Surplus populations have also put downward pressure on wages. Estimates suggest that every 1 per cent increase in labour market slack is associated with a 1.6 per cent increase in income inequality.67 The stagnation of real wages and the declining share of income going to labour are both tied to an excess supply of labour,68 and most economists believe automation and the globalisation of the proletariat are central reasons why wages have been stagnant in recent decades.69 All of these trends have continued since the 2008 crisis as well, with slow real wage growth across the G20, and outright decline in the UK.70 The slow growth of wages leads precarity to also be expressed in the anxiety over high levels of consumer debt and low levels of personal savings.71 In the United States, for example, a full 34 per cent of fulltime workers live paycheque-to-paycheque, while in the UK, 35 per cent of people could not live off their savings for more than a month.72 And at its most vicious, precarity is indicated by a rise in depression, anxiety and suicides – an ‘excess’ that goes uncounted in traditional economic measures.73 Indeed, unemployment is associated with a fifth of all global suicides, and this has only worsened in the wake of the financial crisis.74 In addition to precarity, surplus populations and technological automation help to make sense of a recent labour market phenomenon: the emergence of ‘jobless recoveries’, in which economic growth returns after a crisis but job growth remains anaemic.75 Such recoveries have become standard for the US economy,76 and since the 1990s the trend has been towards longer and longer jobless recoveries.77 The current crisis is no exception, with more than a million full-time jobs yet to return, and forecasts suggesting that US unemployment will remain above pre-crisis levels until 2024.78 This is a global phenomenon as well, with the world economy creating jobs so slowly that the number of jobs will remain significantly below pre-crisis levels for at least a decade.79 While their cause is ultimately still a mystery, jobless recoveries appear to be closely related to automation.80 In fact, the only occupations that have experienced jobless recoveries are those that have been under threat from automation in recent decades – semi-skilled, routine jobs.81 Moreover, these job losses have occurred almost entirely during and in the wake of recessions.82 In other words, crisis periods are when automatable jobs disappear, never to be heard from again.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

In Japan, where the poverty rate shot up to a record 16% in 2012, consumers are shifting from premium brands to inexpensive private-label products in retail stores. Rather than eating out, more Japanese workers now pack their own lunch, earning themselves the nickname bento-danshi or “box-lunch man”. These changes are here to stay. Thomas Piketty, a French economist, predicts that income inequality in developed economies will widen in the coming decades, as long-term annual growth rates remain stuck below 2%.2 With inflation outpacing their incomes since 2007, 76% of US adults now believe their children will be financially worse off than them in the future. And well over half of consumers, surveyed by Booz & Company (now Strategy&), a global management consultancy, in late 2012, reported that they would not revert to their previous spendthrift behaviour when times improve.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

As we have already seen, economic metrics govern the institutions and practices of the state, and the state itself is legitimated by economic growth.61 “The economy produces legitimacy for the state that is its guarantor.”62 The state must support the economy, organizing its conditions and facilitating its growth, and is thereby made responsible for the economy without being able to predict, control, or offset its effects. Hence, far more than a campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!” defines political life in the neoliberal state. While the state facilitates capital, it does not intervene at the level of exchange (access, opportunity), distribution (income inequality) or collateral damages (ecological, social, political). This aspect of neoliberalism is significant for understanding why the growing imbrication of the state with capital today does not generate the kind of legitimacy crisis predicted by 1970s Marxist state theorists — Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, among others.63 The state is not neutral with regard to capital, nor, however, does it compensate for the infelicities or damages of capital.64 The neoliberal state may act openly as a capitalist state and on behalf of capital because economic growth is its raison d’état, and capital appreciation is the presumed engine of growth.


pages: 265 words: 93,231

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

That was our job: to figure out which of the characters were the right ones to pull off the big idea." Subprime mortgage lending was still a trivial fraction of the U.S. credit markets--a few tens of billions in loans each year--but its existence made sense, even to Steve Eisman. "I thought it was partly a response to growing income inequality," he said. "The distribution of income in this country was skewed and becoming more skewed, and the result was that you have more subprime customers." Of course, Eisman was paid to see the sense in subprime lending: Oppenheimer quickly became one of the leading bankers to the new industry, in no small part because Eisman was one of its leading proponents.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

It is strongly resisted by the very considerable number of plain men who insist, never without fervor and pride, that subtlety in economic relationships is an indication of error and that truth is revealed only to the uncomplicated mind. 2 III However, the most serious problem of fiscal policy is the conflict with other economic goals. It collides, first of all, with the tacit truce outlined in Chapter 7 on income inequality. Taxes are the device by which governments have most nakedly sought to influence income distribution. As a result, they have a considerable practical and an even deeper symbolic importance in relation to this issue. Hence, a proposal to increase taxes for fiscal reasons automatically provokes a debate on the question of inequality.


pages: 309 words: 93,958

22 Days in May: The birth of the Lib Dem - Conservative coalition by Laws, David

first-past-the-post, high-speed rail, income inequality, low interest rates, pension reform, smart grid, smart meter

Fairness must mean tackling poverty, which is itself a powerful force denying people real opportunities. But fairness also means accepting our responsibilities, and accepting the boundaries that there are to the infringement of each other’s liberties. For Gordon Brown, fairness means simply reducing income inequality, however this is delivered. For liberals, fairness cannot be detached from freedom and responsibility. There are four major domestic challenges for this government, where progress should not merely wait on the restoration of budget discipline. First, we have to reform and invest in education, to address the scandalous inequalities of outcome and opportunity which scar our society today.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

There’s no doubt that it’s hard to reconsider or reformulate cherished notions like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But, as Kuznets pointed out in his Nobel speech, if those notions simply don’t fit reality, and if the things the market has tried so far have not ameliorated the problem—if they had, lack of employment and income inequality would not continue to plague the world—then it’s not too much to suggest that we at least should ask why the dominant economic theories and conventional market institutions are not working. System D represents half the working people of the world, and they should matter more than the continuation of an elegant yet highly unfair economic model.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But they greatly exaggerate the real-world significance of the “fairness” concern and seem determined to fix a surgical problem with a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, economists rightly point out that trade is only weakly implicated in the major economic problems of the day—deindustrialization and income inequality. They are correct that the distributional consequences of trade are better addressed with safety net programs and nontrade remedies. But they have systematically downplayed these consequences—especially when the requisite compensatory programs have remained on paper. And they seem unable to grasp the valid core of the public concern on social dumping.


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

In that way, my family and our class might have been the least fazed by America’s obsession with wealth. As workers living at the taproot of the agricultural economy, we not only could grow and build our own necessities—we also understood the hard work a loaf of bread represented and thus put less faith in the money that bought it than in the bread itself. Wealth and income inequality were nothing rare in global history. What was peculiar about the class system in the United States, though, is that for centuries we denied it existed. At every rung of the economic ladder, Americans believed that hard work and a little know-how were all a person needed to get ahead. Unlike so many people of my generation, I did get a good life for my hard work and know-how.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

., 20 deficits, deficit spending, 14, 100, 118–22, 177, 231–32, 241 unfunded liabilities and, 119, 232 democracy: in Asian-state model, 17 big government as threat to, 251, 264–69 as central tenet of Western state, 5, 8, 16–17, 22–23, 136, 141, 221 Founding Fathers and, 226, 250, 265 Fourth Revolution and, 249–70 globalization and, 262 imperfections of, 17, 127–28, 141, 143–44, 145, 226–27, 247–48, 251, 269 income inequality and, 263 in India, 136, 146 individual freedom as threatened by, 226, 250–51 nation-states and, 259, 262 presumed link to capitalism of, 261–62 as presumed universal aspiration, 261–62 as rooted in culture, 262 scarcity and, 247–48 self-interest and, 250, 260 short-term vs. long-term benefits in, 260–61, 264 special-interest groups and, 16–17, 111–15, 247, 251 strengths of, 263 twentieth-century triumph of, 252 twenty-first-century failures of, 252–61 uneven history of, 249–50 welfare state as threat to, 22, 142 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 252 Democracy in Europe (Siedentop), 251 Democratic Party, U.S., 97, 240 spending curb approved by, 12 spending cuts opposed in, 100, 255 Democratic Review, 55 Deng Xiaoping, 142 Singapore as inspiration to, 145 Denmark, 22, 210 disability insurance in, 244 “flexicurity” system in, 173, 176 innovation in, 220 1980s financial crisis in, 176 reinvention of welfare state in, 173–74 Depression, Great, 69–70, 85 Detroit, Mich., 218–19 bankruptcy of, 14, 119 Detter, Dag, 236 Dicey, A.V., 57 Dickens, Charles, 50, 57–58 Dirksen, Everett, 192–93 disability-insurance reform, 244 Discovery Group, 211 discretionary spending, 195 diversity, 214–16 DNA databases, 182 Dodd-Frank Act (2010), 117, 239 Doncaster Prison, 214 Downey, Alan, 177 Drucker, Peter, 198 Dubai, 144, 217 Dukakis, Michael, 95 Dundase family, 49–50 East India Company, 36, 40, 47, 48, 50, 56, 150, 240 Eastman Kodak, 190–91 École Nationale d’Administration, 194 economic-freedom index, 174 Economist, 86, 97 Edison, Thomas, 179 education, 7, 9, 16, 48, 58, 197 charter schools in, 212, 214, 215 in China, 147, 148–49, 164 cost/outcome disparities in, 194–95 declining quality of, 111 diverse models for, 214–15 government domination of, 10 international rankings of, 19, 148, 206–7 preschool, 123 reform of, 58–59, 212 in Sweden, 171, 176–77 technology and, 179–80 voucher systems for, 171, 176–77, 220 in welfare state, 68, 69 Education Act (British, 1944), 75 Egypt, 155 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 Mubarak regime overthrown in, 144, 253 Eisenhower, Dwight, 77 elections, U.S., cost of, 257 electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, 205 elitism, 135, 136, 138–39 in Chinese Communist Party, 161–62 in U.S., 162 welfare state and, 77–78 Emanuel, Rahm, 216 emerging world: agriculture in, 238 as failing to grasp technological change, 18 innovation in, 17 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217 need for reform in, 14 urban population shift in, 218 “End of History, The” (Fukuyama), 262 Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR), 182 Enlightenment, 42 entitlement reform, 95, 217, 234, 241–46 beneficiaries’ responsibilities and, 245 conditionality in, 17, 206, 244 disability insurance and, 244 globalization and, 245 information revolution and, 245 in Latin America, 17, 206, 244 means testing and, 243, 245 transparency and, 244–45 entitlements, 9, 10, 15, 16, 79, 100, 127, 141, 222, 228 aging population and, 124, 183–84, 232, 241–42 middle class and, 11, 17 pensions as, 79, 184, 243 as unfunded liabilities, 245–46, 264, 265 universal benefits in, 124, 141, 243–44 equality: capitalism and, 262–63 liberal state and, 69 of opportunity vs. result, 79, 228 sexual, 169 welfare state and, 68–69, 74, 79, 222 Western state and, 221 Equality (Tawney), 69 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 13, 254 Estonia, 121, 210 Euclid, 31, 33 eugenics, 67–68, 78, 169 euro, 99, 100, 258 euro crisis, 12, 100, 126, 130, 258–59 Europe: age of conquest in, 36–37, 39 compulsory sterilization in, 78 contest for secular supremacy in, 38–39 democracy’s failures in, 258–59 dysfunctional political systems in, 126 economic crisis in, 126 Enlightenment in, 42 government bloat in, 98–99 mercantilist policies in, 40 national consolidation in, 38–39 old-age dependency ratio in, 14–15 postwar era in, 78 public spending in, 99–100 revolutions of 1848 in, 54 technocratic bent in, 76–77, 259 transnational cooperation in, 76 wars of religion in, 34, 38 welfare state in, 75 European Atomic Energy Community, 76 European Central Bank, 258–59 European Coal and Steel Community, 76 European Commission, 254 European Economic Community, 76 European parliament, 258 European Union, 13, 16, 17, 76, 99, 108, 109, 258–59, 260 Extraordinary Black Book, The (Wade), 49 Exxon, 154 Fabians, 8, 21, 67, 72, 73, 96, 134, 169, 220 Facebook, 190–91 Falklands War, 94 Farrell, Diana, 132 fascism, 8, 71, 77, 252 Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism, The (Hayek), 134 Federal Communications Commission, 73 Federalist Papers, 5, 265 Federal Register, 117 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 37 filibusters, 256 financial crisis of 2007–8, 100, 164, 263 financial-services industry, 239 Finer, Samuel, 27, 276 Finland, 210 innovation in, 220 1990s financial crisis in, 176 fiscal crisis, as incentive for change, 198 Fisher, Antony, 81–82, 90, 92, 280 “flexicurity,” 173, 176 Ford, Henry, 189, 191, 201 fossil fuels, government subsidies for, 239 Foster, William, 58 Founding Fathers, 108 democracy and, 226, 250, 265 liberal state and, 44–45, 222 Fourteenth Amendment, 120 Fourth Revolution, 5 Asian-state competition as impetus for, 17, 163–64, 247 decentralization and, 216–19 democratic reform and, 249–70 diversity and, 214–16 entitlement reform and, see entitlement reform failure of current model as impetus for, 14–17 freedom and, 247, 248, 268, 270 government efficiency in, 233 ideological foundation of, 21, 28, 221–23, 232 information revolution and, 245, 246–47 infrastructure and, 232 innovation and, 219–20 monetary and fiscal reform in, 266–67 pluralism in, 211–14 as postbureaucratic, 211 pragmatism and, 18–19, 232–33 privatization and, 234–37 security and, 232 small government as principle of, 232, 264–69 subsidy-cutting and, 237–41 technology and, 18, 19–20, 233, 266–67 France, 43, 78 deficit spending in, 14 expanded bureaucracy in, 60 government bloat in, 12 pension age in, 16 public spending in, 75, 99–100 ruling elite of, 194 state capitalism in, 235 Francis I, King of France, 37 Fraser Institute, 174 fraternity, welfare state and, 74, 79 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 38 freedom: balance between security and, 230–31 as central tenet of Western state, 8, 23, 46, 68–69, 222, 256 core elements of, 223–24 democracy as threat to, 226, 250–51 diminished concept of, 225–27, 228–29 Fourth Revolution and, 247, 248, 268, 270 Hobbes and, 33 as ideological basis of liberal state, 69, 223–26 Mill and, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 228, 250, 256, 268 necessary constraints on, 223 welfare state as threat to, 22, 74, 222, 265 see also rights Freedom House, 143, 252 free markets, 49, 59, 142 Friedman as evangelist for, 84, 86 Thatcher and, 93 free trade, 50, 54, 57 Mill’s espousal of, 55 French Revolution, 6, 44, 45–46, 249 Friedman, Milton, 81–87, 89, 93, 106, 128, 171, 280 background of, 82 big government as target of, 82, 84–85, 88 as free-market evangelist, 84, 86 Nobel Prize of, 82, 86, 91 Reagan and, 86 “Road to Hell” lecture of, 84 single currency opposed by, 99 Thatcher-Reagan revolution and, 8, 28, 97, 100 Friedman, Thomas, 163 Friedrich, Carl, 265 Fukuyama, Francis, 142, 143, 256, 262 Future of Freedom, The (Zakaria), 143 G20 countries, 15 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 85, 86 Galtieri, Leopoldo, 94 Galton, Francis, 68 Gardels, Nathan, 124 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 57 Gates, Bill, 97 Gazprom, 152, 153, 154 Geely, 150 General Electric (GE), 205, 243 General Motors (GM), 189, 190, 191, 233 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 70 Geometry (Euclid), 31 George III, King of England, 11, 41 Germany, Federal Republic of (West Germany), 75, 78, 232, 265 Germany, Imperial, 6, 60–61 Germany, Nazi, 71, 232 Germany, unified, 12, 22, 173, 186, 212 gerrymandering, 13, 106, 113, 125, 256–57, 264, 267 see also rotten boroughs Gillray, James, 227 Gladstone, William, 7 economizing by, 51–52, 224 small government as principle of, 51–52, 60 tax policy of, 51 globalization, 10, 191, 193 democracy and, 262 entitlement reform and, 245 government and, 10, 96, 200–207 health care and, 200–201 national determination and, 259–60, 262 Glorious Revolution (1688), 43 GOATs (Government of All the Talents), 215 Godolphin, Sidney, 31 Golden Dawn party, 259 Goldman Sachs, 120 Goldwater, Barry, 80, 86 Google, 189–90, 191, 233 Gore, Al, 95, 131, 198 government: anti-innovation bias of, 194–95, 212, 219 bloat in, 9–11, 18–19, 89–90, 98, 177, 222–23, 227, 229–30, 231, 233 centralization bias of, 192–93, 212, 216 challenges to reform in, 196–98 coercive power of, 198 efficiency of, 18–21, 37, 89, 187, 198–99, 213, 233, 247, 255 entrenched workforce of, 193–94 globalization and, 200–207 in-house bias of, 192, 212 local, 216–19, 267 public contempt for, 106, 112, 227–28, 230, 233, 251, 261 sunset clauses and, 118, 246, 266 technology and, 200, 207–11 uniformity bias of, 193–94, 212, 214 volunteerism and, 216 Government Accountability Office, 235 Grace Commission, 198 Gray, Vincent, 210 Great Britain: asylum seekers in, 54 as capitalist state, 50–54 commercial empire of, 39–40 deficit of, 177 education reform in, 58–59, 79, 212, 214–15 falling crime rate in, 181 fiscal reform in, 130–31 government bloat in, 89–90 health-care spending in, 90 landed artistocracy of, 48, 49 liberal revolution in, 46 low public confidence in, 11 national pride in, 61–62 patronage vs. meritocracy in, 50, 52–53, 222 postwar era in, 78 power of Anglican Church in, 48 public spending in, 9, 75 wars of, 6 “winter of discontent” in, 93 Great Depression, 69–70, 85 Great Exhibition of 1851, 54 Great Society, 77, 192 Great Western Railway, 65 Greece, 16 economy of, 120, 259 public-sector employees in, 115 public spending in, 99 Green, T.H., 61 Green River Formation, 236 Grenville family, 49–50 Grillo, Beppe, 12, 227 gross domestic product (GDP), unreliability of, 121 Grote, George, 54 Guangdong, China, 217 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 31 Hagel, Chuck, 256 Hall, Joseph, 35 Halsey, A.H., 88 Hamilton, Alexander, 5, 150 Hamilton, James, 120 happiness, right to, 48, 49 Hard Times (Dickens), 58 Havel, Václav, 252 Hayek, Friedrich, 10, 83, 85–86, 92, 93, 134, 170 Health and Social Security Department, British, 89 health care, 7, 9, 90, 98, 213 aging population and, 15, 183, 242 in China, 164 cost of, 110, 121, 205, 242–43 cost/outcome disparities in, 195 globalization and, 200–201 government domination of, 10 in India, 17, 18, 200–206 labor productivity in, 200 mass production in, 201–3 Obamacare and, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 role of doctors in, 203–5, 243 single-payer systems in, 205, 233, 243 special interest groups and, 200 in Sweden, 171–73 technology and, 183, 208–9 healthcare.gov, 199 health insurance, 141 health registries, 172, 183, 209 Heath, Edward, 92–93 Hegel, G.W.F., 45, 60–61 71 Helsinki, 220 Heritage Foundation, 92 Hewlett, Bill, 105 Higgins, David, 215 Hilton, Steve, 132 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 250 Hitler, Adolf, 71 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 8, 9, 21, 27–28, 29, 40, 44, 63, 135–36, 181, 219, 268 background of, 30–31 as controversial thinker, 31–32 on human nature, 29–30, 44–45 individual liberty and, 33 as materialist, 33 as royalist, 6, 18, 31–32 social contract and, 32, 34, 42, 222 Hogarth, William, 227 Hollande, François, 12, 16, 153, 184, 194 Holocaust, 78 Homestead Act (U.S., 1862), 62 House of Cards (TV show), 227 House of Commons, 127 House of Representatives, U.S., 97, 127 Howard, Philip, 118, 132, 195 Hu Jintao, 2 Huldai, Ron, 216 Hume, David, 43 Hungary, 254 Huntington, Samuel, 41–42 Hurun Report, 161 Iceland, 261 India, 8, 35, 36 China contrasted with, 146, 153 democracy in, 136, 146 economic stagnation in, 147 education in, 147 health care in, 17, 18, 200–206 infant mortality rate in, 201 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217–18 nepotism in, 162–63 Thatcherite reform in, 96 as weak state, 37 Indonesia, 142–43 health insurance in, 141 industry, landed aristocracy as opponent of, 48 Industry and Trade (Marshall), 233 information, access to, 210–11, 214 information revolution, 245, 246–47 information technology (IT), 18, 19–20 infrastructure: Fourth Revolution and, 232 spending on, 122, 232 innovation, 219–20 in business sector, 194 government bias against, 194–95, 212, 219 nation-state and, 37, 39 Institute for Energy Research, 236 Institute of Economic Affairs, 82, 92 Institute of Medicine, 204 Institute of Racial Biology, 78 interest groups, 16–17, 90, 111–15 Interior Department, U.S., 236 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 15, 76, 90 Asian financial crisis and, 142–43 Internet, 191, 260 health care and, 208–9 self-help and, 209 Iran, China and, 152 Iraq, 253 Iraq War, 143, 253 Ireland, 38 public spending in, 99–100 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 37 Islamic world: antiscientific attitudes in, 41 in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 35 Istanbul, 35 Italy, 196, 259 pension reform in, 130 politicians’ pay and benefits in, 115 public spending in, 99–100 voter apathy in, 12 It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Mann and Ornstein), 125–26, 227 Jackson, Andrew, 55 Jacques, Martin, 163 Jagger, Mick, 90 James I, King of England, 31 James II, King of England, 43 Japan, 15, 17, 36 Jarvis, Howard, 91 Jay, Douglas, 77 Jiang Jiemin, 154 Jiang Zemin, 142 Johnson, Boris, 216–17 Johnson, Lyndon, 77, 80, 87 Joseph, Keith, 92, 93 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 128 Kamarck, Elaine, 131–32 Kangxi, Emperor of China, 40 Kansas, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 224 Kaplan, Robert, 144 Kapoor, Anish, 34 Kennedy, Joseph, 73 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 185 Kerry, John, 96 Keynes, John Maynard, 22, 69–70, 76, 97 pragmatism of, 70–71 Keynesianism, 71, 77, 83, 95 counterrevolution against, 82–84 Khan, Salman, 180 Khan Academy, 180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 79 Kingsley, Charles, 58 Kirk, Russell, 85 Kissinger, Henry, 133, 136 Kleiner, Morris, 118 Knight, Frank, 84 Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), 215 Kocher, Robert, 200 Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 120 Kristol, Irving, 87 Kroc, Ray, 185 Labour Party, British, 68, 69, 70, 77, 93, 94–95, 114 laissez-faire economics, 56, 57, 61, 65–66, 70, 71 Laski, Harold, 68, 134 Latin America: economies of, 8 entitlement reform in, 17, 206, 244 Lazzarini, Sergio, 153 Lee Hsien Loong, 135, 138 Lee Kuan Yew, 4, 17, 53, 133–34, 137, 139–41, 143, 144, 145, 147, 156, 170, 183, 244 authoritarianism of, 137, 138 small-government ideology of, 140, 165 Left, 62, 73, 88, 183 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 20, 187, 213 and growth of big government, 10, 98, 131, 175, 185, 228, 230, 231 subsidy-cutting and, 234, 237–38 Lehman Brothers, 14 Lenovo, 150 Le Pen, Marine, 259 Le Roy, Louis, 276 Leviathan, 10 Leviathan (Hobbes), 29, 32, 33, 34, 42 Leviathan, Monumenta 2011 (Kapoor), 34 Liberal Party, British, 68, 70 liberals, liberalism: and debate over size of government, 48, 49, 232 freedom as core tenet of, 69, 223–26, 232 right to happiness as tenet of, 48, 49 role of state as seen by, 21–22, 222–23, 226, 232 see also Left; liberal state liberal state, 6–7, 8, 220, 221 capitalism and, 50–54 competition and, 247 education in, 7, 48, 58–59 equality and, 69 expanded role of government in, 56–62 Founding Fathers and, 44–45, 222 freedom as ideological basis of, 69, 223–26, 232, 268 industrial revolution and, 246–47 meritocracy as principle of, 50, 52–53 protection of rights as primary role of, 45 rights of citizens expanded by, 7, 9, 48, 49, 51 rise of, 27–28, 269 small government as principle of, 48, 49, 51–52, 61, 232 libertarian Right, 82 liberty, see freedom Libya, 253 LifeSpring Hospitals, 202–3 Lincoln, Abraham, 62, 92 Lindahl, Mikael, 176 Lindgren, Astrid, 170 Lisbon, Treaty of (2007), 258 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 50 Liu Xiaobo, 166 Livingston, Ken, 217 Lloyd George, David, 62 lobbies, Congress and, 238–40, 257 Locke, John, 42, 43, 45 social contract and, 42, 222 Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson), 111 London School of Economics, 67, 74 Louis XIV, King of France, 38 Lowe, Robert, 58–59 L.


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Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

ESCAPISM With the notable exception of Star Trek’s holodeck, fictional accounts of virtual reality are routinely dystopic. In The Matrix, the movie’s virtual world has been constructed by machines to keep humanity from realizing they are an enslaved species. In the popular novel Ready: Player One, the only refuge from a wrecked world suffering from gross income inequality and environmental destruction is a massive virtual universe into which people retreat whenever they have a chance. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a novel I use as a textbook in my Virtual People class at Stanford, VR is essentially a medium for crime and prostitution. Its main character, Case, is so attached to the virtual world that he refers contemptuously to his own body as “meat,” a fleshy prison that stands between him and “bodiless exultation of cyberspace.”20 Virtual reality is depicted in these and other fictions as a place of ultimate escape, with disturbing consequences for the physical world.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

Ideally, displaced workers would be retrained and quickly rehired. However, in the worst-case scenario, workers displaced by technology would be forced to sit outside of the workforce for years, perhaps even a lifetime. As machines take away human jobs, one potentially devastating effect will be to further exacerbate the trend toward income inequality, a growing global problem. Research published by antipoverty charity Oxfam shows that the world’s rich are getting richer. The percentage of the world’s wealth that’s owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and is expected to continue until, in the next couple of years, the wealthiest 1 percent will own more than half of the world’s assets and resources.9 An in-depth analysis of creative destruction is beyond the scope of this book.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

These pay inequities have grown in part because of the massive shift in compensation policies from long-term event time to short-term clock time. Whereas pay used to be split more evenly among managers and employees over the course of decades, now a much larger share goes to the most senior executives each year in the form of annual bonuses and stock awards. Income inequality has grown as the most important unit of time for executive pay policies has become the year instead of the career. As shorter-term clock time comes to dominate our work and the pay gap widens, there are two potentially serious consequences. First, for many people, work becomes less satisfying overall.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Corporate profits will explode, showering wealth on the elite executives and engineers lucky enough to get in on the action. Just imagine: How profitable would Uber be if it had no drivers? Or Apple if it didn’t need factory workers to make iPhones? Or Walmart if it paid no cashiers, warehouse employees, and truck drivers? Driving income inequality will be the emergence of an increasingly bifurcated labor market. The jobs that do remain will tend to be either lucrative work for top performers or low-paying jobs in tough industries. The risk of replacement cited in the earlier figures reflects this. The most difficult jobs to automate—those in the top-right corner of the “Safe Zone”—include both ends of the income spectrum: CEOs and healthcare aides, venture capitalists and masseuses.


pages: 295 words: 90,821

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

Quarterly Journal of Economics 121 (1): 289–320. Bailey, M. J. 2010. “‘Momma’s Got the Pill’: How Anthony Comstock and Griswold v. Connecticut Shaped US Childbearing.” American Economic Review 100 (1): 98–129. Bakija, J., A. Cole, and B. Heim. 2008. “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data.” Department of Economics Working Paper 2010-22, Department of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA. Banerjee, A. V., and E. Duflo. 2003. “Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?” Journal of Economic Growth 8 (3): 267–99. Baqaee, D. R., and E.


pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

In the face of weak growth in the period after the financial crisis of 2008–09, Lawrence Summers revived that term, arguing that as populations in rich countries age, more saving takes place, which results in structurally weak demand. Economists of both right and left worry that high levels of income inequality are bad for economic growth, since rich people save their income rather than spend it. No mainstream economist proposes imperial expansion in order to get capitalism out of its funk. But, like Luxemburg, they recognise that capitalism is less stable than some of the classical economists seem to think. 20 ALFRED MARSHALL (1842–1924) An optimistic ending He was the stereotype of the avuncular Cambridge don.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Martin, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2020). 80 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 256. 81 Emmie Martin, “Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Agree That the Rich Should Pay Higher Taxes—Here’s What They Suggest,” CNBC, February 26, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/25/warren-buffett-and-bill-gates-the-rich-should-pay-higher-taxes.html; Sheelah Kolhatkar, “The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes,” The New Yorker, January 6, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-ultra-wealthy-who-argue-that-they-should-be-paying-higher-taxes. 82 Anand Giridharadas, “The New Elite’s Phoney Crusade to Save the World—Without Changing Anything,” The Guardian, January 22, 2019, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/22/the-new-elites-phoney-crusade-to-save-the-world-without-changing-anything; Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Knopf, 2018). 83 Chad Stone et al., A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2020), https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/11-28-11pov_0.pdf. 84 For detailed discussions of the neoliberal turn, see Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2020); Paul Adler, The 99% Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006); and, for an account of its impact on the lives of Americans, see Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020). 6.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Mill’s co-authorship, 7, 60–1, 153, 157–60; progress, 166–7; Wollstonecraft’s legacy, 151–2 gender realism, 48 Geneva Conventions, 72–3, 185 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 38–9 GlaxoSmithKline, 22, 250–2, 282, 290, 291–2 globalization, 175 Goldacre, Ben, Bad Pharma, 11, 253 Goldin, Ian, 33 Goldman Sachs, 76, 87 Goodman, Clive, 104, 105, 106 Google Trends, 89 Gould, Jay, 211 governance: epistocracy, 17, 93, 93–4, 95–6, 163, 267–70; see also regulation Graham, David, 258, 261–3, 266, 267, 269–70, 293 Graves, Lisa, 237–8 Gray, John, 13, 163; Straw Dogs, 5–6 greatness, 81, 97 greats, 312–13 greats (social movements), 17–18 Greek democracy, 296–7 Greek oracles, 62–4 Green, Joshua, 87 Greenspan, Alan, 32 Grenfell Tower fire, 23–5, 59 Hamilton, Alexander, 193–4 Handlin, Mary and Oscar, 195 Harford, Tim, 30–1, 33–4, 221 Hastings, Warren, 180, 182 Hayek, Friedrich: dependence on corporate funding, 246, 300, 302; disdain for government regulation, 248, 301, 303; on fragility of expert knowledge, 298–300; Road to Serfdom, 164, 301; and social protection, 301–2 Heffernan, Margaret, Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, 230–1 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 216 Heyer, Heather, 313 Hickel, Jason, The Divide, 137 Hillsborough disaster, 88–9 Hirschman, Albert, 35 historical amnesia, 57, 202 history: presentism, 28; sanctioned ignorance, 40–2; statue removal protests, 313–14; unintentional misunderstandings, 169 Hitler, Adolf, 50, 80 Homestead steel mill strike, 208–10 Huffington Post, 217, 236 human contingency, 6 Hume, David, 176 Hurcombe, Linda, 288–90 identity politics, 138–9 ignorance: enduring myths, 81–4; first acknowledgement, 154; greater than knowledge, 47, 49; psychology of, 38–42; rational ignorance, 46–7; snowmobile fallacy, 241–3; useful unknowns, 51–6, 257, 277; see also elite ignorance; reckless ignorance; strategic ignorance; voter ignorance; wilful ignorance ignorance alibis, 12, 56–61, 87, 210 ignorance cycles, 225–6; see also macro-ignorance; micro-ignorance ignorance doesn’t excuse principle, 231–3, 239–40 ignorance pathways, 167–8, 175–6 ignorantia legis principle, 231–3 IMF, 33–4, 137 imperialism, 68, 179; see also colonialism income, minimum income, 183 income inequality, 216, 220 India, 10, 122, 127, 131, 160–1; see also East India Company indigenous peoples, 26–9, 58 Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO): failure to pursue journalists, 109–12; hindrances to effective operation, 106–7, 108, 109; Operation Motorman, 107–8; regulatory agency, 106–7; What Price Privacy?


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

A company that had named itself after a folk hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor was being accused of doing the opposite and short-circuiting America’s capital markets to help the most despised group of plutocrats—hedge fund managers. A little more than a decade after the global financial crisis that was such a formative event for its young customers and whose ripples were still being felt in widening income inequality, Robinhood had supposedly stabbed them in the back. Millions of New Customers Many users claimed on social media that they were done with Robinhood after it restricted trading of the meme stocks on January 28. There is a big difference between what people say and what they do, though.


pages: 270 words: 88,213

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, coronavirus, feminist movement, fixed income, gentrification, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, medical residency, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, obamacare, San Francisco homelessness, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Soul of a New Machine, War on Poverty

Black Americans represented only 13 percent of the population, but, by one estimate, 40 percent of all homeless people. It was easier for some groups to become homeless than others, and for everyone trapped in it, the state of homelessness was poverty in its most visible, savage, and lethal form. Homelessness was fed by racism, income inequality, and a cascade of other related forces. These included insufficient investments in public housing, as well as tax and zoning codes that had spurred widespread gentrification and driven up rents. Many poor and moderately poor Americans lived with the fear of losing housing, which can itself harm bodies and minds as well as social relations in families.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Wallison (2009) has also blamed government policy intended at expanding the proportion of homeowners, but his argument explains only the housing boom in the U.S.—not the rest of the world. Rajan (2010) argues that U.S. politicians promoted home ownership and, especially, abundant mortgage financing among low-income households as a palliative against stagnating real wages and rising income inequality. Real estate returns also exhibit short-term momentum and long-term reversal tendencies. Momentum effects are stronger but it is hard to ascertain how much they reflect smoothed and/or stale prices and how much they identify tradable opportunities. In part, observed momentum likely reflects extrapolative expectations.

Financialization is related to several other trends: rising leverage and asset richening; securitization and its flip side (i.e., disintermediation from banks); deregulation and active financial innovations; expansion of the delegated asset management industry (institutionalization of asset holding and trading); the finance sector’s increasing political influence; widening income inequality within countries; and globalization and integration of capital markets. Some of these trends are now reversing. For example, certain securitized asset classes have not recovered their liquidity since both the 2008 crisis and the “flight to simplicity”. Other trends, such as growth of the asset management industry, will persist.


pages: 341 words: 99,940

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts by Will Storr

Easter island, income inequality, invisible hand, Jon Ronson, place-making, quantum entanglement

He pointed to a small sub-room in the corner. ‘You could try one of the computers in there.’ I’d already given up. But I went in anyway and sat down and logged on again, with the sticky fog of an angry sulk fast descending. ‘Gregory,’ I typed in. ‘A.’ Hundreds of titles fell down the screen in old boxy type. A. Gregory: ‘Farm Income Inequality & Stability’. I kept scrolling, my eyes running off the titles like rain down a gutter. No, no, no, no. That’s not it, no. The first hundred went. Then the second hundred. A. Gregory: ‘The Effects of Barbiturate & Other Sedatives on Fish Retinal Neurones’. And then I saw it. A. Gregory: ‘Problems In Investigating Psychokinesis In Special Subjects’.


pages: 339 words: 99,674

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

The U.S. intelligence budget alone has at least doubled since 2001, and by 2013, stood at more than $70 billion a year, including both civilian and military intelligence spending. It is no accident that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in America are in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. A 2012 report by Reuters found that income inequality in Washington was greater than in almost any other city, thanks to the massive amounts of money flowing to lobbyists, contractors, and others benefiting directly or indirectly from federal spending. America has become accustomed to a permanent state of war. Only a small slice of society—including many poor and rural teenagers—fight and die, while a permanent national security elite rotates among senior government posts, contracting companies, think tanks, and television commentary, opportunities that would disappear if America was suddenly at peace.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

Similarly, Paul Krugman, who like most contemporary economists is not much prone to admitting mistakes, started a 2008 talk on trade with a startling statement: “This paper is the manifestation of a guilty conscience.”16 This was a few months before he would receive the Nobel memorial prize in Economics, which gave his words even greater currency. What was Krugman feeling guilty about? He had changed his mind about the effects of globalization on income inequality, and he worried that his earlier nonchalance might have contributed to the neglect of important tensions engendered by trade. Krugman had been at the forefront of a wave of academic studies during the nineties that downplayed the impact of globalization on domestic income distribution. Yes, the increase in inequality in the United States was undeniable; but the evidence at the time seemed to point to other instigating factors.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Unemployment had also dropped from 7.2 percent, when he took office, to 5.5 percent in 1988.13 The Reagan years after 1982 were marked by the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history.14 Some 20 million new jobs were created between 1983 and 1989 and economic growth averaged a very healthy 3.5 percent a year.15 But the Reagan years were also marked by a sharp increase in income inequality. The long trend toward a more equal America that had begun after the Roaring Twenties was put into reverse. As Robert Wade of the London School of Economics points out, in 1980, before Reagan took office, the richest 1 percent of Americans received around 9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).


pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

When you have more houses than you or loved ones can live in, more cars than you can drive; more income in a year than can be spent on what you or your family can actually use, even uselessly use; then we are not speaking of property anymore, not the proprium, but of the inappropriate and alien—that which one gathers to oneself through the accident of social arrangements, exploiting them willfully or accidentally, and not through the private and the personal. — Thus the rationale for restricting income. Inequality will always exist, but in itself it is something different. One has to recognize that while the proprium may be passed down in nonmonetary forms, too—in the peculiarities of your genetics from your parents; in the heirloom, dwelling, tool, or decoration that wears the traces of hands and breath—income always comes as a consequence of arrangements of the community, via the shared space of trade, the discussion and rules, the systems of investment, and all the voluntary associations of society, of which the largest association is government.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Journal of Political Economy 69, 213–225. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 1994. Whither Socialism? Cambridge, MIT Press. Swedberg, Richard. 1994. “Markets as Social Structures.” In N. J. Smelser and R. Swedberg, eds., The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Szymanski, Stefan. 2001. “Income Inequality, Competitive Balance and the Attractiveness of Team Sports: Some Evidence and a Natural Experiment from English Soccer,” Economic Journal 111, F69–F84. Taylor, Curtis R. 1995. “Digging for Golden Carrots: An Analysis of Research Tournaments.” American Economic Review 85, 872–890. Temple, Jonathan. 1999.


pages: 327 words: 97,720

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

When asked to choose activities from a list, the primed were far more likely to opt to work and play alone. And when they were given a chance to set up chairs for an interview, they chose to put greater physical distance between themselves and other people.31 In a similar vein, various studies have attempted to correlate income inequality with health statistics in each of the fifty U.S. states.32 Bruce Kennedy and his colleagues developed something called the Robin Hood Index, referring to the amount of wealth that would have to be redistributed to attain an equal distribution. They found that an increase of one percent in this measure of inequality was associated with additional mortality of 21.7 deaths per 100,000 people.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

Historically, the debate in this area has been framed around relative fairness. High levels of inequality, such as the examples just given, are widely considered unfair. And it’s not just the poor that don’t like it. Opinion polls in the United Kingdom and the United States show a strong majority—around 80 percent—believe that income inequalities are too large. This means some very financially comfortable people are not personally comfortable with such high levels of inequality. There is an intuitive sense that such extremes are not right. Well, like many things we currently accept as normal and find hard to imagine shifting, this is another one that’s going to see dramatic change with the Great Disruption.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It provides access to jobs and opportunities if you don’t live in a good economy.” Some in the Valley have become downright glib about the leveling bias of technology. “Thanks to Airbnb,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, “now anyone with a house or apartment can offer a room for rent. Hence, income inequality reduced.” Investors like Andreessen, according to this view, are just like the Occupy movement, but with bigger houses and clearer results. Networks are the basis for much of this new power—networks that simultaneously push power out to the edges and suck it into the core. This idea comes from an authority on networks, Joshua Cooper Ramo, a journalist turned protégé of Henry Kissinger, who some years ago became interested in how new varieties of power were upending the old laws of strategy and geopolitics.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act of the same year created a new administrative agency that was given the power to regulate competition, sharing enforcement responsibilities with the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s Antitrust Division.8 Yet these new interventions did not halt the growing power of concentrated businesses. As legal scholar Einer Elhauge documents, business concentration, and the income inequality many blamed on it, continued to rise during this period.9 It took a Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to establish an activist antitrust and regulatory policy toward private monopolies. Regulators and courts became more aggressive about searching out and blocking methods businesses use to expand their economic power.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

This dialogue was wider than just Europe and America—it included Australia, Canada, and Latin American countries such as Brazil—but at its heart was a transatlantic conversation with fellow left-liberal politicians of the same generation, especially Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder. Instead of confronting a common military enemy, the Soviet Union, they would now tackle common economic and social challenges. For example, Clinton argued that a free market society like the United States had a regrettably high level of income inequality but “in countries that have chosen to make sure that did not happen, very often there have been quite high levels of unemployment . . . which is another form of social inequality.” However, he went on, “I think virtually every European country has done a better job than the United States in providing adequate family leave policies, adequate child care policies, adequate supports.”38 Unsurprisingly, this kind of discourse went down well in Europe.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

They found that as inequality rose, so did the number of prisoners and school dropouts, the rate of teen pregnancy and drug use, the incidence of mental illness and obesity. They compared a baby born in Greece with one born in America, where per capita income is twice as high and where we spend twice as much per person on medical care. But the Greek baby will live, on average, 1.2 years longer. “There are now many studies of income inequality and health that compare countries, American states, or other large regions, and the majority of these studies show that more egalitarian societies tend to be healthier,” they observed.14 It’s an experiment that works for everything from literacy rates to murder rates. It’s not, it turns out, because inequality hurts those at the bottom; it hurts everyone in a society.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The sky-high ticket prices and minimal number available for public purchase became an embarrassment to the government, which launched an investigation into the incident and barred the arena from holding shows for a period of time. Individuals involved prefer not to talk about what happened. The fact that many devoted fans were willing and able to part with tens of thousands of dollars to watch the forty-seven-year-old diva perform is an indication of the high income inequality that now pervades China.*1 Live Events In China, as in the United States, musicians earn most of their income from performing live shows. Live events account for more than 60 percent of music spending in China, a higher share than in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.11 The live event market in China can fairly be described by imagining Bill Graham Presents, the legendary San Francisco promoter’s operation, on steroids.


pages: 320 words: 97,509

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

While patients today are undoubtedly paying more for medical care, less and less of that money is actually going to the people who provide the care. According to an article in the journal Academic Medicine, the return on educational investment for primary care physicians, adjusted for differences in number of hours worked, is just under $6 per hour, as compared with $11 for lawyers. As in the rest of America, there is serious income inequality in the medical profession. Some doctors, especially procedure-based specialists, are probably paid too much. Others, such as primary care physicians, are not paid enough. (Yet almost every doctor feels the world owes them more for what they’ve been through.) Doctors today are working harder and faster to maintain income, even as staff salaries and cost-of-living expenses continue to rise and medical school debt approaches $200,000.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

Pickett, and C. S. Crandall, “Social Ecology of Similarity: Big Schools, Small Schools and Social Relationships,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, DOI: 10.1177/1368430211410751. 28. Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos, “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality,” NBER Working Paper No. 19829, January 2014, www.nber.org/papers/W19829. 29. Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 30. On this point, see Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: W.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

See social norms Curing Affluenza (video), 185 D dead zones, 105–6 debt, 18–21 DeWitt, Calvin, 132, 195–96 discontent advertising and, 42, 157, 159 dietary, 120–21 malls, 13, 14 market values and, 52–53 material wealth and, 24, 39, 115–17 self-esteem and, 123–24 sex, 121–22 social isolation and, 64–66, 68–71 throw-away society and, 49–50 See also fulfillment Doherty, William, 47–48 Dominguez, Joe, 179–81 Donovan, Webster, 107–8 Don’t Buy It (website), 219–20 Douglas, Tommy, 228 Dowie, Mark, 164–65 downshifters, 181, 185–86 Dungan, Nathan, 219–20 Dunning, David, 124 Durning, Alan, 95–96, 204 E Earth in Balance (Gore), 2 Earth Institutes, 186 ecological footprint, 96–97, 241 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 135–36 economics dissatisfaction and, 120 and the environment, 170 the G.I. Bill, 147, 149 globalization, 87–88 income inequality, 82–84 poverty, 82–83, 84–87 progress and, 3–4, 7 saving money and, 21–22 of scale, 66–67 single-payer health care, 228 sustainability and, 246, 247 taxes, 229–30 voluntary simplicity and, 232–33 workweek reduction and, 227 See also social class ecophobia, 192 education commercialization, 59–61, 231 Edwards, Felicia, 86 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 50, 85 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 149 Electronic Gaming Monthly (magazine), 58 Elgin, Duane, 183, 187 employment.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Even more strikingly, while only 19 per cent felt that poverty was caused by laziness or a lack of willpower in 1986, the figure had increased to 27 per cent twenty years later. What is remarkable about these figures is that they have come at a time when inequality has grown as sharply as social mobility has declined. The G ini coefficient-used to measure overall income inequality in Britain-was rated as 26 in 1979. Today it has risen to 39. It is not simply that this growing social division renders those at the top more likely to be ignorant of how other people live their lives. As we have seen, demonizing the less well-off also makes it easier to justify an unprecedented and growing level of social inequality.


pages: 320 words: 96,006

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

For me, all the marital turmoil was rolled into the glamour of being American; I may have even been jealous. Then, when the fervor died down, what got left in its wake was what sociologists call the “divorce divide.” Divorce, like so many other phenomena in American life these days, got refracted through the prism of widening income inequality. Divorce rates began to plummet for the college educated while they stayed high for everyone else. Yates’s April Wheeler had it exactly right. For the ambitious class, the key was opening up the possibility for the woman to support the family. In fact, the most thorough overview of studies found that when a wife works, a marriage is more stable.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

We can vent our frustrations in an instant on social media and find many who will cheer us on. But we may still feel less control over the hard realities of our lives, how we fit into society, and how we engage with our governments and institutions. To close this gap, it will be critical to actually reduce wealth and income inequality and change the material conditions of those who have been left behind. But a subtler challenge is in how we create more meaningful opportunities for people to actively shape their lives and connect with the institutions that shape them. People need to feel more like owners of their own destinies, rather than pawns of elites.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

These are now such ordinary and unremarkable features of public life that we scarcely notice the important work they do in supporting democratic debate. While everything is working as normal, numbers representing GDP, inflation, population growth, health outcomes, life expectancy, unemployment, and income inequality appear as simple and indisputable facts. While disagreements can continue to rage on “moral” issues, such as animal rights or assisted dying, matters of fact, overseen by experts, are areas of public discourse where consensus is expected. Statistics have the useful effect of delimiting the arena of democratic conflict, describing what an economy and society look like in objective terms, such that citizens and politicians can at least agree on the reality they all inhabit.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

The OECD estimates that 38 percent of jobs in rich countries are at risk: Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, “Automation, Skills Use and Training,” OECD, working paper, 2018. asked Americans recently to offer a word: Laura Wronski, “Top Words to Describe 2018: Great and Exhausting,” Survey Monkey, Curiosity at Work, survey dates December 10–17, 2018. between poor people who have a job and poor folks who don’t: “We focus on not working, rather than income inequality, throughout this paper because we see it as a far greater problem. There is significant evidence suggesting that misery haunts the lives of the long-term not working,” write three distinguished Harvard University economists, Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence H. Summers, in “Saving the Heartland.”


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

In the interstices of economic decline there had arisen unprecedented levels of poverty and, despite the increasingly broad diffusion of multicultural sensibilities, much of it was concentrated among ethnic minorities who had been forced into urban enclaves by a combination of council policy and white racism. Income inequality had risen faster in the UK than in any comparable industrialised country. In the rush to home ownership and sales of council housing, the housing stock had been left to crumble in large areas of the country. The falling value of pensions meant that a growing number of pensioners were in poverty.19 New Labour’s instrument for dealing with this legacy was what Gordon Brown called ‘post-monetarist economics’.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

In any case, the very conditions of the Occupy general assembly’s existence—it was, after all, a free association of self-selected participants—meant that these experiments in participatory democracy never had to confront seriously the toughest challenge to social democratic ideals in a complex and large modern society. That challenge is coping with participants with incommensurable beliefs and convictions, including radically different views on whether or not social justice requires less income inequality, never mind the abolition of capitalism. One glance at the world we actually live in should suffice to remind us of the many other things people do not share: notably moral values and religious faith, but also a passion for political participation. As Hannah Arendt remarked—and this is in fact a crucial point—one of “the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world” is “freedom from politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is politically the most relevant part of our Christian heritage.”


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The futuristic tone is set aside, however, when it comes to labor issues. For one, Tegmark gives detailed advice on “career choice” for young people who want to avoid being replaced by intelligent machines: it is safer to become an entrepreneur, lawyer, doctor, or scientist (areas he considers not yet mastered by AI). He acknowledges that income inequality has been rising but adopts the usual explanation of neoliberal economists: technological progress inevitably rewards “the educated” who can compete in the market, and inequality is a byproduct. Tegmark notes that while some “on the left” attribute inequality to things like “globalization and/or economic policies such as tax cuts for the rich,” the main cause is really “technology.”


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Moreover, with climate change becoming an increasing concern, such groups will be less able to adapt their homes to be resilient to extreme weather conditions such as heatwaves. For CABE (2008: 6) the challenge is ‘… to find ways in which design and management of the built environment alleviates and does not exacerbate income inequality …’ – not least by being aware of the equity impact of public and private investment decisions. This awareness may extend beyond the short-term impacts of particular development decisions to the long-term social impacts of attempts to improve the physical fabric, such as the gentrification that such process often gives rise to (see Chapter 9).

Laura Jackson, for example, cites evidence that pedestrian fatalities are most common in those parts of the USA where urban sprawl is the dominant form – despite walking being less prevalent in such locations, with consequential increases in obesity and hypertension (Ewing et al 2008). More profoundly, while a higher quality and quantity of social relationships are associated with health benefits, social stratification and income inequality is associated with increased mortality. Because urban sprawl is strongly associated with an absence of social capital, and with higher stratification in society, it is also increasingly seen as a main contributing factor to a range of negative health impacts culminating in the potential for higher mortality (Frumkin 2001: 209).


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Indeed, in the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent, leading the criminologist David Kennedy to explain to a reporter, “The idea that everyone has ingrained into them—that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse—is wrong. It was never right to begin with.”143 Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.144 But the Gini coefficient, the standard index of income inequality, actually rose in the United States from 1990 to 2000, while crime was falling, and it had hit its low point in 1968, when crime was soaring.145 The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state’s governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence.146 (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighborhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)

In a regression analysis of 122 civil wars between 1945 and 1999, Fearon and Laitin found that, holding per capita income constant (which they interpret as a proxy for government resources), civil wars were not more likely to break out in countries that were ethnically or religiously diverse, that had policies which discriminated against minority religions or languages, or that had high levels of income inequality. Civil wars were more likely to break out in countries that had large populations, mountainous terrain, new or unstable governments, significant oil exports, and (perhaps) a large proportion of young males. Fearon and Laitin conclude, “Our theoretical interpretation is more Hobbesian than economic.

., & Wilson, M. 2000. Risk-taking, intrasexual competition, and homicide. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. 2005. Carpe diem: Adaptation and devaluing of the future. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 55–60. Daly, M., Wilson, M., & Vasdev, S. 2001. Income inequality and homicide rates in Canada and the United States. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 43, 219–36. Damasio, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam. Darnton, R. 1990. The kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in cultural history. New York: Norton. Darwin, C.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

In total, 52 per cent of those surveyed by Pew said that the world will be a better place with more jobs being created by technology than will be displaced, as we have seen in each previous age. However, the remaining 48 per cent believe that the displacement of both blue-collar and white-collar workers will be on such a scale that it will inevitably lead to increases in income inequality, mass unemployment and breakdowns in social order. Regardless of where you stand in the argument of how AI and robotics will affect our future, one thing is absolutely certain. It will be a time of heightened disruption. At the heart of the solution to the disruption problem will be how we prepare ourselves for this future.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The positive correlation between city and suburban growth is extremely robust.25 03-2151-2 ch3.indd 48 5/20/13 6:50 PM DENVER: THE FOUR VOTES 49 Other studies suggest similar correlations between a city’s economic growth and that of its suburbs.26 For example, it is quite rare for a weak city to be surrounded by a strong metro, or a strong city to be set in a weak metro.27 One study determines that during the 1970s, suburban population growth had a positive effect on growth of city employment. Similarly, during the 1980s and 1990s, growth of suburban employment had a positive effect on city employment growth. . . . The results suggested that city growth tended to be strongly tied to conditions within the city, particularly demographics, population density . . . crime rates, and income inequality. . . . Suburban growth, by contrast, tended to be strongly influenced by national and regional factors, such as climate and regional location, although city demographics and city population density were also important [to suburban growth] during the 1980s and 1990s.28 It is a central canon of social science research that correlation does not imply causality, and most studies show that city and suburban economic and population growth is correlated but not that growth (or decline) in one causes growth (or decline) in another.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Within the democratic process, we are also able to act as a group and are not limited to our options as individuals. Acting as a group, we are thus in a position to solve various obstacles to dealing properly with issues that we cannot, without great difficulty, solve on our own. These points obviously bear on a number of questions outside the area of communications, such as environmental protection, income inequality, and antidiscrimination law. In many contexts, people acting in their capacity as citizens favor measures that diverge from the choices they make in their capacity as consumers. Of course it is important to impose constraints, usually in the form of rights, on what political majorities may do under this rationale.


pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

Friedman was against all government interventions in the market including tariffs, rent controls, minimum wages, regulation, social security, public housing, national parks, and government provision of infrastructure and services such as post offices and roads. Monetarism was also attractive to free market advocates because it explained the Great Depression in terms of government failure rather than market failure – that is, the failure of the Federal Reserve to manage money supply properly, rather than declining demand, overproduction and income inequality in the market.22 The pursuit of monetarism also had a marked political agenda. Nigel Ashford, writing in the think tank magazine Policy, argued that the interest in monetarism was clearly seen by some as a way of reducing union power: In the 1970s British governments of both parties believed that the only solution to the problem of inflation was an incomes policy, which required the support, or at least the acquiescence, of the trade unions in a corporatist style of decision-making.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

The only thing we have seen used so far in the battle against tax havens is a pair of kid gloves. The debate triggered by the Panama Papers will continue for a long while yet – and it illustrates that a very different world is an achievable possibility. Where there’s a will. . . The revolution will be digitized A statement by John Doe Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests and the occasional documentary.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Despite recent, small increases in the minimum wage, the floor of the economy, its real value has been eroded over two decades, so that many year-round, full-time workers cannot make enough to support a family of four at the federal poverty level. Recent statistical findings on wages, benefits, employment, insurance, and income inequality are summarized and interpreted in Marc Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, The Social Health of the Nation: How America Is Really Doing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92–109. On time starvation and debt, see Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 1–24, 72–74. 4.


pages: 339 words: 109,331

The Clash of the Cultures by John C. Bogle

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, Occupy movement, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Among the critics, hear New York Times columnist Jesse Eisinger: “The financial industry has strayed far from being an intermediary between companies that want to raise capital so they can sell people things they want. Instead, it is a machine to enrich itself, fleecing customers and widening income inequality. When it goes off the rails, it impoverishes the rest of us.” For an independent view, hear Mary Schapiro, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission: “At the end of the day, if the markets aren’t serving their true function—which is as a place to raise capital for companies to create jobs, build factories, manufacture products—if the markets are not functioning as a rational way for investors to allocate their capital to those purposes, what’s the point of markets?”


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

The first report was called ‘Plutonomy’, and it explained the idea like this: The world is dividing into two blocs — the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the US. We project that the plutonomies (the US, UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization. In a plutonomy there is no such animal as ‘the US consumer’ or ‘the UK consumer’, or indeed the ‘Russian consumer’. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 2008, the top ten hedge fund managers earned more than $10 billion between them. This divergence in earnings has played a large part in rising wage inequality, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon economies. The period from 1940 to 1980 has been dubbed ‘the Great Compression’ in America since income inequality was reduced, in part due to high tax rates and the gains made by skilled workers such as those in the car industry. After 1980, tax rates were cut, particularly for those at the top end of the income scale, while the rewards for talent increased. This was true of sports stars and chief executives as well as bankers and fund managers.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

World Bank economists reported in 2006 that the real income of the poorest 10 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people had fallen by 2.4 percent between 2001 and 2003, to less than $83 per year. And this was during a period when the economy grew by 10 percent and the income of the country’s richest grew by more than 16 percent. China today has greater income inequality than does the United States or, incredibly, Russia. The rich are decidedly richer, and the poor unimaginably poor. The shotgun wedding of capitalism and Communism has not resulted in the best of times for scores of millions of Chinese laborers. As Shanghai journalist Wang Chang Chu told me, “We do not yet have the luxury to concern ourselves too much with things like human rights.”


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

(A bad reversal came with Indonesia’s crisis over 1997-1999, with average income falling by 12 percent and the poverty rate shooting up 65 percent, again confirming that income and povertymove together.) All of this in retrospect seems unsurprising. For poverty to get worse with economic growth,the distribution of income would have to get much more unequalas incomes increased. There is no evidence for such disastrous deteriorations in income inequality as income rises. In Ravallion and Chen’s data set, for example, measures of inequality show no tendency to get either better or worse with economic growth. If the degree of inequality stays about the same, then income of the poor and the rich must be rising together or falling together. This is indeed what my World Bank colleagues David Dollar and Aart Kraay havefound.A 1 percent increase in average income of the society translates one for one into a 1 percent increase in the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of the population.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

For example, team members may acquire skills, insights, and experience at failed startups that they can apply elsewhere, like the alumni of GO Corp, a failed 1990s pen-and-tablet computing startup, who famously went on to lead many successful Silicon Valley technology ventures, including Intuit (Bill Campbell), VeriSign (Stratton Sclavos), and LucasArts (Randy Komisar). Conversely, startups that fit this book’s definition of success—they made money for their early investors—might cause negative spillovers (accelerating ecological damage, exacerbating income inequality, and so forth), making them failures from society’s point of view. In practice, however, it’s almost impossible to measure spillovers. So, we’ll stick with the “investors lost money” definition of startup failure here, but recognize that from society’s perspective, some failures deliver more value than others.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

But this simply shifts attention from the word important to the equally mysterious role of judgment. What is “important” depends on the situation and the interests of those asking the question. For example, surveys showed that the issue of systemic racism became the leading issue for millennials during the summer of 2020, surpassing earlier concerns of climate change, war, and income inequality. In the context of business or organization strategy, an issue is important when it strikes at a vital interest. Put differently, a challenge’s importance is measured by the degree to which it threatens the basis of a group’s or company’s strategy or even its existence. An opportunity is important because it is large and risky and because it requires an adjustment in the company’s strategy.


pages: 396 words: 117,897

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

The pursuit of endless growth is, obviously, an unsustainable strategy (Binswanger, 2009), and the post-2008 experience has shown how dysfunctional modern economies become as soon as the growth becomes negligible, ceases temporarily or when there is even a slight decline: rising unemployment, falling labor participation, growing income inequality, and soaring budget deficits. But alternatives are imaginable and unorthodox economists and ecologists have long argued for the decoupling of energy use and material consumption from standard perceptions of progress, for a transition toward a low-growth, then a zero-growth society, and eventually even to a managed reduction of energy and material flows.


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Previously, she was a features editor and national correspondent at Bloomberg Businessweek, and her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, New York, Time, and other publications. She appears as a speaker and commentator on business, economics, Wall Street, regulation, financial crime, politics, Silicon Valley, income inequality, women’s issues, and other topics at conferences and on broadcast outlets including Bloomberg Television, CNBC, PBS, CBS, and NPR. Before becoming a journalist, she spent several years as a risk arbitrage analyst at two hedge funds in New York City, where she lives. sheelahkolhatkar.com @sheelahk To inquire about booking Sheelah Kolhatkar for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Nation states’ ability to raise money and deliver services, enforce law and maintain a border is facing unprecedented strain. Globalisation—essentially the free mobility of goods, services and labour around the world—has created winners, but plenty of losers too. Settled communities have been transformed, and in some places limited public services have struggled to keep up. Income inequality has risen markedly in every liberal democracy for the last thirty years, and many people are no better off than their parents.1 The environment is being trashed. Levels of depression, anxiety and unhappiness are at all-time highs.2 That’s not to mention the thousand smaller problems all bubbling under these megatrends: struggling public services, ageing populations, housing shortages, misogyny, racism, religious fundamentalism and on and on.


pages: 367 words: 117,340

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

If you start to talk about healthcare, for example, you have to talk about the poor. If you talk about the poor, you have to talk about jobs. If you talk about jobs, you have to talk about globalization. If you talk about globalization, you have to talk about China and India and Brazil and overpopulation and income inequity and currency valuation and energy and pretty soon you’re not talking about anything because you’re talking about everything. Each issue is so hopelessly entwined with every other one that they’re like a ball of yarn the cat’s gotten into. Republicans criticize Obama for his “lack of leadership.”


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Clearly, this group has never been the monolithic bloc of capitalist purists that critics imagine. Rather, executives throughout history have, at different points, gone along with public opinion and caved to concerted pressure campaigns, even when this decision cut into their own pay. They have shared the wealth before and may well do so again if income inequality emerges as a major issue in American life. That hasn’t happened yet, but stay tuned. If the middle class remains prostrate after the Great Recession even as corporate bonuses recover—which seems to be the emerging pattern—pressures for change will grow. c10.indd 234 5/11/10 6:25:52 AM 11 A (Very) Liberal Education ill the upper class keep getting more liberal?


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), the Fordham Index of Social Health (FISH), the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), The Index of Economic Well-Being (IEWB), and the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) are among the many new quality-of-life economic index models. These new indices measure the general improvement in the well-being of society and include things such as infant mortality, longevity of life, the availability of health coverage, the level of educational attainment, average weekly earnings, the eradication of poverty, income inequality, affordability of housing, the cleanliness of the environment, biodiversity, the decrease in crime, the amount of leisure time, and so on. The governments of France, the United Kingdom, as well as the European Union and the OECD have created formal quality-of-life indexes with the expectation of increasingly relying on these new measurements to judge the overall performance of the economy.


pages: 403 words: 119,206

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, joint-stock company, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, stocks for the long run, the market place, transaction costs

If only a relatively small fraction of these people also decided to take a flier in stocks, much of the large increase in shareholdings that occurred during this period can be accounted for. One reason middle-class investors had the money to purchase both Liberty Bonds and stocks was that the war created an employment boom for wage earners, which also lessened income inequality. The National Bureau of Economic Research reported that the share of national income going to the top 5% of earners declined from 33% in 1913–1916 to about 25% in 1918–1919.10 Nominal hourly wage rates (not adjusted for inflation) more than doubled between 1916 and 1920. Another important reason new money was available for investments was that much more money was circulating in the economy during the war years.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This same phenomenon can be found in the US: while the national Gini Coefficient is 0.38, more than 40 American cities have a ratio of above 0.5. The most unequal city in the US – Atlanta, Georgia, at 0.57 – is at a similar level of inequality as Nairobi, Kenya, which includes the largest slum in the world, and Mexico City.28 Yet income inequality within the city is more than just a register of varying levels of wealth. The consequences of inequality go to the heart of the city: they define the urban landscape and determine the distribution of opportunities, turning the right to the city that should be available to everyone into a rigged lottery.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

He might not have analysed the ways that politicians and businessmen in emerging markets exploit the rules to get rich, and he might have mistakenly predicted that places like Russia would become more, rather than less, law-driven; but he did at least recognise the danger to his basket of plutonomy stocks posed by anti-corruption campaigns. ‘High income inequality, projected to get worse and associated corruption perceptions, often centred around [state-owned enterprises], is likely to bring about a strong anti-corruption policy,’ he wrote in a follow-up paper for Merrill Lynch Bank of America (his new employer) in 2014. ‘Luxury sales with a strong Emerging Market angle, or with high visibility (watches, wine, cars, jewellery, etc.) are likely to be at risk in the short term.’


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Also see Ben Bagdikian, “The 50-Year Swindle,” The Progressive, April 31, 2002. 51.For instance, the share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners rose from 8.9 percent in 1976 to 23.5 percent by 2007, while the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by over 7 percent. See Robert H. Frank, “Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore,” New York Times, October 16, 2010. 52.Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, and Sam Pizzigati, “Shifting Responsibility: How 50 Years of Tax Cuts Benefited the Wealthiest Americans,” report for Wealth for the Common Good, April 12, 2010. 53.KPMG press release, “Cyprus, Ireland and Switzerland Have Most Attractive Corporate Tax Regimes in Europe, Finds KPMG International Poll,” December 17, 2007, http://www.kpmg.co.uk/news/detail.cfm?


pages: 349 words: 114,914

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization, and broad income inequality are real. And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism. Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, political scientists at the University of Washington and UCLA, respectively, have found a relatively strong relationship between racism and Tea Party membership.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

As a result they directed scarce development funds to their own farms, and strengthened their position as entrenched intermediaries between the village and the larger political system. The rural development schemes of the Nehru years achieved results insofar as they encouraged prospering peasant landowners to shake off the agricultural inefficiencies of the colonial era. They made no contribution towards reducing income inequalities or poverty among India’s millions of poor and landless villagers. Gandhian schemes, such as the bhoodan movement of Vinoba Bhave, which sought gifts of land for the landless, though they attracted much publicity, fared little better in securing a more equitable distribution of arable land. Central to Nehru’s conception of the new India was a planned economy.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Yale professor Jacob Hacker, in The Great Risk Shift, identified two vital pillars of economic security—the family and the workplace—that had been weakened as political leaders and corporations cut back protection of income security, health care, and retirement pensions. Income instability, said Hacker, had grown even faster than income inequality. He emphasized data showing that family income had become increasingly volatile from year to year—for example, the chance that a household would at some point experience a 50 percent drop in income rose from minimal in 1970 to almost 1 in 5 in 2002.3 From the workplace to health-care centers and retirement communities, insecurity was spreading.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

South Korea didn’t either, until forced to remove capital controls and regulation of private borrowing, largely under US pressure, in very recent years. (It’s widely recognized that this forced liberalization was a significant factor in South Korea’s 1997 liquidity crisis.) Latin America has the worst income inequality in the world, and East Asia has perhaps the least. Latin America’s typical imports are luxury goods for the wealthy; East Asia’s have been mostly related to capital investment and technology transfer. Countries like Brazil and Argentina are potentially rich and powerful, but unless they can somehow gain control over their wealthy, they’re always going to be in trouble.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

The “world’s deadliest” claim became a working assumption among governments and NGOs. 2 Nancy Cardia, “Urban Violence in São Paulo” (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center, 2000); Amnesty International, “They Come in Shooting: Policing Socially Excluded Communities” (London: Amnesty International, 2005). 3 Mota Guedes and Vieira Oliveira, “Braudel Papers 38: Democratization of Consumption: Progress and Aspirations in São Paulo’s Periphery,” 11. 4 Some of his analysis can be found in Bruno Paes Manso, Maryluci de Araujo Faria, and Norman Gall, “Diadema: Frontier Violence and Civilization in Sao Paulo’s Periphery” (São Paulo: Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics, 2005) and Bruno Paes Manso, O Homem X: Uma Reportagem Sobre a Alma Do Assassino Em São Paulo (São Paulo: Record, 2005). 5 The nature of poverty as a strategic passage rather than a permanent state is analyzed in detail in Narayan, Pritchett, and Kapoor, Moving Out of Poverty. 6 See, for example, the findings of the comprehensive study by Walter Russell Mead and Sherle Schwenninger, The Bridge to a Global Middle Class: Development, Trade and International Finance (Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2002). 7 Steven Durlauf, “Neighborhood Feedbacks, Endogenous Stratification and Income Inequality,” in Dynamic Disequilibrium Modeling, eds. William A. Barnett, Giancarlo Gandolfo, and Claude Hillinger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a review of the literature demonstrating the importance of a middle class in maintaining stability and promoting democracy and prosperity, see Steven Pressman, “The Decline of the Middle Class: An International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Issues XLI, no. 1 (2007). 8 Guedes and Oliveira, “Braudel Papers 38.” 9 David Rothkopf, “Pain in the Middle,” Newsweek International, Nov. 21, 2005. 10 Branko Milanovic, “Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does the World Have a Middle Class?”


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

What it shows is that, from the late 1970s onwards, the income share taken by the super-rich has grown enormously‌—‌so much so that their share of total income today is nearly two and a half times what it was in the mid-1970s. And that’s just their share: naturally, since total incomes have grown substantially over the same period, their incomes measured in absolute terms grew very much faster than that. Figure 5.1: Income of the top 1% earners in the US, 1950–2008 Source: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118 (1), 2003, pp. 1–39. A longer and updated version is available in A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty, eds, Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries (Oxford University Press, 2007).


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

This dynamic can exist even if there is not perfect symmetry in the distortion of news on the right and on the left. The left may well adhere to journalistic standards more than the right, as Benkler and his colleagues argue, but count the number of identity politics stories on the left: does their proportion have any connection to the relative importance of that issue compared with income inequality or climate change? I am not saying that the issue of transgender bathrooms is not important. God forbid you misunderstand me here, and I get banished from polite society (at least my side of society). What I am saying instead is that the poverty of black children in inner-city schools is also important.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, 136. 9.Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, p. 164. 10.Nancy Fraser, The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2019), p. 13. 11.See Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, p. 163. 12.Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, pp. 162–163. 13.The sad tale of ballooning commutes is one of land use and development planning, as well as public investment that prioritized the automobile over public transportation, as we learned in the chapter “Cars and the Common Good.” The rise of the parent as chauffeur to kids scheduled up with far-flung activities is surely also a factor. Another is growing income inequality and cheap credit, which helped to create a housing market in which you trade a longer commute for lower mortgage payments on a bigger house, located farther out. “Drive till you qualify” is the usual shorthand for this among real estate agents. Driverless cars, because they make commute time available for other activities, would surely make even longer commutes viable, exacerbating the land-use problems of recent decades and the corollary issues of congestion and pollution. 14.Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, p. 164. 15.Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust, pp. 166, 170. 16.Hence, in the air-cooled VW world, the ridiculous prices paid for SPG roller-bearing crankshafts, Judd superchargers, anything touched by Gene Berg, and anything made by the German firm Okrasa, whose complete engine kits claimed to lower your 0–60 time by twelve seconds.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

American Journal of Political Science, vol. 59, no. 2, 326–40. The increasing economic value of education: “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 11, 2014. Life with parents: Rebecca Beyer, “This is not your parents’ economy,” Stanford, July–Aug. 2017, 46. Children: Melissa Schettini Kearney, “Income Inequality in the United States,” testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Jan. 16, 2014. San Francisco: Rebecca Solnit, “Death by Gentrification,” in John Freeman, ed., Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (New York: Penguin, 2017). As Warren Buffett put it Buffett quotation: Mark Stelzner, Economic Inequality and Policy Control in the United States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Today a majority of Americans live in the suburbs, and the numbers are growing.41 But according to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of current suburbanites are white, compared with just 44 percent of city dwellers. That sets up a racial disconnect between urban and suburban populations.42 Even in urban centers, people often live in neighborhoods that are segregated by race or socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, many people have seen their real wages remain stagnant amid rising income inequality, and millions of Americans in cities, suburbia, and rural areas alike are struggling with poverty and without good-paying jobs. This has steeped fear and resentment not only among those who feel that they’ve lost status they’re entitled to, but also among those who feel that they’ve been too long excluded from their fair share.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It is true that serious poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and that a certain level of prosperity is necessary if people are to free the energy and resources required to protect their environment.11 Studies have suggested that the curve postulated by Simon Kuznets, which shows income inequality at first rising and then falling as societies develop, is exhibited also by key environmental factors. Above an average annual per capita income of $4,000 to $5,000, it has been suggested, environmental degradation steadily declines.12 Nevertheless, whether expressed as a prediction or as a recommendation, the statement that there are ‘limits to growth’ has an air of intuitive plausibility.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

I wrote a dissertation on the effects of Federal Reserve interest rate policy in the early 1980s on debt burden and development programs. I know how complicated this is, and we’re not going to resolve it now. 3. Gautam Nair, “Most Americans Vastly Underestimate How Rich They Are Compared with the Rest of the World. Does It Matter?” Washington Post, August 23, 2018. 4. Branko Milanovic, “Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economy,” World Bank Regional and Sectoral Studies, chap. 3, www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/Income_ineq_poverty_book.pdf. 5. Branko Milanovic, “For Whom the Wall Fell?” The Globalist, November 7, 2014. 6.


pages: 413 words: 115,274

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

In one of precious few movies made about parking, The Parking Lot Movie, Meghan Eckman follows the trials of the beatniks and goofballs who run a lot next to the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The attendants are mostly graduate students, with future careers in academia and the arts, a self-described “ragtag group of fractured poets” who wax philosophical about justice, anger, income inequality, and parking. “You could almost see the truncated syllogism in their head,” one attendant says of drivers’ sense of entitlement. “Like: ‘I bought the car; how could there not be a place to park it? Surely it comes with a parking space.’ ” Customers treat them badly, but the scorn builds solidarity.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

(Foxconn), 17–18, 221 Hong Kong, as port, 40, 48 Hou, Xiaodi, 152, 153–54 hub-and-spoke model of delivery, 261–62 Hubei Province, China, 6 Hyperloop, 79 Hyundai Merchant Marine, 26 I Love Lucy (TV show), 191, 213 idle time, 74–76, 137–39, 268 ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), 69–74 immigrants and immigration, 94, 249 IMO (International Maritime Organization), 28–29 IMUs (inertial measurement units), 143–45, 147, 268 income inequality, 3, 74 Industrial Revolution, 91, 92, 94, 212, 214–15 injury. See accidents, injuries, and dangers in the workplace Instacart, 217 Instagram, 259 Institute for Women, 104 Intel, 153, 154 intermodal transport systems, shipping containers as, 19 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), 38–39 intersection of humans and automation: longshoremen, 69, 70–71, 77, 79, 85–86; Moravee’s paradox, 178–79, 243; at ports, 69, 70–71, 77, 79, 85–86; in robotic warehousing, 177–79, 180, 182, 186–87, 189, 191, 192–94, 223, 241–50; self-driving trucks, 141, 147, 148–51, 155–57; UPS delivery drivers and ORION, 284 interstate highway system, 127–34 Intuit, 266 USS Iowa, 61–62 iPhones.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

The recommendation systems and algorithmic curation of the private platforms that constitute the infrastructure of our digital public sphere have contributed to polarization and supercharged the spread of misinformation. And the tech industry has contributed to a winner-take-all economy, which has in turn widened wealth and income inequality, phenomena that social scientists have repeatedly demonstrated undermine confidence in democratic institutions. We believe that democracy must be defended. Democracies are committed, at least in principle, to the noble and enduring values of individual freedom and equality. Democracy is itself a kind of technology, a design for social problem solving whose chief virtues are its defense of individual rights, empowerment of citizens’ voices, and adaptability to ever-changing social conditions.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Perhaps more than in traditional, non-digital work settings, digital platforms allow customers to evaluate sellers and service providers based on their portfolios, reviews, and quality of work. The gig economy has been the subject of much debate and has been a focus of my research in the past decade. There is no doubt that AI-driven automation will lead to certain job losses, further deepening income inequality. I have argued in my research that it is time to consider how tax, social welfare, universal basic income, and other fiscal transfer policies might have advantages in protecting the interests of many and tackling financial insecurity and income and wealth inequality, compared to traditional labor market wage and work conditions protections.33 Moreover, we need to understand the net effects of job displacement and job gains that inevitably happen as a result of technological innovation.


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

To retrieve these results, input: “Follow the lives of [white girls] and [black girls] from [poor] households, using their [individual] incomes as adults and including kids of [only native-born mothers].” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT African American households in the ninety-fifth percentile: “Historical Income Tables: People,” Table United States Censure Bureau: “Historical Income Tables: Income Inequality, Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent [Black],” https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-households/h01b.xlsx. Compare also United States Census Buearu: “Historical Income Tables: People, Table P-1Total CPS Population and Per Capita Income [Black],” https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-people/p01b.xlsx.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Even 90 percent of the respondents who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 opted for Swedish wealth distribution. “People dramatically underestimated the extent of wealth inequality in the U.S.,” says Ariely. “And they wanted it to be even more equal” than Sweden’s.36 Yet despite these values, wealth and income inequality is effectively off the table in American politics—an absolute nonstarter—except for periodic rhetorical flourishes by Democrats when elections draw near. What proposals do get a hearing, like the so-called Buffett rule in 2012—which would have applied a minimum income tax of 30 percent to people making more than a million dollars a year—would have been dream legislation for the U.S.


Confronting Gun Violence in America by Thomas Gabor

classic study, Columbine, demand response, Ferguson, Missouri, income inequality, mandatory minimum, More Guns, Less Crime, RFID, Silicon Valley, traumatic brain injury, urban sprawl, work culture

A more recent study conducted by Michael Siegel of Boston University’s School of Public Health and two associates analyzed data over a 30-year period (1981–2010).5 The long study period allowed the authors to not only compare states with varying gun ownership levels over several decades but also observe the impact on homicide of changes in gun ownership levels over time. The study isolated the impact of gun ownership on firearm homicide by statistically controlling (accounting for) the impact of a host of social, economic, and demographic factors, such as urbanization, income inequality, alcohol consumption, and the proportion of young adults. The researchers found that gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates. Specifically, for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by almost 1 %. Over the 30-year period, states with higher rates of gun ownership experienced more gun homicides and total homicides.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

McKinsey has also been instrumental in enforcing the rules and customs of modern business—the modern company is no one’s nanny, it is not a permanent employer, and it is playing in a ruthless game of winners and losers. In that regard, McKinsey has also contributed to the effects of modern business on the rest of society. By serving the interests of the corporate suite, the firm has played a part in the growth of income inequality—the chasm between compensation of the heads of companies and their employees is the widest in history. McKinsey’s continued focus on the problem to be solved, as opposed to all the ramifications of the proposed answer, remains perhaps its greatest weakness. The focus on the purity of that answer, as opposed to how easy or difficult it will be to get to where one wants to be, has never been the firm’s strong suit.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

The automated system leads to some errors, but this is deemed a worthwhile tradeoff. We’ll continue to make tradeoffs in our deployment of autonomous systems. We may eventually see a widespread increase in a range of autonomous systems that displace people, possibly leading to increased unemployment and income inequality—to me the most serious concern about potential future AI systems. In past technological revolutions—agricultural and industrial—the character of work changed, but the changes happened over generations rather than years, or decades, and always led to new jobs that replaced the old ones. We may be in for a period of much more rapid change that could alter the notion of a full-time job (a notion only a few centuries old).


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109. Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Arthur Goldhammer, trans. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. (2003). Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. Quarterly Journal of Economics 143(1):1–39, http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/118/1/1. Pinker, Steven. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking. Plato. (1956). Great Dialogues of Plato. W. H. D. Rouse, trans. Mentor Books, New American Library.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

The apartheid government began the privatizing, and the ANC, once it controlled the state, embarked on one of the most ambitious deregulatory schemes in the world. It sold off state-run operations from airports to waterworks. The results have been precisely what you’d expect: spectacular prosperity for some, little improvement for everyone else. In fact, and although it’s difficult to believe, income inequality in South Africa has actually widened since apartheid was dismantled. South Africa is again a one-party state, with rampant corruption and Afrikaner-style cronyism. But money—thank God—is free at last. The International Freedom Foundation is gone, along with the government that propped it up, but its spirit triumphed.


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

See Natalie Angier, “No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture,” New York Times, April 13, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html for the fascinating story, as accessed December 23, 2016. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically Erick Messias et al., “Economic grand rounds: Income inequality and depression across the United States: an ecological study,” Psychiatric Services 62, no. 7 (2011): 710–2. See also http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/?p=642, as accessed December 10, 2016. This is true if you compare different countries Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2009), 31–41, 63–72, 173–196.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

YEAR MAJOR NEWS STORIES RELATED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE 2009 Inauguration of Barack Obama 2010 Tyler Clementi suicide (raises awareness of bullying of LGBT youth) 2011 Occupy Wall Street (raises awareness of income inequality) 2012 Killing of Trayvon Martin; reelection of Barack Obama; Sandy Hook elementary school massacre (raises interest in gun control) 2013 George Zimmerman acquitted of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin; Black Lives Matter founded 2014 Police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; police killing of Eric Garner in New York City (with video); Black Lives Matter protests spread across America; lead in drinking water in Flint, Michigan, raises awareness of “environmental justice” 2015 Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage; Caitlyn Jenner publicly identifies as a woman; white supremacist Dylann Roof massacres nine black worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina; Confederate flags removed from state capitol in South Carolina; police killing of Walter Scott (with video); universities erupt in protest over racism, beginning at Missouri and Yale, then spreading to dozens of others 2016 Terrorist Omar Mateen kills forty-nine in attack on gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; police killing of Alton Sterling (with video); police killing of Philando Castile (with video); killing of five police officers in Dallas; quarterback Colin Kaepernick refuses to stand for national anthem; North Carolina requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates; protest against Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock Indian Reservation; nomination and election of Donald Trump 2017 Trump inauguration; Trump attempts to enact various “Muslim bans”; women’s march in Washington; violent protests against campus speakers at UC Berkeley and Middlebury; Trump bans transgender people from military service; Trump praises “very fine people” in Charlottesville march, during which a neo-Nazi kills Heather Heyer and injures others by driving a car into a crowd; fifty-eight killed in largest mass shooting in U.S. history in Las Vegas; start of the #MeToo movement, to expose and stop sexual harassment and assault 2018 (through March) Nikolas Cruz, expelled student with history of emotional and behavioral disorders, kills seventeen at high school in Parkland, Florida; students organize school walkouts and marches for gun control across the United States Important, terrifying, thrilling, and shocking events happen every year, but the years from 2012 through 2018 seem like the closest we’ve come to the intensity of the stretch from 1968 to 1972.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

., “Social Ties and Health: The Benefits of Social Integration,” Annals of Epidemiology, 1996: 442–51; Hirdes, J. P., and W. F. Forbes, “The Importance of Social Relationships, Socioeconomic Status, and Health Practices with Respect to Mortality Among Healthy Ontario Males,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1992: 175–82; Veenstra, Gerry, “Social Capital and Health (Plus Wealth, Income Inequality and Regional Health Governance),” Social Science and Medicine, 2002: 849–68; Berkman, Lisa F., “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1995: 245–54. Citizens of sprawl: Leyden, Kevin M., “Social Capital and the Built Environment: The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods,” American Journal of Public Health, 2003: 1546–51; Williamson, Thad, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The Government Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve, and various scholars studied these trends and found that these increased prices led to a wide-scale shedding of low-income bank accounts.52 John Caskey reported that those families further down on the income spectrum were much more likely to lose their bank accounts.53 This trend has persisted, and the number of the unbanked has risen yearly since the 1980s and will likely continue to increase as banking becomes more competitive and conglomerated and as income inequality and wealth inequality continue to grow.54 This trend was especially acute in the inner cities. If community banking nationwide is an endangered banking species, it is extinct in urban areas. Today, large banks dominate urban areas and control 90 percent of their bank assets. And because these banks do not offer small loans to the poor, there are very few banking options for the inner-city poor.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

When the new peso convertible was introduced by Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo in 1991, it was the sixth Argentine currency in the space of a century. Yet this remedy, too, ended in failure. True, by 1996 inflation had been brought down to zero; indeed, it turned negative in 1999. But unemployment stood at 15 per cent and income inequality was only marginally better than in Nigeria. Moreover, monetary stricture was never accompanied by fiscal stricture; public debt rose from 35 per cent of GDP at the end of 1994 to 64 per cent at the end of 2001 as central and provincial governments alike tapped the international bond market rather than balance their budgets.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But broader forms of reward like academic tenure and research grants are vastly more beneficial. Alas, winner-take-all patterns are becoming more common in other parts of our society. The United States, for instance, has famously endured a weakening of the middle class and an extreme rise in income inequality in the network age. The silicon age has been a new gilded age, but that need not and ought not continue to be so. Winner-take-all contests should function as the treats in an economy, the cherries on top. To rely on them fundamentally is a mistake—not just a pragmatic or ethical mistake, but also a mathematical one.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

For an analysis of the long-term effects of land reforms undertaken by British colonizers on the productivity of the land, see also Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India,” American Economic Review 95, no. 4 (2005):1190–1213, showing that land that was given to landlords continued to have lower productivity rates even in post-independence India. 65. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johson, and James A. Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001):1369–1401. 66. Luis Angeles, “Income Inequality and Colonialism,” European Economic Review 51 (2007):1155–1176. 67. Some legal systems developed legal constructs that resemble the trust; others introduced the trust by way of an international convention. For a recent account of the dissemination of trusts, see Lionel Smith, “Stateless Trusts,” in The Worlds of the Trust, ed.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

, Research Paper 62. 28 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/09/top-public-school-willing-accept-donations-secure-places-overseas/ 29 Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2017. 30 http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/david-lawson-fraud-allied-london-13605598 31 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/top-private-schools-unwittingly-accepting-laundered-money-wealthy-foreign-criminals-moldovan-police-a7640811.html 32. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5481713/Calls-grow-UK-freeze-assets-London-based-Russian-oligarchs.html 33 http://www.dulwich.org.uk/college/about/dulwich-international 34 https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21577077-some-englands-best-known-private-schools-are-rushing-set-up-satellites-abroad 35 Interview with the author at Dulwich College, 12 January 2018. 36 https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21577077-some-englands-best-known-private-schools-are-rushing-set-up-satellites-abroad 37 @Andrew_Adonis, Twitter, 11 December 2017. 38 https://www.isc.co.uk/media/4069/isc-census-2017-final.pdf 39 www.gemseducation.com 40 The Times, 2 May 2017. 41 John Jerrim and Lindsey Macmillan, ‘Income Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility and the Great Gatsby Curve: Is Education the Key?’, Social Forces, Vol. 94, issue 2, 1 December 2015. 14 Dormitories of Abuse 1 Interview with the author, 19 July 2017. 2 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552175/Top-prep-school-PE-teacher-82-killed-hit-train-two-days-sentenced-abusing-young-boy.html 3 https://www.jordanssolicitors.co.uk/2013/12/caldicott-boys-school-former-headteacher-guilty-of-child-abuse/ 4 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/john-smyth-public-school-christianity-brutality-thrashings-evangelical-decency 5 Turner, p. 5. 6 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/05/john-smyth-school-predator-beat-five-years/ 7 https://www.channel4.com/news/police-investigate-alleged-brutal-lashings-by-christian-leader 8 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/03/british-barrister-john-smyth-child-abuse-allegations-church-england-charged-zimbabwe-killing; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/02/archbishop-canterburys-delightful-friend-accused-killing-teenager/ 9 Interview with the author via Twitter, February 2017. 10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-39560235/further-abuse-allegations-uncovered-against-leading-qc 11 http://www.titustrust.org/about.php 12 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/10/now-archibishop-sees-toll-child-abuse-claims-true-not/ 13 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/john-smyth-public-school-christianity-brutality-thrashings-evangelical-decency 14 https://www.churchofengland.org/media/3999908/report-of-the-peter-ball-review-210617.pdf 15. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/charity-commission-appoints-interim-manager-to-ampleforth-abbey-and-the-st-laurence-education-trust 16 http://www.itv.com/news/2018-02-18/shocking-scale-of-sexual-abuse-at-uk-boarding-schools-revealed-by-itv-documentary/ 15 Bad Charity 1 Lionel Cust, A History of Eton College (London: Duckworth, 1899). 2 Ibid. 3 http://apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends86/0001139086_AC_20160831_E_C.PDF 4 Jeremy Paxman, Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain?


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Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, the world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon. Increasingly this new technology era has ushered in a new age of anxiety. This tension is the most pronounced in the world’s democracies. Wracked by unease about immigration, trade, and income inequality, these nations increasingly confront populist and nationalist fissures that result in part from seismic technology shifts. Technology’s benefits aren’t distributed evenly, and the nature and speed of change is challenging individuals, communities, and entire nations. Democratic societies collectively confront greater challenges than they’ve faced in almost a century, and in some cases other countries are using technology itself to exploit this vulnerability.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Unshackled from its Nehruvian-socialist economic model, the country has birthed a new elite of conspicuous rich; a large, confident middle class with money to spend; and a media-soaked culture increasingly permissive about a style of conspicuous consumption that would astonish, and presumably pain, Mahatma Gandhi. There were glimmers of this possibility in 1992, but only that. “Shining India,” as the Hindu Nationalist political slogans today have it, is partly a mirage—poverty, illiteracy, profound income inequality, and backward infrastructure remain embedded behind the glare. Even so, India today is a markedly more stable and prosperous country than it was when I moved there to work fifteen years ago—and it is also the only country in South Asia of which that can be said. If India’s success continues, in fifty years, the country’s more than one billion citizens may be transformed into a wealthy, innovative, and broadly prosperous society, much as the people of Korea and Japan were in the postwar period.


pages: 385 words: 121,550

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

But there is little doubt that, when the dust settles, many of the JAMs will not be managing at all. Economic insecurity and inequality will rise still further. The nonpartisan Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons real median incomes will not grow at all in the next two years. Average real incomes (after housing costs) for the poorest 15 per cent are actually set to fall. Income inequality will rise as Brexit-fuelled inflation erodes the value of benefits for the poorest people. For all Theresa May’s rhetoric, there is no evidence at all that the Tories will do anything much to improve the economic lot of the disgruntled outsiders – and there is every chance that Brexit will change it for the worse.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

As we have seen, possible areas of improvement are paid sick and family leave, more flexible work schedules, and perhaps childcare subsidization. This is especially likely if there is sustained political activism beyond the initial burst of sympathy for grocery-store clerks, delivery drivers, and nursing-home staff. The process is unlikely to be smooth, but the COVID-19 pandemic struck, by coincidence, at a time when income inequality in the United States was already at a century-long high in ways that had increasingly come to be seen by many citizens as unsustainable.94 Many Americans may also come to better appreciate essential but unglamorous jobs that keep their lives running and may be more sympathetic to wage demands.


The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

activist lawyer, banking crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, financial innovation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, kremlinology, land reform, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, reserve currency, risk/return, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Upton Sinclair

when you started a family…: One of the most contentious communist policies, the one-child policy, still remains on the books, although in practice it has long been flexible in some areas. The one-child policy was in fact introduced relatively late in the Party’s rule, in 1979. The official name of the…: The Chinese name, in pinyin, is Zhongguo Pudong Ganbu Xueyuan. Amidst China’s successes…: The measure used here is the Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure for income inequality. In the two years to…: Paper by Bert Hofman, World Bank China economist, presented to Bank of China forum, in Beijing, 2 November 2006. See also Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, 22 November 2006. When I met…: The names of the students have been changed at their request. CHAPTER 2 CHINA INC.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

., the calls manifested themselves in a revitalized left, fired by the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and a new roster of congressional leaders. While Sanders’s campaigns eventually flamed out, his imprint on broader policy will long outlast him. An entire slate of policy proposals, all centered on rising wealth and income inequality, have glommed on to American political discourse, and have proved impossible to dislodge. Things like a wealth tax, which would target substantial holdings of the richest among us. Things like a return to a progressive taxation policy, such as the kind America boasted during the post–World War II period, and which disintegrated amid broader deregulatory reforms.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Grand publicly funded schemes such as the interstate highway network and vast hydroelectric dams were merely “tributes to the capacity of government to command great resources.”16 Labor unions, set up to protect the rights of their members and collectively bargain for better wages, could no longer be considered “on the side of the angels.”17 Chapter by chapter, Friedman laid out his vision of how an economy, freed from tinkering by politicians, could eventually make everyone more prosperous and fulfilled than the existing mixed economy, part private, part government system. Instead of government spending, government regulation, and government as the patron of last resort, Friedman offered an idyllic world in which the market alone would purge the old evils of unemployment, racism, income inequality, and poor education that repeated government efforts had failed to cure. Keynesianism was dismissed as logically flawed, in that new money pumped into an economy through government spending on borrowed money provided a false and temporary sense of prosperity that undermined true progress. As one liberal commentator observed, “Whatever government did, he wanted to undo: farm parities, tariffs, rent control, minimum wages, industry regulation, social security, public housing, conscription, national parks, the post office, public roads, and the licensing of the professions.”18 In assessing the faults in existing government policies, the strong strain of contrarianism in Friedman’s character came to the fore.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Birth rates worldwide are falling to a half or a third of the old levels. In Bangladesh the average number of children per wife, I have noted, has fallen to 2.2, from 6 thirty years ago, and so worldwide.14 Many more people than in 1968 live in affluent societies, and are themselves affluent. World population growth has accompanied sharply rising per-person income. Inequality has dramatically fallen worldwide. Extreme poverty has sharply declined. Famines have become rare. And to recur to the eighth, environmental pessimism, great amounts are now being spent to avoid ecocatastrophe, with some gratifying successes, if more to do. Yet nearly half a century after making some of the worst scientific predictions of his generation—outdoing in this respect even the proud physicists missing dark matter and the proud economists missing the Great Recession—people still heed what Ehrlich says, inviting him, for example, to NPR’s Science Friday and hanging on his words.

Kotlikoff. 2012. “Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Closed access Working Paper No. 18629. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972 (2004). Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 2nd ed., London: Routledge. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier. 2002. “The Disturbing ‘Rise’ of Global Income Inequality.” Closed access paper, National Bureau of Economic Research no. 8904. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier. 2006. “The World’s Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and Convergence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121:351–397. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, and Maxim Pinkovskiy. 2010. “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income.”


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The vast majority of immigrants from Central and South America, who made up about half the total, had considerably lower levels of schooling than native-born Americans. Their presence resulted in higher wages for college graduates and depressed wages for those who had lower levels of schooling.15 The immigration trends caused increases in wage and income inequality, because of the demand for skilled labor due to technological changes and new trade patterns. Sophisticated new technologies flourished in the aerospace, defense, electronics, and computer industries. Sprawling scientific complexes raised the standard of living for millions of Americans. Research funds for technology, or R & D (research and development), which were practically insignificant in the 1950s, amounted to an estimated $100 billion a year at the end of the 1980s.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

Halaby 2003; Owens and Rivera 2012. 8. Combining public and private universities, tuition has increased twelvefold over the past thirty years (Jamrisko and Kolet 2012). 9. See, for example, https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost-attendance (accessed October 13, 2014). 10. For a discussion of income inequality in higher education, including the income groups that receive the most financial aid and those that are hardest hit by a lack of aid, see Carnevale and Strohl 2010; Reardon 2011. 11. Fry 2012. 12. For detailed reports on the effect of law school debt on career choice, see http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/lawSchoolDebt.pdf (accessed October 13, 2014); http://www.napla.org/law_school_debt.pdf (accessed October 13, 2014). 13.


No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

Also, 25 percent of those who have filed currently live below the poverty line, compared with a poverty rate of 35 percent for those in our sample who have never declared bankruptcy. One interpretation of these results is that there is more (cross-sectional) variation in income among nonfilers than filers, income inequality being more prevalent among the former. Table 8-2 presents the demographic and descriptive characteristics among sample members who would benefit from bankruptcy, as well as among sample members who would not benefit. Individuals who would benefit are as likely to have more than a high school diploma as those who would not benefit.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

One-third of the world’s resource-dependent economies are in Africa. This engenders a high 05-7561-4 ch5.qxd 9/16/08 4:13 PM Page 89 Vanguard of South-South Commerce 89 degree of dependence on resource rent and, concomitantly, opportunities for corruption. Partly as a result, the continent is characterized by a high degree of income inequality and is prone to conflict. At the aggregate level, after years of growth spurts followed by downturns, the African continent now appears to have broken that cycle and seems to be growing at a sustainable rate. Over the past decade, Africa grew at an average rate of 5.4 percent, on par with the rest of the world (see figure 5-1).


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

While globalisation and the opening-up of markets around the world has generated great wealth, it is unevenly distributed. The gated communities of the affluent stand next to shanty towns in which households have no clean running water. A third of all city dwellers now live in slums. In many cities of the developed world there is also rising income inequality, resulting in increasingly polarised societies. Inner London is far more divided than any other area in England. In terms of income, it has the highest proportion of households in both the richest tenth (19 per cent) and the poorest tenth (17 per cent) nationwide, measured after housing costs.


pages: 492 words: 141,544

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

artificial general intelligence, basic income, blockchain, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, precariat, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, seigniorage, strong AI, Turing machine, universal basic income, zero-sum game

In stilted antique language, reminiscent of Mao Zedong or Sun Yat-sen, or even Confucius or Laozi, the previous iterations of reform lists had now become the Seven Great Reforms: return of the iron rice bowl, legal standing for the ecologies of China, reform of the hukou system, an end to the Great Firewall, full equality for women, an end to gross income inequality, and the return of the Party to the people. “Interesting,” Qi said. Some of these demands, she told Fred, would be supported by urban youth, some by the rural populace, some by the migrant workers, some by intellectuals and the prosperous business class. Netizens or farmers or migrants, everyone wanted something from the Party, and no one outside the Party was convinced that it had been doing the best it could.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Congress 2013,” Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, November 11, 2012, www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/levels_of_office/documents/cong.pdf. 25. Philip N. Cohen, “Fact-Checking David Brooks, Citing Hanna Rosin Edition,” Family Inequality (blog), September 11, 2012, http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/fact-checking-david-brooks-citing-hanna-rosin-edition/. Cohen, a sociologist who studies gender and income inequality at the University of Maryland, quotes a Bureau of Labor Statistics July 18, 2012, news release on “Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, Second Quarter 2012.” Cohen also notes that among young adults who have completed college and are working full-time, year-round, women make 80.7 percent of men’s median earnings.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But the unstructured, freewheeling internet environment made this difficult because there was no way to stop the free flow of recriminations and accusations of selling out that seemed to occur daily online.28 The experience of tactical freezing is not limited to a few countries. Occupy, the movement that started in New York as a protest against income inequality and that occupied Zuccotti Park near Wall Street for many months, resisted even the limited spokescouncil model of organization, in which working groups on certain topics reported back to the full assembly. Even that most horizontal form of organization was seen as too hierarchical by many protest participants.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe 1300–1600, Cambridge University Press 2009; it is notable that Angus Maddison dates the ‘capitalist epoch’ after 1820 Negative social and economic effects of inequality: see e.g. Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphaphiphat, Frantisek Ricka and Evridiki Tsounta, ‘Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective’, IMF Staff Discussion Note, June 2015 ‘Prodigals and projectors’: in a long letter, written as part of his Defence of Usury and sent from his travels in Russia in March 1787, Jeremy Bentham took Smith to task for his dismissive remarks about ‘prodigals and projectors’, arguing that Smith’s ‘projectors’ were in fact ‘adventurous spirits’ given to innovation and improvement.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

These patterns may reflect the same ethnic “brand-name” effects as in Kenya. Fafchamps speculates that the caste system in India, with its rigidity of hereditary occupations by caste, may be the result of such a process. Since some occupations are more rewarding or high skilled than others, this is a recipe for persistent ethnic (or caste) income inequality. However, ethnic specialization is not as ubiquitous in rich countries as in poor countries because there is an impersonal solution in rich countries to establishing a reputation for quality and fair dealing: creating a large corporation. The corporation spends a large upfront amount to create a brand-name reputation and has a lot to lose if it cheats.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

Sekules, ‘The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff’, New York Times, 7 February 2007. 10Editorial, Spear’s Wealth Management Survey, Winter 2006/7. 11Rosie Cox, The Servant Problem, Tauris, 2006. 12Financial Times, 27 October 2007. 13See, for example, Doreen Massey, World City, Polity, 2007, chapter 2; Chris Hamnett, Unequal City: London in the Global Arena, Routledge, 2003; Greater London Authority, London Divided: Income Inequality and Poverty in the Capital, London, 2003. 14Evening Standard, 6 July 2007. 15Simon Parker and David Goodhart, ‘A City of Capital’, Prospect, April 2007. 16Ajay Kapur et al., ‘The Global Investigator. Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances’, Citigroup Equity Research, 14 October 2005. 17Luke Harding, Guardian, 14 October 2008. 18See note 1. 19Guardian, 25 October 2008. 20Andrew E.


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

In 1720, what happened was a true experiment, something unfamiliar, as yet unexperienced. Newton and his peers may be forgiven for failing to anticipate a species of catastrophe that was brand-new. We cannot claim that excuse. * This increasing complexity also helped fuel a decades-long trend toward greater income inequality in the United States and other advanced nations, as those in a handful of sectors, including finance, managed to capture more and more of the profits of whole economies. For Richard, Irene, and Leo… with love and thanks ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work spent a long time in gestation, which means that its arrival has been attended by the kindness and smarts of a great number of people.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Research at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy reveals a 29% decline in real, inflation-corrected, basic-needs charity from 2001 to 2014.2 These declines in the modesty and compassion narratives extend to a lower willingness to help the world’s emerging countries. The intelligent machines narratives (chapters 13 and 14) are still much talked about, though they do not seem to have much economic impact at the moment. Machines do not seem to be very scary at the time of this writing, but should there be some adverse news about income inequality or unemployment, the contagion of scary forms of this narrative could reappear. A sudden increase in concerns about robots has happened before. A search on ProQuest News & Newspapers for articles containing both robot and jobs reveals that the number of articles almost tripled between the last six months of 2007 and the first six months of 2009.


The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield

bank run, buy and hold, capital controls, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death from overwork, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, new economy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, the market place, transcontinental railway, wage slave, working poor

Then these trustees could see that all the companies played nicely together. A trust wasn’t technically a corporation. It didn’t require a state license to exist. It wasn’t—yet—subject to state regulation. But trusts had come to represent everything skeptical, restless Americans feared about the influence of Wall Street, concentrated power, and income inequality. Trusts had enough influence over their markets to force suppliers to lower prices while charging customers more. Trusts could restrict production. They could sway politicians, providing campaign contributions and investment opportunities and using economic muscle when necessary. Standard Oil was20 the trust par excellence.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

Historically, productivity in the developed world has increased at a remarkably steady 2 to 2½ percent per year, which means that every 35 years the standard of living doubles.11 But some economists, such a Professor Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, believe that productivity growth is due to fall dramatically in the United States.12 He cites the aging of the population, growing income inequality, and faltering educational achievement, among others factors, as the reasons for the decline. Except for the top 1 percent of the income distribution, Gordon predicts the vast majority of the U.S. population will experience growth of only 0.5 percent per year, less than one-quarter the long-term average.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

Later, economic insecurity led to delayed vaccinations among low-wage workers: nearly half of adults in the US who by choice had not yet received a vaccine by the summer of 2021 identified concern about potential lost wages if unable to work due to side effects of the vaccine as the primary reason.10 The problem of economic inequality is likely to get worse before it gets better. A study on the economic effects of five previous pandemics found that income inequality in affected countries increased steadily for five years following the end of the pandemic. We can already see this playing out: during the first year of the pandemic, global billionaire wealth increased by $3.9 trillion. By contrast, global workers’ combined earnings fell by $3.7 trillion.11 Meanwhile, three in four households worldwide suffered declining income after the start of the pandemic, including four hundred million job losses, according to a study of thirty-seven countries published by the International Labor Organization.12 And these jobs weren’t lost equally—women and ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

His manner reeked of insincerity: he was said to be the kind of man who ‘who slaps you on the back . . . and calls you by somebody else’s Christian name’.5 It was a significant feature of British politics in the late 1940s that it was dominated by a genuinely socialistic Labour Party. Dalton attacked wealth. One commentator noted, after Dalton had left the Treasury in 1947, that it was ‘probable that the differences in spendable income [that is, income inequality between classes of people] in this country are already less than those which the Russians consider necessary to provide economic incentives’. At its highest level, tax on income reached 19s 6d in the pound, or 97.5 per cent.6 Indeed, the whole post-war Labour government has been characterized by a noted historian, sceptical of the post-war settlement, as being dominated by a ‘Christian and socialist idealism of the purest late-Victorian kind’.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Why did World War II, one of the most destructive events in the history of world, engender an era of near-full employment and broad-based prosperity both in the United States, where capital and infrastructure were mostly preserved, and in Europe, where resources were obliterated? People have lots of explanations, and I’m sure there’s truth in many of them. But I think an underrated factor is the degree to which the war “reset” the inequalities that had developed over prior decades. Suddenly nearly everyone was poor in much of Europe. In the United States, income inequality declined during the war. Military pay and the GI Bill and rationing and war bonds helped shore up the broad public’s balance sheet, reducing indebtedness and overall wealth dispersion. World War II was so large an event, organized and motivated by concerns so far from economic calculation, that squabbles between rich and poor, creditor and debtor, were put aside.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

Over the past thirty years, incomes in this central part of American society have stagnated or even fallen, with the skilled and semiskilled working classes suffering particularly badly.1 Meanwhile, incomes at the lower end of the scale have been held down by the resumption of mass immigration, both legal and illegal. Median family income rose by 40 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by only some 7 percent, despite the fact that a vastly greater number of women entered full employment over the latter period. Meanwhile income inequality increased considerably. In 1969 the richest 5 percent of families earned 15.6 percent of all income. In 1996, the figure was 20.3 percent.2 Ruthless competition, the lack of state regulation and a minimum wage, the increase in temporary and informal employment, the use of unregistered illegal immigrants and the decline of the trade unions have meant that many jobs which once kept people in the middle classes now barely maintain them at subsistence level.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Hence New York City has become a tech magnet since the financial crisis, and the once dilapidated Playa Vista area of Los Angeles has become an advanced aerospace and media complex. Major cities account for 85 percent of America’s GDP, with New York City alone almost 8 percent of the economy. However, much as the gap between first-tier cities and the rest is growing, so too is the gap within cities. New York City’s income inequality has become as severe as that in many third world countries. Dallas–Fort Worth (whose airport alone is the size of Manhattan) is America’s fourth most populous city, and as Mayor Michael Rawlings confesses, it is the “poorest rich city”6 in the country. Rich cities, however, can grow even while they go broke.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Yet despite the rosy economic outlook for the tourism sector, poverty remains a pressing concern. An estimated 51% of the population in Mexico lives below the poverty line and the poorest of the poor are usually indigenous people who live in rural communities, where food, medical services and work are hard to come by. Income inequality is especially a hot-button topic in the state of Yucatán, home to one of the largest indigenous populations in the nation. Progress at a Cost There’s no denying that the tourism boom has generated many jobs across the peninsula, as has the manufacturing industry in and around Mérida. Having said that, locals worry that rapid development is causing serious environmental and cultural degradation.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 254. 27. Ibid., p. 249. Timothy Noah likewise acknowledges that “changes in the global economy are making incomes less equal in many countries outside the United States.” But he also argues that “the income-inequality trend of the past three decades has been unusually fierce here in the world’s richest nation,” turning the phrase “American exceptionalism” into a slur rather than a compliment. Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012, p. 5. 28.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Henry, ‘The Debt Hoax: an economic detective story’, New Republic, 14 April 1986 is thought to be the first major article linking the cycle of Euromarket lending, debt and offshore wealth. Years later, Henry would create the first credible in-depth estimates for the quantity of wealth stashed offshore: see James S. Henry, The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for Missing Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality and Lost Taxes, Tax Justice Network, July 2012. For a more recent and excellent account of the recycling of debts into flight capital, see Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, Zed Books, 2011. Tim Congdon, a City of London financier, said, ‘Fly-by-night rascals effectively stole the proceeds of syndicated loans and did not have to carry the burden of debt service … It fell on the general body of taxpayers, not the jet-setting fraudsters, to meet the demands of the international bankers’, in Susan Strange, States and Markets, Bloomsbury, 1998, p.124.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

In fact, Fearon stated, “per-capita income is the single best predictor of a country’s odds of civil war outbreak, empirically dominating other factors that one might have expected to do better, such as level of democracy, degree of ethnic or religious diversity or nature of ethnic demography, or level of income inequality.”13 But why do poor countries experience more civil war than do rich ones? Poverty and unemployment feeding recruitment is intuitive, but perhaps the logic is reversed and governments in higher-income countries have more resources to spend on suppressing rebels. Fearon argued that this argument misses something too: high income in rich countries also creates more motivation for rebels, as there is more to gain from overthrowing the government, which could nullify that suppression effect.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They won’t hold it against you if you’re a no-show at their wedding, and they’ll step right over a homeless person on their way to a mindfulness yoga class. It’s a society in which all men and women live in their own self-contained bubble, unattached to traditional anchors like family or religion, and largely unperturbed by outside social forces like income inequality or the Syrian Civil War. “Take it light, man” elevated to life philosophy. Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal “feel-good” principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies with a capitalization table and a vesting schedule.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The first dimension is the enduring fall in growth rates, accompanied by a permanent rise in the total (public and private) debt relative to GDP in practically all countries, since the 2008 financial crisis. The second dimension of the crisis pivots on the first, by way of insufficient demand, rising income inequality, the financial strangulation of social systems, endemic underemployment, and the failure of education in promoting upward social mobility. Poverty traps deepen, and for many parts of society the prospect of improved living conditions is ever more distant. Citizens’ distrust for political discourse grows in tandem with governments’ inability to redefine social progress or indicate a way forward.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But especially for us.”24 Hanauer’s warning came before longevity genes were on most people’s radar and long before most people had so much as contemplated what significantly lengthened lifespans and healthspans could do to the rich-poor divide. Universal access to technologies that prolong vitality won’t fix every problem associated with income inequality, but it’s a crucial start. WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DIE WHENEVER WE WANT TO By cosmic standards, this region of the Milky Way isn’t a horribly inhospitable place for life to evolve in. We’re here, after all. And the outer edges of spiral galaxies like ours seem to hold reasonably good promise for a few life-sustaining planets to materialize,25 far better than the dwarf galaxies that are the most abundant type of star systems in the universe.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

Ray, 244–46 Dixon, Gilbert, 391 DNA testing, 387 dog pen, Angola, 135, 147, 242, 291 dogs (K9), 18 Donald (AW brother), 6 Douglass, Frederick, 11, 208 drug dealers, 32, 44, 94–95, 129 Drummer, Marina, 237, 261, 263–64, 287, 294, 373 Duncan, Shirley, 126, 241 dungeon (being “locked up”) as constant threat, 29 AW first trip to, 35 AW sent for Brent Miller murder, 101–02 CCR, 101–02, 155 conditions described, 29–30, 35–36 drinking from the toilet, 168 the only way out, 36–37 strip searches and beatings, 167–68 30C violation, 325 Ebonics, 44 “Echoes” (Woodfox), 135, 223–24 economic issues income inequality, 309–11, 379 prison-industrial complex, 236, 412 private prisons, 410, 412 Edland, John, 90 education, access to/lack of, 3, 71–73, 80, 108, 121, 310, 314, 346–49, 382, 413 Edwards, Edwin, 291 Edwards, Ruby. See Mable, Ruby Edwards 8th Amendment, U.S. Constitution, 123–24, 186, 203–04, 262, 354 Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, St.


pages: 559 words: 155,777

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham

banking crisis, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, death of newspapers, full employment, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, new economy, New Journalism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer: altruism, trade route, traveling salesman

For details regarding the Crystal Palace, see Jan Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Its Park and Gardens (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1858), esp. 144–46; Crystal Palace Company, The Crystal Palace Penny Guide (Sydenham, U.K.: R. K. Burt, 1858). high-level French civil servant: Christian Morrisson and Wayne Snyder, “The Income Inequality of France in Historical Perspective,” European Review of Economic History 4, no. 1 (2000): 59–83, 73, table 7. “the air of a conqueror”: Dostoevsky, Gambler, 293–94. “I like Paris this time”: LII, 54 (Aug. 16/28, 1863, to Nikolai Dostoevsky). “like sliding down a snowy hill”: Dostoevsky, Gambler, 278.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Anglo-Saxon observers often report that conspicuous consumption is unknown in Scandinavia, but this has probably more to do with their inability to read local codes than with its absence. Spending goes on summer houses, interior design and high-end ski wax rather than on wristwatches and SU Vs. ‘Luxury fever’ is not a peculiar disease born out of Anglo-Saxon inequality. Take France, one of the few countries that so far has managed to escape widening income inequality. A high-net-worth French millionaire spends $30,000 on luxury goods a year, $8,000 more than the equivalent American.105 The inegalitarian thesis would predict the opposite. When we speak of luxury, we are, in fact, dealing with several markets. The high-end one includes classic Porsches and Tiffany and follows the ups and downs of the stock market.106 Luxury handbags and watches make up a second, more diffused market with a logic of its own.

Davies, ‘Wealth and Economic Inequality’, in: Wiemer Salverda, Brian Nolan & Timothy M. Smeeding, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (Oxford, 2009), ch. 6. And see now at length: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014). In this section, I am focusing on income inequality (not wealth), because earned income, rather than inherited country houses, became the main marker in the twentieth century. Piketty focuses on capital’s share of income (such as dividends and capital gains) and argues that we are seeing a return to a widening gulf between capital and labour that scarred the nineteenth century.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

“The current campaign finance”: Republican National Committee, Growth and Opportunity Project, March 13, 2013, 51. “We consistently see”: See Kenneth Vogel, “Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity Plans $125 Million Spending Spree,” Politico, May 9, 2014. These political problems: See Annie Lowrey, “Income Inequality May Take Toll on Growth,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2012. “The poor, okay”: See Bill Roy and Daniel McCoy, “Charles Koch: Business Giant, Bogeyman, Benefactor, and Elusive (Until Now),” Wichita Business Journal, Feb. 28, 2014. Michael Sullivan: Asked whether Steven Cohen and Michael Sullivan contributed money to the Kochs’ political efforts, Mark Herr, a spokesman for Point72, Cohen’s new hedge fund, said, “We don’t comment or offer guidance on political donations.”


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

See Greece Hellwig, Christian, 113 Hellwig, Martin, 343 Herrigel, Gary, 49 Hill, Jonathan, 203 Hitler, Adolf, 55, 60 Hollande, François: Draghi and, 354; on Eurobonds, 114; in French election of 2012, 150–52; Merkel and, 34–35, 382 Holocaust, 55 Holy Roman Empire, 44 Hong Kong (China), 90, 370–71 Honohan, Patrick, 195, 337–39, 347 housing bubbles: in Ireland, 168; in Spain, 169; in United States, 170 Hungary, 21, 54, 296 Hypo Real Estate Holding AG (Germany), 165, 171 Iceland, 213, 340 IKB bank (Germany), 165 Immigration: of Syrian refugees, 285–86; into UK, 276–77 income inequality, in Italy, 244–45 Independence Party (UK), 37 Indonesia, 293 inflation, 47, 54–55, 359; capital flows and, 78–79; disinflationary spiral and, 178–79; Draghi on, 361; ECB’s mandate on, 316–20; falling rates of, 365; in Germany, 185; governmental defaults and, 125–26; IMF on, 301; internal devaluation and, 106–7; in Italy, 92; quantitative easing’s impact of, 366 inside money, 161 insurance, 389–90 interbank market, 166–72, 323 interest rate channel, 187 interest rates: convergence of, 166–69; debates over multiplier effects in, 137–42; during financial crises, 186–91; interbank (LIBOR and Euribor), 169; negative, 359–60; repo rate, 164 international capital flows.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

In the light of the role of client fascism as a system of institutionalized class repression and warfare, it is little wonder that the income share of the top 5% of income receiving units in Brazil rose from 44% in 1960 to 50% in 1970, that the share of the poorest 80% fell from 35% to 27.5%, and that only the top 10% of the population increased its relative income share. The Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of income inequality, reached its highest national level ever recorded in Latin America in Brazil in 1970.52 According to Business Week, the real wages of the lowest 80% of the Brazilian population “have been steadily dropping since 1964—the year the generals took over—despite a tripling of the gross national product to $80 billion.”53 In 1971, 65% of Brazil’s economically active population subsisted on a monthly income of $60 or less; only 1% earned $350 per month and over, but many of these earned $5,000 a month or more.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

It has been argued that wages were exploitatively low in Asia, and governments there have engaged in draconian policies to suppress consumer demand and enforce a very high rate of savings. But income distribution began to equalize rapidly in one country after another once they reached a certain level of prosperity.15 Taiwan and South Korea have steadily decreased income inequality over the last generation: while Taiwan’s top 20 percent made 15 times the income of the lowest 20 percent in 1952, the multiple fell to 4.5 times by 1980.16 If growth continues at anything near its present rate, there is no reason to think that the rest of ASEAN will not continue to follow suit in the next generation.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Extractive political institutions thus also tend to create a vicious circle because they provide no line of defense against those who want to further usurp and misuse the powers of the state. Yet another mechanism for the vicious circle is that extractive institutions, by creating unconstrained power and great income inequality, increase the potential stakes of the political game. Because whoever controls the state becomes the beneficiary of this excessive power and the wealth that it generates, extractive institutions create incentives for infighting in order to control power and its benefits, a dynamic that we saw played out in Maya city-states and in Ancient Rome.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Both directed their energies largely toward black youth “deprived because of social, economic, cultural, or…personal conditions.” Government, it was argued, should play a role in the transformation of youth culture. The problem with such initiatives as Thomas F. Jackson has argued in his seminal article on antipoverty policy in the 1960s, was that they “failed to eliminate income poverty or reduce income inequality [or] to increase the aggregate supply of jobs in urban and other labor markets.” The education, job training, and youth programs that were at the heart of the War on Poverty in Detroit were built on the same premises and suffered many of the same limitations as the previous generation of ad hoc programs.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the two main Democratic candidates in the 2016 presidential race, both said that overturning Citizens United would be a litmus test for their Supreme Court nominees—a level of opposition known to only a handful of notorious cases in American history, such as Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision.69 Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the public reaction to the Citizens United decision came in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, a series of populist political protests against income inequality and the role of money in politics that began in New York and, according to the Washington Post, quickly “spread like wildfire around the country.” The original Occupy protestors, who camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for two months, displayed signs testifying to the role they believed cases like Citizens United played in distorting democracy: “Corporations Are Not People,” “Democracy Not Corporatization,” “Revoke Corporate Personhood.”


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

., Cooper, Joel, and Crano, William D., eds. 2010. The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change. Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology. New York: Psychology Press. Frank, Robert H. 1999. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press. Fredriksen, Kaja Bonesmo. 2012. Less Income Inequality and More Growth – Are They Compatible?: Part 6. The Distribution of Wealth. Technical report, OECD Economics Department Working Papers 929. OECD Publishing. Freitas, Robert A., Jr. 1980. “A Self-Replicating Interstellar Probe.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 33: 251–64. Freitas, Robert A., Jr. 2000.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

In the new US economy, corporations could easily relocate factories to lower-cost venues overseas, services and finance played an increasingly prominent role, and the once-enormous political power of unions was beginning to flag. This shift in the balance of economic forces meant, among other things, that the rewards of economic progress would no longer be spread quite so widely as before. The year 1979 marked the moment when income inequality in the United States began to increase for the first time since 1945—the beginning of a trend that has continued to the present day. Of all the Western economies that were buffeted by these trends, none of them suffered quite so badly as Great Britain. The OPEC oil embargo dented growth figures everywhere, but the United Kingdom proved especially vulnerable.


pages: 726 words: 172,988

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Wall, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, open economy, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, Yogi Berra

In Chapters 9 and 10 we discuss the incentives and ability of banks and other financial institutions to borrow at favorable rates and under favorable terms. In Chapters 10 and 13 we further consider the impact of money market funds on banking. 9. This observation was made by Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC, in a Washington Post column on April 13, 2012 titled “Fix Income Inequality Now.” Bair whimsically calls on banks to solve the inequality problem by giving everyone a $10 million loan for ten years at an interest rate of zero, which could generate $200,000 a year in interest for a decade. After pointing out that taking $10 million at zero interest and investing at 2 percent would give everyone $200,000 as a gift, essentially as a “money machine,” she says: “The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Cities will need to strike a tricky balance between helping less-advantaged outsiders and driving away the rich. America’s polarization means that its cities, which have long tilted left, are more progressive than ever. As long as the federal government fails to take action on causes like climate change and income inequality, urbanites will look to their city governments to respond. There is much to admire in activism that fights for the future of the planet and the fates of the poorest Americans. But that activism must recognize the limits that cities face, especially when the tax base is untethered. Urbanites over the age of fifty remember what happened when progressive mayors of cities like New York and Detroit ignored the exit option enjoyed by their wealthier residents.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

And they’re far from done: Today, PayPal alumni have taken as a mission everything from cataloging the world’s genealogical records to restoring three billion acres of forest ecosystems to “scaling love”—bringing their PayPal experience to bear in each case. They’ve also been at the center of the biggest social, cultural, and political controversies of our age, including bitter fights over free speech, financial regulation, privacy in technology, income inequality, the efficacy of cryptocurrency, and discrimination in Silicon Valley. For its admirers, PayPal’s founders are a force to be emulated. For its critics, the group represents everything wrong with big tech—putting historically unprecedented power into the hands of a small clutch of techno-utopian libertarians.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

., p. 12 9 Francis Green and David Kynaston, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (London, Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 96 10 ‘America’s New Aristocracy’, Economist, 22 January 2015; ‘How the Internet Has Changed Dating’, Economist, 18 August 2018 11 Jeremy Greenwood et al., ‘Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality’ (NBER Working Paper No. 1989) 12 A. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003) 13 Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, ‘The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3’, American Educator 1 (1) (spring 2003), pp. 4–9 14 Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, p. 122 15 ‘America’s New Aristocracy’ 16 Amy Chua, ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior’, Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2011 17 Jennifer Medina, Katie Benner and Kate Taylor, ‘Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in US College Entry Fraud’, The New York Times, 12 March 2019 18 Luis Ferré-Sadurní, ‘Donald Trump May Have Donated over $1.4 million to Penn’, Daily Pennsylvanian, 3 November 2016 19 Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York, Three Rivers Press, 2007) 20 Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2019), passim 21 Ibid., p. 149 22 Ibid., p. 151 23 Jacques Steinberg, The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College (New York, Viking, 2002), pp. 124–36, 219–20 24 Lauren A.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

the United States is an outlier: Gretchen Livingston and Deja Thomas, “Among 41 countries, only U.S. lacks paid parental leave,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/16/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/. 8. UNLUCKY GENERATIONS Only 3 percent came from the poorest: David Brooks, “Who Is Driving Inequality? You Are,” New York Times, April 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/income-inequality.html. “unluckiest generation”: Andrew Van Dam, “The unluckiest generation in U.S. history,” Washington Post, June 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/. unable to cover $1,000: Megan Leonhardt, “60 percent of millennials don’t have enough money to cover a $1,000 emergency,” CNBC, December 20, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/60-percent-of-millennials-cant-cover-a-1000-dollar-emergency.html.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

In a more general set-up, an individual has the option to stick with the default, that is, the cultural features that she receives from her parents, or can select cultural features that deviate from her parents’. The problem for all social scientists is that it is far from clear how individuals make such choices. There is no obvious maximization process that leads people to believe in the immorality of a high income inequality, the evils of narcotics use, or the theory of evolution. Choice-based cultural evolution is not an unconstrained choice. Clearly every individual is constrained by his or her environment, which determines the set of possible choices. One can choose, but normally only from a pre-existing menu.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Pak, Ki Hyuk. “Outcome of Land Reform in the Republic of Korea.” Journal of Farm Economics 38, no. 4 (Nov. 1956). Pamuck, Sevket. “The Price Revolution in the Ottoman Empire Reconsidered.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (Feb. 2001): 69–89. Piketty, Tomas and Emmanuel Saez. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003). Piketty, Thomas and Emmanuel Saez. “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.” NBER Working Paper No. 11955. Rabushka, Alvin. “A Tax Revolt, First and Foremost.” Hoover Digest No. 4.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Additionally, many of the world’s poor have benefited, as hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty and into the burgeoning middle classes of large emerging economies such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. In 1990, 36 percent of the global population, or 2 billion people, lived in extreme poverty. By 2015, the number of individuals living in extreme poverty had been reduced to 10 percent of the world’s people, or 736 million people.21 For this reason, income inequality between countries has declined somewhat in recent decades. Nevertheless, all this apparent progress obscured lingering vulnerabilities. Yes, there were tremendous worldwide economic gains. But many around the globe were left behind or continued to live on thin margins prone to disruption. In advanced industrial countries, the economic growth seen in recent decades has not redounded to the benefit of many in the working and middle classes, who have seen their wages stagnate and face the prospect of their children faring even less well than they have.


pages: 693 words: 204,042

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

There were sirens in the distance, but there were always sirens in the distance; it wasn’t clear that these sirens were in response to the collapse. Presumably any number of people had been crushed and were lying dead in the wreckage of the tower, but none of them were visible. “I hope we don’t turn into pillars of salt,” said Mr. Hexter. The skyscrapers of New York are too small. suggested Le Corbusier Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. We find an inverse relationship between the income share accruing to the rich (top 20 percent) and economic growth. The benefits do not trickle down. noted the International Monetary Fund years later h) Franklin Jojo and I set up a chatbox on our screens, and we didn’t talk that much about business in it, although we did both follow some of the same feeds, because those were the feeds anyone needed in order to trade in coastal futures.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

It's likely we'd see a reorganized United Nations, with powers to enforce a more responsible approach to our global commons, such as the oceans, the atmosphere, and the environment. When corporations and governments made investment decisions, they'd explicitly factor the externalities of the natural world into their cost-benefit analyses. While there would still be massive income inequality between rich and poor nations, that gap would be decreasing as a result of economic structures based on fairness rather than untrammeled exploitation. And the flourishing of the natural world would be given a high priority in global decision-making. There might even be an enforceable UN Declaration of the Rights of Nature, putting the natural world on the same legal standing as humanity.91 This future, driven by an understanding of the interconnected nature of global systems, would embrace continued technological innovation in a form that enhances sustainable consumption and shared access for people around the world.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

The ones I classified as directly involving ethnicity were: “Sharing the Burden of the Transition to Adulthood: African American Young Adults’ Transition Challenges and Their Mothers’ Health Risk”; “Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation”; “Compounding Inequalities: How Racial Stereotypes and Discrimination Accumulate Across the Stages of Housing Exchange”; and “The Paradox of Persistence: Explaining the Black-White Gap in Bachelor’s Degree Completion.” The ones I classified as directly involving class were: “Social and Genetic Pathways in Multigenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment”; “Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments”; “Education, Smoking, and Cohort Change: Forwarding a Multidimensional Theory of the Environmental Moderation of Genetic Effects”; “Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree”; “Political Consequences of Survival Strategies Among the Urban Poor”; “Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Persistence in the United States”; and “Encultured Biases: The Role of Products in Pathways to Inequality.” 32.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Yet the greatest beneficiaries of the new tech companies seemed to be the very rich people who led and invested in them. Silicon Valley’s titans had more money than God and an unimaginable amount of data on ordinary people. America was still climbing out of the market-shattering Great Recession, and sharp levels of income inequality had spurred populist movements on both Left and Right. While Jobs was being eulogized in Cupertino, the protesters of Occupy Wall Street had taken over New York City’s Zuccotti Park, railing against “the 1 percent.” Tech moguls were the 0.001 percent, and all their change-the-world promises seemed to have done nothing except encourage smartphone addiction.


Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

But the use of this unprecedented power has had many worrisome consequences and has resulted in changes whose continuation might imperil the very foundations of modern civilization. Urbanization has been a leading source of inventiveness, technical advances, gains in the standard of living, expanded information, and instantaneous communication, but it has also been a key factor behind deteriorating environmental quality and worrisome income inequality. The political implications of an uneven distribution of energy resources have both intra- and international consequences ranging from regional disparities to the perpetuation of corrupt, and often intolerant or outright violent, regimes. Modern high-energy weapons have raised the destructive powers of nations by many orders of magnitude when compared to preindustrial capacities, and hence modern armed conflicts have seen commensurate increases not only in military but also in civilian casualties.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

It has long been obvious that one area can outperform others, as Silicon Valley has done; but the rule of law and price stability cannot explain why the Valley is more innovative than Montana or Michigan.[39] To understand the Valley’s secret, we need to update Ronald Coase’s framework: we must study venture-capital networks as deeply as we study markets and corporations. In a world of intensifying geoeconomic competition, the countries with the most creative innovation hubs are likely to be the most prosperous and ultimately the most powerful. In a world of intensifying income inequality, the countries that can foster greater regional diversity in the locations of those hubs will be happier and more stable. Even as they seek to regulate Big Tech, governments must do everything possible to foster technology startups—a policy challenge to which we will return presently. For now, it is enough to say one thing about this challenge.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

For many, the lingering American discontent had roots in nostalgia about some former era of glory—but the thirties had the Depression; the forties, World War II; the idyllic fifties, over thirty thousand battlefield deaths in the Korean War and schoolchildren doing drills to prepare for a nuclear war; the sixties, Vietnam and three political assassinations; the seventies, the oil crisis, economic malaise, and high inflation; the eighties, the fear of AIDS, street crime, and paranoia about Japan. Even the good old days had their share of trauma. And pure measurements such as income inequality and wage levels risked missing the bigger picture of American life, neglecting to note the dramatic progress in quality of life that affected people of all classes. For instance, the lives saved by air bags and seat belts. At one point in the new millennium, murders had dropped by nearly 70 percent from twenty years earlier, the poorest neighborhoods being the biggest beneficiaries.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

Though economists normally oppose unions, there are economic arguments in favor of a cartel when sellers (such as workers selling their labor) face a buyer with market power. The opposition economists normally present to unions, to interventionist labor market policies, and to attempts to reduce income inequality are thus shown to be unjustified, even on the grounds of standard economic logic. Labor demand and supply: an inverted commodity The economic theory that a person’s income reflects his contribution to society relies on being able to treat labor as no different from other commodities, so that a higher wage is needed to elicit a higher supply of labor, and reducing the wage will reduce supply.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Here, the architectural firm Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder is working with Gruzen & Partners on Schomburg Plaza. (ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, 1972) THE BATTLE OVER FAIR SHARE HOUSING IN WESTCHESTER, 1972. Logue welcomed the opportunity provided by the state-level UDC to solve racial and income inequities with metropolitan solutions. But the UDC’s effort to build one hundred units of garden apartment–style subsidized housing in nine Westchester towns met with ferocious rejection, evident at this Bedford public hearing. (ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, 1972) UDC COLLAPSE IN WINTER 1975.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

But big income gaps can also be inefficient, because they can bar talented poor people from access to education or feed resentment that results in growth-destroying populist policies. But now the economics establishment has become concerned about who gets what. Research by economists at the IMF suggests that income inequality slows growth, causes financial crises and weakens demand. In a recent report the Asian Development Bank argued that if emerging Asia’s income distribution had not worsened over the past twenty years, the region’s rapid growth would have lifted an extra 240 million people out of extreme poverty.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

., and Potter, J. (2017). A theory of the emergence, persistence, and expression of geographic variation in psychological characteristics. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (5), 339–69. Reyes-García, V., Godoy, R., Huanca, T., Leonard, W., McDade, T., Tanner, S., and Vadez, V. (2007). The origins of monetary income inequality: Patience, human capital, and division of labor. Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (1), 37–47. Reynolds, B. (2006). A review of delay-discounting research with humans: Relations to drug use and gambling. Behavioural Pharmacology 17 (8), 651–67. Richardson, G. (2004). Guilds, laws, and markets for manufactured merchandise in late-medieval England.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

For many, the lingering American discontent had roots in nostalgia about some former era of glory—but the thirties had the Depression; the forties, World War II; the idyllic fifties, over thirty thousand battlefield deaths in the Korean War and schoolchildren doing drills to prepare for a nuclear war; the sixties, Vietnam and three political assassinations; the seventies, the oil crisis, economic malaise, and high inflation; the eighties, the fear of AIDS, street crime, and paranoia about Japan. Even the good old days had their share of trauma. And pure measurements such as income inequality and wage levels risked missing the bigger picture of American life, neglecting to note the dramatic progress in quality of life that affected people of all classes. For instance, the lives saved by air bags and seat belts. At one point in the new millennium, murders had dropped by nearly 70 percent from twenty years earlier, the poorest neighborhoods being the biggest beneficiaries.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

., & Wilson, M. 1994. Evolutionary psychology of male violence. In J. Archer (Ed.), Male violence. London: Routledge. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. 1999. The truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian view of parental love. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Daly, M., Wilson, M., & Vasdev, S. 2001. Income inequality and homicide rates in Canada and the United States. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 43, 219–236. Damasio, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam. Damasio, H. 2000. The lesion method in cognitive neuroscience. In F. Boller & J. Grafman (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (2nd ed.), Vol. 1.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia would win the Pulitzer for investigative reporting but was forced into bankruptcy soon after the Champagne was uncorked. During the years after 2008, when global financial calamity was intensifying, the need for quality journalism increased. The forces of nationalism were massing across the Western world. There was record income inequality even with a record low unemployment rate. The financial crisis of 2008 cost the U.S. economy some $10 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Economic dislocation and technological change were upending life everywhere. Climate change was wrecking the environment; catastrophic events, such as the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, were becoming more commonplace.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Most continental Western European countries – France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries prominent among them – had not followed the Scandinavian route, but had nonetheless developed strong political traditions since the Second World War of tempering the market through social welfare policies. These also tended to mitigate to differing degrees growing income inequality, which was far more marked in the former eastern-bloc countries and also in much of Southern Europe. In the ‘good years’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s the growing inequalities were, if recognized, largely ignored or regarded simply as the price to pay for the wider benefits of globalization.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

The ISEW also adjusts for income disparity and depletion of natural resources.40 The GPI includes many of the same criteria but adds the value of voluntary work in the community and subtracts the loss of leisure time.41 The FISH measures sixteen social-economic indicators, including infant mortality, child abuse, childhood poverty, teen suicide, drug abuse, high school dropout rates, average weekly earnings, unemployment, health insurance coverage, poverty among the elderly, homicides, housing, and income inequality.42 The IEWB takes into account such things as the family savings rate and the accumulation of tangible capital such as housing stocks, which measure one’s sense of future security.43 Both the French government and the European Commission are working on high-level studies to create quality-of-life indexes to judge the real health and well-being of the economy and the citizenry.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

New York: Cambridge University Press. Philby, Harry St. John B. (1928). Arabia of the Wahhabis. London: Constable. Philippon, Thomas, and Ariell Reshef (2012). “Wages in Human Capital in the U.S. Finance Industry: 1909–2006.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127:1551–1609. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez (2003). “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1: 1–41. Pils, Eva (2014). China’s Human Right Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance. London: Routledge. Pincus, Steven C. A. (2011). 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pincus, Steven C.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

The British economist Nicholas Stern credibly forecasted that reducing carbon dioxide emissions enough to avert potentially catastrophic global warming would cost 1 to 2 percent of global gross domestic product now, while failing to act may eventually cost five to twenty times that amount. That seemed a more politically plausible trade-off in the economic boom year of 2006, when Stern announced his findings, than it did in 2011, in the maw of stock market panics, European sovereign debt crises, flat growth across many industrialized democracies, and rising income inequality.28 Britain and continental European democracies have already taxed themselves to ease the climate risk faced by future generations. Coal-dependent Australia, after long resistance, has adopted a carbon price. In the United States, most of the major oil corporations that had earlier undermined the findings of climate science, including ExxonMobil, now accept, if reluctantly, that a price on carbon is coming, and that it might be justified.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors. Whatever the unpleasantness of the past, Pinker assures us, there is every reason to be optimistic, indeed happy, about the overall path our species has taken. True, he does concede there is scope for some serious tinkering in areas like poverty reduction, income inequality or indeed peace and security; but on balance – and relative to the number of people living on earth today – what we have now is a spectacular improvement on anything our species accomplished in its history so far (unless you’re Black, or live in Syria, for example). Modern life is, for Pinker, in almost every way superior to what came before; and here he does produce elaborate statistics which purport to show how every day in every way – health, security, education, comfort, and by almost any other conceivable parameter – everything is actually getting better and better.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

“Germany Cannot Respect EU Budget Constraints: Eichel.” Agence France-​Presse, May 11. Cook, Peter. 1998. “What Italian Renaissance?” Globe and Mail, February 2, B2. Copelovitch, Mark S. 2010. “Master or Servant? Common Agency and the Political Economy of IMF Lending.” International Studies Quarterly 54: 49–​77. Corak, Miles. 2013. “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3: 79–​102. Corcoran, Jody. 2011. “Our EU Masters Will Make Us a Vassal State.” Sunday Independent (Ireland), July 24. Cornwell, Rupert. 1985. “Kohl Sets Out Goals for West Germany at Milan EEC.”


Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

With this burgeoning humanity comes almost unbelievably high costs of living and real estate. Public transportation is often inadequate, so everyone hits the tortured freeways. Meanwhile, the gap between California’s richest and poorest citizens dramatically keeps widening. Nowhere in the nation is income inequality greater than in San Francisco, where artists, working-class families and other long-time tenants are being evicted to build luxury condos for wealthy, young tech-company employees, whose private commuter buses infuriatingly clog city streets. Sheer human impact is a palpable force almost everywhere in coastal California and begs the question that Rodney King asked back in 1992: ‘Can we all get along?’


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

“Now a mayor is under great pressure,” commented a mayor of a city of eight million. His role as head of a major Chinese city goes far beyond that of his opposite numbers in cities elsewhere in the world. His responsibilities include employment and job creation, as well as raising living standards and salaries and reducing income inequality. Pushing rapid economic growth is the mechanism for meeting all these targets. “I have to keep economic development going, but on the other hand I have to take care of reducing energy consumption.” However, he can wield, as he put it, “government administrative measures” to help him. That means, for instance, that he has the power to consolidate the more than 300 paper manufacturing facilities in his locality, down to just 20 in order to raise energy efficiency.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

To Sunday-school classes, he frequently reiterated his motto, “I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can, and to give away all you can.”26 When he met his secretary out riding one Sunday, he advised her to save for a rainy day. “By way of apology for talking business on a Sunday,” the secretary reported, “he said that there was a great deal of religion in good business.” 27 The widening income inequality that accompanied industrialization didn’t faze him because it formed part of the divine plan. By this stage of his career, Rockefeller’s material success must have undergirded his faith. That he had earned so much surely signaled divine favor, a grace so awesome as to suggest that God had chosen him for some special mission—or else why had He favored him with such bounty?


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

In a fully industrialized economy like Britain, with a population of roughly 45 million in 1868, industrial workers far outnumbered all other social classes put together, over 16 million compared with under 5 million economically active members of the upper and middle classes. In Germany manual labourers and their families made up nearly two-thirds of the population, though this figure included agricultural workers as well. Income inequalities were striking. According to one estimate, of the 10 million people with an independent income in Britain in 1867, some 50,000 (the ‘upper class’) earned over £1,000 a year, 150,000 (the ‘middle class’) between £300 and £1,000 a year, 1,854,000 (the ‘lower middle class’) up to £300 a year, and 7,785,000 below £100 a year, of whom nearly 2,250,000 were agricultural labourers and the rest urban skilled and unskilled workers.


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

Although it was clear Lula was at least aware of what was happening, he managed to avoid impeachment by firing Dirceu and convincing the opposition, by now fancying its chances in the 2006 election, that the national interest would be best served by having the government finish its term. Brazil booms again Lula also won the 2006 election as Brazilians credited him for the increasing economic prosperity and stability of his first term. Lula continued to preside over higher economic growth, combined with a continuing reduction of income inequality and improvement in social indicators – most famously in a programme called Bolsa Família (the family grant), where poor families receive cash payments in return for keeping children in school, getting them vaccinated, and so forth. It has proven extremely effective and become a model for many parts of the developing world.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Though he’s widely considered competent and even forward thinking, it’s not uncommon to hear people talk about him rather unenthusiastically as a typical politician beholden to special interests. In May 2008, with the US and world economies faltering and continued tensions with Haiti, Fernández was reelected for another presidential term. He avoided a runoff despite mounting questions about the spending US$700 million on Santo Domingo’s subway system, rising gas prices, income inequality and criticisms over the government’s response to Tropical Storm Noel in late October 2007. DR Today Young and old groan equally about corruption and lack of opportunities. While the government cuts spending on education, health care and other social programs, money goes towards large infrastructure projects like road building, loan payments and, according to many journalists in the DR, to line the pockets of politicians.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The Chinese state was always interfering with private enterprise—tak­ ing over lucrative activities, prohibiting others, manipulating prices, exacting bribes, curtailing private enrichment. A favorite target was maritime trade, which the Heavenly Kingdom saw as a diversion from imperial concerns, as a divisive force and source of income inequality, worse yet, as an invitation to exit. Matters reached a climax under the Ming dynasty ( 1 3 6 8 - 1 6 4 4 ) , when the state attempted to prohibit all trade overseas. Such interdictions led to evasion and smuggling, and smuggling brought corruption (protection money), confiscations, vi­ olence, and punishment.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

The handover, however, did not change Macau socially and economically as much as the termination of the gambling monopoly in 2001. Casinos mushroomed, redefining the city's skyline, and tourists from mainland China surged, fattening up the city's coffers. Yet the revenue boost, coupled with government policies (or the lack thereof), also led to income inequality and a labour shortage. Macau residents are also increasingly critical of their chief executive's pro-Beijing stance. In May 2014, thousands in the formerly placid city took to the streets to protest Chief Executive Fernando Chui, who was reelected three months later. MACAU PRIMER Macau’s political and economic systems, like Hong Kong’s, are still significantly different from those of mainland China.