low skilled workers

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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

There really are reasons to believe some jobs aren’t going away: this is particularly true in sectors that are stringently regulated, such as medical care, where the doctors’ lobby can be expected to fight business models that might reduce the pay or prestige of physicians, or where there is intense cultural resistance to automation, such as child care. But even if we accept that there are millions of low-skill jobs that will need to be filled in the decades to come, why would we assume that only low-skill workers would be willing to take them on? Labor scarcity could lead to higher wages, which would in turn attract domestic workers. While this might seem as though it would be cripplingly expensive, remember that we are talking about nonsubstitutable jobs.

While low-skill immigration has greatly enriched immigrant workers themselves and the affluent professionals who rely on them most, this compositional effect has pushed up the poverty rate and kept large swaths of our economy stuck in a low-wage, low-productivity rut. By limiting low-skill immigration, at least for a time, while welcoming high-skill immigration, we can change the dynamic. At the margin, doing so would ease wage pressures on established low-skill workers and make high-skill labor more abundant. Affluent professionals would face more competition, and they would surely resent it. Low-skill workers might face challenges, too, as rising wages would send employers scrambling to boost productivity. In time, though, a more selective, skills-based immigration system would yield a more egalitarian economy, in which machines do the dirty work and workers enjoy middle-class stability.

Over the long run, though, employers can adapt to the increased supply of low-skill workers by adopting more labor-intensive business models. Why rely on expensive machines to do work that can be done more cost-effectively by hand, thanks to all of the low-skill labor that is available? In a few years’ time, the adoption of more labor-intensive business models can turn what was once a surplus of low-skill labor into a shortage, at which point wages start going up. What would happen if most of the arrivals were high-skill? In that case, employers would eventually find a way to make use of them, and incumbent low-skill workers might benefit, as they would complement the newcomers.


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

Canada's seasonal worker scheme has been held up as a model for other countries, despite criticisms from organized labor and human rights groups for the restrictions it places on migrants.38 The implementation of programs designed to attract temporary low-skill workers has been slow in many developed countries because of the expectation that migrants arriving through other channels will take on less desirable jobs. For instance, in North America and France, many low-skill jobs are done by migrants who have arrived through refugee resettlement or family migration channels.39 In Europe, high-income countries currently meet their demands for low-skill labor through visa-free migration from Eastern Europe.

In general, however, developed countries have tried to restrict the movement of low-skilled workers, primarily because of concerns that they and their children do not adapt as quickly as high-skilled workers.97 Employment rates are lower for low-skilled workers, often because the language barriers are higher. Nevertheless, they have continued to move through family migration programs or as asylum seekers. Many others try to enter without authorization. The hiring regulations around high-skilled jobs are more consistently enforced than those around low-skilled workers, so undocumented migrants may work undetected for years.

As such, the extended nature of many high-skill migration programs distinguishes them from low-skill programs, which explicitly aim to prevent any adjustment to permanent status. Low-Skilled Migration As the workforces of developed countries have become more highly educated, the unmet demands of agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors have led states to open migration channels for foreign low-skilled workers. Recruiting low-skilled workers on short-term or seasonal contracts carries the risk of unintentionally generating a stream of permanent migrants (such as that which resulted from post-WWII “temporary” guest-worker programs in Europe).25 Managing temporary programs, therefore, involves extensive state intervention, cooperation with employers, and the use of incentives and penalties to induce the return of low-skilled migrants.


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

Ghetto neighborhoods were as highly segregated as they are now, but people were working. The disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is in part related to the nationwide decline in the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Fundamental structural changes in the new global economy, including changes in the distribution of jobs and in the level of education required to obtain employment, resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of increasing joblessness and declining real wages for low-skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system, the decreasing availability of lower-skilled blue-collar jobs, and the growing importance of training and education in the higher-growth industries adversely affected the employment rates and earnings of low-skilled black workers, many of whom are concentrated in inner-city ghettos.

The central problem is that the demand for labor has shifted away from low-skilled workers because of structural changes in the economy. During certain periods, this problem can be offset to some extent by appropriate macroeconomic levers that can act to enhance economic growth and reduce unemployment, including fiscal policies that regulate government spending and taxation and monetary policies that influence interest rates and control the money supply. But given the fundamental structural decline in the demand for low-skilled workers, such policies will have their greatest impact in the higher-wage sectors of the economy.

Many low-wage workers, especially those in high-jobless inner-city neighborhoods who are not in or have dropped out of the labor force and who also face the problem of negative employer attitudes, will not experience any improvement in their job prospects because of fiscal or monetary policies. Despite some claims that low-skilled workers fail to take advantage of labor-market opportunities, available evidence strongly suggests not only that the jobs for such workers carry lower real wages and fewer benefits than did comparable jobs in the early 1970s, but that it is harder for certain low-skilled workers, especially low-skilled males who are not being absorbed into the expanding service sector (see Chapter 2), to find employment today. As the economists Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk put it: In our view, the problem is not that more people have chosen not to work, but rather that demand by employers for less-skilled workers, even those who are willing to work at low wages, has declined.


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

If technology is destroying vast numbers of low-skilled jobs but is creating only a few new high-skill jobs, we will be left with a shortage of low-skill jobs and a large number of permanently unemployed low-skilled workers. Hence, we are in a permanent Great Depression. There are jobs that computers won’t be doing, or at least won’t for centuries. Priest, plumber, and policeman come to mind. There are real limits to what the machines can do. However, those limits are well above the requirements of many, many existing jobs. Once you accept the idea that automation will do more and more low-skill jobs, you cannot escape the fact that this will result in too many low-skilled workers and too few low-skill jobs.

That’s why by 2024, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 29 percent employment growth for interpreters and translators. ASSUMPTION 4: Low-skilled workers will be the first to go. ASSUMPTION 5: There won’t be enough jobs for these workers in the future. The assumptions that low-skilled workers will be the first to go and that there won’t be enough jobs for them undoubtedly have some truth to them, but they require some qualification. Generally speaking, when scoring jobs for how likely they are to be replaced by automation, the lower the wage a job pays, the higher the chance it will be automated. The inference usually drawn from this phenomenon is that a low-wage job is a low-skill job. This is not always the case.

This would prove him correct in the extreme. Possibility two involves unemployable people as well. The central idea behind possibility two is that there will be a substantial number of low-skilled workers who will not be able to compete with machines. In this view, the hierarchy of economic value in the future goes from skilled humans on top, then robots, then low-skilled workers. In this scenario, there are a great many low-skill jobs that robots will soon be able to do. For each job replaced, the number of unemployed unskilled workers will increase and the number of unskilled jobs will decrease. So the world will have ever more unskilled workers competing for ever fewer unskilled jobs.


Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey

The disappearance of high-wage low-skill jobs in sectors like automobiles, steel, meatpacking, and the like is a universal problem for all industrialized countries. This job loss is what accounts for continuing high rates of unemployment in Europe and for falling real working-class wages in the United 25 This speech was reprinted as “Welfare Reform and Character Development,” City Journal 5, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 56-69. [FUKUYAMA] Social Capital 479 States. It is a problem that is bound to become more severe as the Third World develops and more low-skill workers enter the global labor market.

It is a problem that is bound to become more severe as the Third World develops and more low-skill workers enter the global labor market. It is, as the account of the Great Disruption above indicates, also one of the sources of family breakdown and the various pathologies accompanying the shift in gender roles. Those low-skill workers most severely affected are males rather than females. In the first lecture, I pointed out that male median incomes, measured in constant dollars, peaked in the United States in around 1972 or 1973 and have been trending slightly downward ever since, while male labor force participation has been declining. That is, any gains in household income realized since that time have come as a result of women entering the work force or receiving higher incomes.

There are currently some forty federal and countless state worker retraining programs, the first of which consume some $25 billion of the federal budget every year, and they are as a group generally recognized to be abysmal failures. 26 26 For an overview of vocational and job-training programs, see Derek Bok, T h e State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 480 Tanner Lectures on Human Values The American system of vocational education is very weak compared to that of central Europe; for the most part, low-skill workers are simply left to fend for themselves in acquiring the skills needed to remain employed. Adding urgency to the worker retraining issue is the shifting age composition of all OECD countries. Owing to steady drops in fertility almost all OECD countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate by the middle of the twenty-first century.


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

The numbers of high-skill, high-wage workers could dramatically increase by outsmarting workers from other nations, leading domestic and foreign companies to expand their high-value, knowledge-intensive activities in America, given the superior productivity that smarter employees can create. As a consequence, there was no need to unduly mourn the loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs to Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe despite the short-term problems it caused for displaced workers. Better-quality jobs were being created to replace them, although there was bound to be a period of adjustment as workers retrained for more skilled positions. The idea of a magnet economy recognized a global auction for jobs, but this was limited to low-skill jobs auctioned on price, resulting in manufacturing jobs migrating to low-wage economies in Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe.

Routine 20 The Global Auction production could be fulfilled in low-wage countries for a fraction of the cost of operating plants in North America or Western Europe. Gone were the days when national champions, such as Ford in America, ICI in Britain, and Siemens in Germany, offered high wages to low-skill workers as they did after World War II. These companies had little choice other than to exploit the global market for labor if they were to remain competitive. Accordingly, there are no American, British, or German jobs, only American, British, or German workers who must confront the ultimate judgment of the global market.

Yet it was the rise of mass assembly-line production associated with the name of Henry Ford that ensured Taylor his place in economic history. Ford drew on a range of innovations that were prevalent at the time, although he denied that scientific management had influenced the creation of the moving assembly line that employed mass ranks of low-skill workers responsible for carrying out the same monotonous tasks. Craft skills were broken down into their most rudimentary form, reduced to a series of simple repetitive operations of the order of punching a hole in metal plates thousands of times a day without moving from the machine. In the case of General Motors’ Vega, two young women jumped on and off the assembly line and slid grilles behind the headlights; this was one of the more active roles available.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

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

What is new is the acceleration of this trend and the increasing vulnerability of many high-skill occupations and nonroutine low-skill jobs. Clearly this has yet to massively affect the high-educated, since investment in education still commands high returns, but dispersion in wages and job opportunities is increasing among the well-educated, and it is certainly not inconceivable that substitution effects will in the future come to dominate complementarity effects for a majority. This points to a less radical, but nevertheless transformative, techo-optimist scenario. Yet in assessing the consequences of such a shift we cannot extrapolate from what has happened to the minority of low-skilled workers in the past.

First, and most obvious, export-oriented firms will be opposed because they would face an increase in labor costs and will have to scale back their operations. Second, the relative supply of low-skilled workers will rise, which will cause a corresponding decline in their relative wages. Although this will be somewhat compensated for by a higher real exchange rate and cheaper imports, the compensation is less than one hundred percent, and much less in large countries. From this it follows that low-skilled workers will block lower funding for training if they are represented by a party in government. Insofar as PR electoral systems—which all export-oriented countries in Europe adopted in the early twentieth century—produce more center-left governments, it would be hard for such governments to agree to a balanced trade international rule.

One can of course find examples of governments giving tax concessions to companies that promise to retain jobs instead of moving them to low-wage countries. Such pressures and temptations arise naturally as part of Vernon’s (1966) product life-cycle as production becomes more routinized and can be performed by robots or low-skilled workers abroad. But we think it is far more remarkable that governments in ACDs routinely shun such temptations. At the height of deindustrialization in the 1980s governments across ACDs engaged in policies that accelerated the decline of sunset industries by cutting back subsidies, privatizing unproductive public enterprises, and removing barriers to competition from low-wage countries while betting on new high value-added industries moving in to take advantage of an abundance of high-skilled labor (and the associated institutional supports).


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

If a lawyer marries an advertising executive, or a scientist partners with a management consultant, they are likely to look to large cities that have a critical mass in both industries, further adding to the gravitational pull of these places. With the growing number of skilled workers in superstar cities has come increased jobs for low-skilled workers too. To understand why, it is helpful to differentiate between the ‘tradeable’ and ‘non-tradeable’ sectors of the economy. The tradeable sector produces things that can be consumed away from where they are originally produced. Manufactured goods, digital products and most financial services fall into this category.

As they do so, they will decrease the supply of labour in the places they are leaving and increase the supply of labour in places they are going, which should gradually bring wages back in line. Yet it is getting harder and harder to move, as reflected in declining rates of mobility within countries. In 1980, one in every 35 US citizens moved across state borders each year, a figure that by 2020 had halved to one in every 70.38 If low-skill workers were to migrate out of declining cities and towns, it would help to break the vicious cycles of high unemployment, depressed wages and deteriorating living standards experienced in these places. Why have we not seen this happen? Beyond the obvious and profound ties of personal history, family and friendships that connect individuals to communities, there are structural forces at play that have lowered the propensity for workers to relocate in search of better opportunities.

Historically, less educated workers had a relatively higher propensity to relocate, as good middle-class manufacturing or administrative jobs created many opportunities for a better life in more prosperous areas. Now, less educated workers looking to relocate to superstar cities are typically only able to secure low-paid service jobs. And while wages for these jobs tend to be higher in thriving cities, the difference is often more than offset by the increased cost of living. A low-skill worker moving from Cleveland to San Francisco would on average enjoy an after-tax increase of roughly 30 per cent, but a decline in their spending power of roughly 10 per cent, after adjusting for the increased cost of living, leaving them worse off.40 By far the biggest factor behind this disconnect is rising house prices.


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

52 One can’t help but fear that the $15 hourly minimum wage in Seattle, for example, a thriving city with a low share of Hispanic immigrants, isn’t intended to do the same thing—eliminate low-skilled jobs and motivate low-skilled workers to settle elsewhere. Perhaps a high national minimum wage would discourage low-skilled workers from immigrating to America by limiting their opportunities for employment, but it would be detrimental to the low-skilled workers who have already settled here. Meanwhile, advocates of the poor would insist on raising government benefits to meet the material needs of unemployed workers not of their own making.

They have also ignored compositional shifts in the workforce to higher-skilled workers.46 Credible empirical studies of minimum-wage employment that take these factors into account show that if employers are forced by law to pay higher wages, they simply hire employees with higher productivity who are worthy of higher wages.47 These studies show “higher minimum wage drawing those enrolled in school and working part-time into full-time work, while pushing those working full-time and not enrolled in school out of jobs into ‘idleness’ (neither working nor employed),” and “substitution from low-skilled adults to possibly higher-skilled teenage students (in food-service occupations).”48 This harms, rather than helps, the low-skilled workers it seeks to help. A 2014 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research tracked—for the first time—the employment and earning histories of individuals most affected by increases in the minimum wage and found that increases in the minimum wage over the last ten years reduced employment among low-skilled workers 6 to 9 percentage points.49 Similarly, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 500,000 workers will lose their jobs if the federal government increases the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour, and cautions that the loss among the lowest-skilled workers—namely, African American workers between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, where unemployment rates are twice as high as their white counterparts—will be three times greater than adults generally.50 In other words, if higher-skilled workers replace lower-skilled workers, the job loss among lower-skilled workers could be substantially greater than 500,000.

At the same time, information technology opens a window of attractive investment opportunities that competes with displaced workers for the attention of properly trained talent and the economy’s willingness and capacity to take risk. Successful IT start-ups like Google and Facebook tend not to employ low-skilled workers directly. Instead, attractive investment opportunities raise the pay of properly trained talent and successful risk-takers, and their increased demand employs lesser-skilled workers in other lines of works—waiters and landscapers, for example. But an influx of low-skilled immigration spreads a given increase in the demand of properly trained talent and successful risk-takers over a greater number of lesser-skilled workers who compete with one another to satisfy that demand.


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

All available econometric studies show that the elasticities in question are systematically higher than the elasticity of capital/labor substitution (Krussel et al., 1996; Hamermesh, 1986) (compare Chapter 2), and these findings are confirmed by historical work on major structural shifts in employment in various countries and periods. It is easier to replace low-skilled workers with machinery or skilled workers than to do without skilled workers. However, the superiority of fiscal transfers and allocation by price is no more readily accepted in regard to wage redistribution than in regard to capital/labor redistribution. The left remains skeptical about reducing employer-paid social charges on low-wage workers.

If a union disagrees because it thinks that the employee should earn €1,525 a month and the manager only €3,810, then the only way to proceed is to attempt to forcibly impose a new wage schedule on employers. Of course, it would be better to increase the manager’s tax by €760 a month and use the proceeds to make a fiscal transfer of €760 to the low-skilled worker. That way, the firm would not have to pay more to its workers and less to its managers, which would inevitably lead to hiring fewer workers and more managers and thus to an increase in unemployment. But unions do not have the power to levy taxes and make transfers. Historically, the role of unions has been to intervene in conflicts of this type: when the state fails to play the redistributive role that the unions believe it should play, they step in and use the resources at their disposal: direct redistribution through struggle in the workplace.

If there is substantial elasticity of substitution between different types of labor (defined in the same way we defined elasticity of capital/labor substitution in Chapter 2), however, fiscal redistribution is strictly superior: it allows increasing the income of relatively unskilled workers by the same proportion as direct redistribution but without increasing the cost of low-skilled labor to the firm and thus without decreasing the number of low-skilled jobs. Once again, the superiority of fiscal redistribution comes from the fact that, unlike direct redistribution, it severs the connection between the price paid by the firm and the price received by the worker. This argument is quite general and does not apply only to redistribution between workers of different skill levels.


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

This presented economists with an empirical puzzle that was quite different from the one that had preoccupied them in the past. Previously, the focus for many had been on why the so-called ‘skill-premium’ was rising; why, for large parts of the twentieth century, the wages of high-­skilled workers were rising relative to the wages of low-skilled workers, even though the supply of the former was rising as well. (Typically, the premium was measured by comparing the wage of college graduates to those with only a high school education.) There was a popular explanation of this: technological change was ‘skill-biased’ and, for various reasons, new technologies raised the demand for high-skilled workers relative to lowskilled workers, pushing up their wages and that skill-premium.

There was a popular explanation of this: technological change was ‘skill-biased’ and, for various reasons, new technologies raised the demand for high-skilled workers relative to lowskilled workers, pushing up their wages and that skill-premium. But the trouble was that this story could not explain the hollowing-out of the labour market. There, the interesting fact was not so much that high-­ skilled workers were increasingly being paid more relative to low-skilled workers, but that those middling-skilled workers were enjoying neither the same wage nor job growth as the low-skilled or high-skilled at either end. In light of this shortcoming, support began to build for a different narrative, developed by a team of economists at MIT: David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane.

And job titles like robot engineer, database administrator, and computer support specialists, didn’t even exist in occupational classification as late as the 1970s. And while today’s tech industries don’t employ as many people directly as the smokestack industries of the twentieth century did, they support the incomes of many low-skilled service jobs, as high-income earners, whose skills are complemented by computers, demand many services, like those of janitors, gardeners, hairdressers, fitness trainers, and so on. Second, even if many jobs are becoming automatable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they must be automated anytime soon.


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

It’s simplest to see its effects on low-skilled workers. When an advanced country like the US imports low-skilled, labor-intensive goods, the demand for low-skilled labor in the US falls, simply because we produce less of those goods here. If there is to be full employment, wages for low-skilled workers—adjusted for inflation—have to fall.4 And if wages don’t fall enough, unemployment increases. It’s really that simple. Anybody who believes in the law of supply and demand should understand why globalization (in the absence of government programs to ameliorate its effects) hurts low-skilled workers. The same goes for labor more generally: the US imports labor-intensive goods, and thus trade liberalization (opening up US markets to foreign goods by reducing tariffs or other trade barriers) reduces the overall demand for labor, and thereby also reduces (real) wages in equilibrium.

., 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. AFSCME, 292n60 Jim Crow laws, 241, 271n3 job destruction, 83, 117 jobs; See also labor force participation ensuring full employment, 193–94 fiscal policy to ensure creation of, 194–96 with good working conditions, 192–97 guaranteed, 196–97 improving quality of, 197 low-skilled workers and, See low-skilled workers and new technologies, 118–23 reducing exploitation, 197 restoring work–life balance, 197 right to, 196–97 Jobs, Steve, 65, 117, 139 Johnson, Lyndon B., 13, 40, 210 joint ventures, with China, 95–96 judges, reducing tenure of, 166, 167 judiciary, 165–67; See also Supreme Court Juliana v.

The idea that our trade negotiators got snookered is laughable: we got almost everything we wanted in late-twentieth-century trade negotiations.2 Over the opposition of those from developing countries, we secured strong intellectual property protections—which protected the intellectual property of the advanced countries, but not that of developing countries. We’ve succeeded in forcing countries to open up their markets to our financial firms—and even to accept those highly risky derivatives and other financial products that played a central role in our own financial collapse. It’s true that American workers have been disadvantaged—low-skilled workers in particular have seen their wages reduced, in part because of globalization. But that is partly because American negotiators got what they asked for: the problem was with how we managed globalization and with what we wanted—trade agreements simply advanced corporate interests at the expense of workers in both developed and developing countries.


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

This view reflects the intuitive notion that technological change and globalization benefit one group and hurt the other, but it misses the important point that the two groups are affected differently in different places. Technological change and globalization result in more employment opportunities for a low-skilled worker in a high-tech hub but fewer opportunities for a similar worker in a hollowed-out manufacturing town. What divides America today is not just socioeconomic status but also geography. The Unequal Distribution of Death America’s Great Divergence is caused by economic forces. But it is having profound effects outside the economic realm.

We have seen that the changes in the global and national economy are causing an increase in inequality among workers with different skill levels, with the less skilled being hit the hardest. Differences in geographical mobility, coupled with increasing polarization among American cities, only exacerbate the problem. Thus, some of the earning inequality between highly skilled and low-skilled workers reflects mobility differences: if the less educated people were more able and willing to move to cities with better job opportunities, the gap between college graduates and high school graduates would shrink. By being less mobile, less educated workers are also significantly more likely to be unemployed.

In fact, the two complement each other, which means that an increase in the former group is likely to raise the productivity of the latter group. Second, firms are apt to respond to an inflow of highly skilled immigrants by investing more, and this new investment may further raise the productivity of low-skilled workers. Third, skilled immigrants generate important spillovers at the local level, since an increase in the number of highly educated individuals in a city tends to strengthen the local economy, thus generating local jobs and raising natives’ wages. In principle, it is possible that the effect is positive even for skilled Americans.


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

Finally, when technology leads to relatively sudden shifts in income between groups, it may also dampen overall economic growth and potentially precipitate the kind of collapse in aggregate demand reflected in the current slump. Consider each of the three sets of winners and losers discussed earlier. When SBTC increases the incomes of high-skill workers and decreases the incomes and employment of low-skill workers, the net effect may be a fall in overall demand. High-skill workers, given extra income, may choose to increase their leisure and savings rather than work extra hours. Meanwhile, low-skill workers lose their jobs, go on disability, or otherwise drop out of the labor force. Both groups work less than before, so overall output falls.5 One can tell a similar story for how super-wealthy superstars, given additional wealth, choose to save most of it while their less-than-stellar competitors have to cut back consumption.

Aside from the damage it does to the living standards of the affected workers, lower pay only postpones the day of reckoning. Moore’s Law is not a one-time blip but an accelerating exponential trend. The threat of technological unemployment is real. To understand this threat, we'll define three overlapping sets of winners and losers that technical change creates: (1) high-skilled vs. low-skilled workers, (2) superstars vs. everyone else, and (3) capital vs. labor. Each set has well-documented facts and compelling links to digital technology. What’s more, these sets are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the winners in one set are more likely to be winners in the other two sets as well, which concentrates the consequences.

In a growing economy, the gains to the winners may be larger than the losses of those who are hurt, but this is a small consolation to those who come out on the short end of the bargain. Ultimately, the effects of technology are an empirical question—one that is best settled by looking at the data. For all three sets of winners and losers, the news is troubling. Let’s look at each in turn. 1. High-Skilled vs. Low-Skilled Workers We’ll start with skill-biased technical change, which is perhaps the most carefully studied of the three phenomena. This is technical change that increases the relative demand for high-skill labor while reducing or eliminating the demand for low-skill labor. A lot of factory automation falls into this category, as routine drudgery is turned over to machines while more complex programming, management, and marketing decisions remain the purview of humans.


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

World War II not only destroyed an incalculable amount of wealth, both at home and abroad, but it also robbed countless individuals of their lives. Immigration, meanwhile, not only allows foreigners to share in the American Dream, which is something we should value for its own sake, but may also fuel economic growth.16 Low-skilled workers tend to bid down wages for low-skilled work, which sounds bad until you remember that this lowers the cost of the products we all buy. And high-skilled workers bring us all the benefits of their ability, which includes starting new businesses (see the careers of Andrew Carnegie, PayPal’s Elon Musk, Intel’s Andy Grove, and Google’s Sergey Brin, among many others).

Over the long run, minimum wage hikes can also lead companies to save money by replacing employees with technology, or by reducing employee perks and benefits. In other cases, higher labor costs may lead some companies not to expand, while other companies may never get started. Either way, fewer jobs for low-skilled workers.22 The point isn’t to criticize the Card and Krueger study in particular. It’s that it’s wrong to take a single empirical study as gospel, and to extrapolate its results without great care. (Writing in 1998, Krugman found it “remarkable” that “this rather iffy result [from Card and Krueger] has been seized upon by some liberals as a rationale for making large minimum wage increases a core component of the liberal agenda. . . .

Show me a plumber, and I’ll show you a 300-pound guy with a giant butt crack and a tool belt. He’s a punch line.”37 But it’s the plumber who gets the last laugh: the fact is that with only a couple years of training, a junior plumber can earn between $40,000 and $50,000 a year, and an experienced plumber can earn upward of $70,000.38 Even the low-skilled service-sector jobs at places such as McDonald’s and Walmart have been unfairly maligned as “dead-end jobs.” A low-skilled, low-paying job is not a limit on opportunity—it’s a stepping-stone to greater opportunity. Or it is if you choose to make it one. Most employers today are desperate, not just for great employees, but even for good employees—competent workers who show up on time and stay until the job is done.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

This naturally drives up the reward to technology and high-skill labor in the developed nation. Likewise, free trade pushes the developing nation to make more of the goods that involve a lot of low-skill labor, and this is good for low-skill workers in developing nations. The resulting intensification of low-skill-intensive exports, however, tends to be bad for low-skill workers in rich nations. This was basically the story of globalization in the 1980s. High-skill workers in rich nations won, while low-skill workers in rich nations lost. In both cases, the “mechanism of action” was trade—either higher exports or higher imports. The second unbundling (also known as the New Globalization) adds a new twist to the story.

Note that this part of the New Globalization’s impact is due to international knowledge flows as well as the trade flows thus generated; this is thus one of things that is really new about the New Globalization. When it comes to the impact that shows up in the developed nation, the vector of transmission is heightened import competition as before. That is, the GVC-fueled rise in the output of low-skill-intensive goods tends to lead to more imports by the developed nations. This plainly harms low-skill workers in the rich nation. Again, this is something that has happened in most advanced nations. There is, however, a more nuanced result from this sort of shift. Brilliant research by Branko Milanovic in his 2016 book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization shows what this “new winners and losers” means from a planetary perspective.

Specifically, it meant a regrouping of many low-skill tasks into occupations that tended to require higher skills. Although such automation tends to eliminate some jobs, the workers that stay on tend to be more productive and they tend to need more skills. Thus this aspect of advancing information technology tends to be good for G7 factory workers with advanced skills and bad for low-skill workers whose job is now done by a machine. By contrast, better communications technology allowed more stages to be moved offshore. The stages that were offshored tended to be related to simple fabrication and assembly steps that made heavy use of factory workers. Such workers were hardly members of “the one percent,” in the United States, Europe, and Japan, but they were in the middle-income range for blue-collar workers.


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

Moreover, in parallel with the end of the Cold War, technology was flattening the global economic playing field, reducing the advantages of the people in developed countries such as the United States, while empowering those in the developing ones. The pace of global change accelerated to a speed faster than any we had seen before. It took us Americans some time to appreciate that while many of our new competitors were low-wage, low-skilled workers, for the first time a growing number, particularly those in Asia, were low-wage, high-skilled workers. We knew all about cheap labor, but we had never had to deal with cheap genius—at scale. Our historical reference point had always been Europe. The failure to understand that we were living in a new world and to adapt to it was a colossal and costly American mistake.

The second story tells us that all this connectivity is enabling a whole new category of workers to join the global marketplace. In the process it is exposing Americans to competition from a category of workers we have not seen before on a large scale: the low-wage, high-skilled worker. We have gotten used to low-wage, low-skilled workers in large numbers. But the low-wage, high-skilled worker is a whole new species, to which we will have to adapt. The third story tells us that these technologies are now empowering individuals to level hierarchies—from Arab tyrannies, to mainstream-media companies, to traditional retail outlets, to the United States of America itself.

The first are “creative creators,” people who do their nonroutine work in a distinctively nonroutine way—the best lawyers, the best accountants, the best doctors, the best entertainers, the best writers, the best professors, and the best scientists. Second are “routine creators,” who do their nonroutine work in a routine way—average lawyers, average accountants, average radiologists, average professors, and average scientists. The third are what we would call “creative servers,” nonroutine low-skilled workers who do their jobs in inspired ways—whether it is the baker who comes up with a special cake recipe and design or the nurse with extraordinary interpersonal bedside skills in a nursing home or the wine steward who dazzles you with his expertise on Australian cabernets. And the fourth are “routine servers,” who do routine serving work in a routine way, offering nothing extra.


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

Computers and sophisticated robots now assemble the major components of a car—which creates high-paying jobs for people who write software and design robots while reducing the demand for workers with no specialized skills other than a willingness to do an honest day’s work. Meanwhile, international trade puts low-skilled workers in greater competition with other low-skilled workers around the globe. In the long run, international trade is a powerful force for good; in the short run, it has victims. Trade, like technology, makes high-skilled workers better off because it provides new markets for our high-tech exports. Boeing sells aircraft to India, Microsoft sells software to Europe, McKinsey & Company sells consulting services to Latin America.

A high proportion of America’s homeless population suffers from substance abuse, disability, or mental illness. A healthy economy matters, too. It was easier to find a job in 2001 than it was in 1975 or 1932. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats; economic growth is a very good thing for poor people. Period. But even at high tide, low-skilled workers are clinging to driftwood while their better-skilled peers are having cocktails on their yachts. A robust economy does not transform valet parking attendants into college professors. Investments in human capital do that. Macroeconomic factors control the tides; human capital determines the quality of the boat.

The twenty-first century is an especially good time to be a rocket scientist. Our economy is evolving in ways that favor skilled workers. For example, the shift toward computers in nearly every industry favors workers who either have computer skills or are smart enough to learn them on the job. Technology makes smart workers more productive while making low-skilled workers redundant. ATMs replaced bank tellers; self-serve pumps replaced gas station attendants; automated assembly lines replaced workers doing mindless, repetitive tasks. Indeed, the assembly line at General Motors encapsulates the major trend in the American economy. Computers and sophisticated robots now assemble the major components of a car—which creates high-paying jobs for people who write software and design robots while reducing the demand for workers with no specialized skills other than a willingness to do an honest day’s work.


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

Illegal immigration to the United States is a function, first and foremost, of too many foreigners chasing too few visas. Some 400,000 people enter the country illegally each year—a direct consequence of the fact that our current policy is to make available just five thousand visas annually for low-skilled workers. If we want to reduce the number of illegal entries, the most sensible course is to provide more legal ways for people to come. This could be done through some sort of guest-worker program or by lifting the quota on green cards or both. The means matter less than the end, which should be to give U.S. businesses legal access to foreign workers going forward.

Like Peri, Vedder concluded that the reason immigration doesn’t cause unemployment is because immigrants help enlarge America’s economic pie. “Immigrants expand total output and the demand for labor, offsetting the negative effects that a greater labor supply might have,” he writes. “They fill vital niches at the ends of the skill spectrum, doing low-skilled jobs that native Americans rebuff (at prevailing wages) as well as sophisticated high-skill jobs.” Among high-skilled immigrant workers, these dots are perhaps easier to connect. Think of a silicon chip manufacturer in the United States that hires a bright immigrant engineer from China to redesign its products with the goal of making them more cost-efficient and marketable.

If Ford and General Motors didn’t have competition from Toyota and Honda, cars would be more expensive and fewer people could afford them. Closing off the U.S. economy to foreign labor likewise would have negative consequences, primarily because the country would have less human capital overall. What’s more, we’d be a poorer society because we’d be using the human capital we did have less efficiently. Low-skilled immigrants fill millions of jobs in agriculture, construction, hotels, health care, light manufacturing, and retail. These are big and important sectors of the U.S. economy, and businesses depend on immigrant labor to stay competitive. Again, the issue isn’t so much the viability of removing foreign labor from the U.S. economy.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

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

SHIFTING GOALPOSTS AND SKILL GAPS EVERYWHERE The story of skill gaps is no longer a new one, but over the next decade, it will become a familiar one. Around the world, a shortage of approximately 40 million high-skilled workers and 45 million medium-skill workers may emerge, by 2020, alongside a surplus of 95 million low-skilled workers. If the previous era was defined by millions of workers in China joining the global labor force, the next era will see skill gaps emerge even in China—as its number of young workers shrinks by nearly 50 percent between today and 2030 and the country falls short of high-skilled workers by 23 million.4 “Skills security” also seems to be eroding.

This analysis will become increasingly granular, down to knowing the number of college graduates and workers with specific training in cities around the world. Your business can gain an advantage by using this data to create maps of global skills supply, which will inform decisions about where to invest. The world is likely to have too few high-skill workers and not enough jobs for low-skill workers 1 Twenty-five countries from the analyzed set of seventy countries, with 2010 GDP per capita greater than US$20,000 at 2005 purchasing power parity (PPP) levels. 2 Eleven countries from the analyzed set of seventy countries, from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, with 2010 GDP per capita less than $3,000 at 2005 PPP. 3 Low-skill defined for advanced economies as no post-secondary education; for developing economies, low skill is primary education or less.

For instance, retailers that invested in bar-coding devices made their staff at checkout counters more efficient. Manufacturers that adopted computerized numerical control lathes for turning and milling eliminated the need for manual measurement and readjustment. Smart technology devices used by low-skill workers can equip them to perform higher-skill jobs. For example, as part of a financial inclusion program, introduction of technology allowed twenty thousand less-skilled workers in southern India to work as rural banking agents, processing payments with smart cards, cell phones, and kiosks. Using technology to improve the productivity of professional and managerial work has traditionally not received as much attention as it has for more labor-intensive occupations.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

CONTENTS A Note on Terminology Introduction, 2018 Introduction, 2007 PART ONE · IMMIGRANTS AND THE ECONOMY Myth 1. Immigrants take American jobs Myth 2. Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages Myth 3. Unions oppose immigration because it harms the working class Myth 4. Immigrants don’t pay taxes Myth 5. Immigrants are a drain on the economy Myth 6. Immigrants send most of what they earn out of the country in the form of remittances PART TWO · IMMIGRANTS AND THE LAW Myth 7. The rules apply to everyone, so new immigrants need to follow them just as immigrants in the past did Myth 8.

The deportation of thousands of people of Mexican origin from the Southwest during the decade did little to affect employment rates in that region (unless you count those employed to carry out the deportations). Unemployment during the Depression, like unemployment today, simply had very little to do with immigration. MYTH 2 IMMIGRANTS COMPETE WITH LOW-SKILLED WORKERS AND DRIVE DOWN WAGES Wages in the United States have indeed been falling with respect to prices, and with respect to profits, since the 1960s. In 2006, wages and salaries made up a smaller proportion of the country’s gross national product than at any time since the government started collecting those statistics in the 1940s, while corporate profits rose to record highs.1 The gradual gains made by the working class during the first half of the twentieth century were being chipped away in the second half—just as immigration rates began to rise again.

This contradiction continues to characterize U.S. law and society: many people who are physically present here are still excluded from the rights and privileges of citizenship. Keeping some people outside of the bounds of equality and citizenship served employers’ need for cheap labor in the past, and continues to do so today. So let’s return to the original question: do immigrants compete with low-skilled workers for low-paying jobs? Yes. But the reason that this competition exists is because too many people are deprived of rights. The proposals for immigration reform that are circulating today do nothing to expand the rights of those currently excluded—in fact they do just the opposite. Further restrictions on immigration will not lower the numbers of immigrants—as long as the demand for labor is there, history has shown that immigrants will keep coming.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Zeynep Ton, an adjunct associate professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, refers to these as “bad jobs.”13 These bad jobs won’t go away in the Gig Economy; they are the persistent bane of our economy and our society. The Gig Economy is not a silver bullet. It won’t eliminate bad jobs and poorly paid workers, but what it can do is offer some positive change for these low-skill workers. In the Gig Economy, these workers have the chance to gain more control and have more flexibility and autonomy in their working lives. Uber drivers work under similar circumstances that most taxi drivers always have: they are contractors with no benefits, no overtime or minimum wage, and no access to unemployment insurance.

Similarly, the economic plight of an on-demand worker for a company like TaskRabbit or Postmates is not materially different from that of a low-wage hourly worker in a fast food restaurant or retail store. They both have low wages and no benefits, but workers who wouldn’t dream of applying for a job in a fast food restaurant are willing to work on platforms like TaskRabbit or Postmates partly because they can do so when and how much they wish. The Gig Economy gives low-skill workers the chance to move from bad jobs to better work. It’s not a big change, but it’s a change in the right direction. Is the Gig Economy Really New? If we step back and consider the Gig Economy and its place in the history of work, we realize that it’s not really new. There have always been contractor and consulting gigs, as well as part-time jobs.

Their income is stagnating, their benefits are shrinking, and they are too slowly coming to terms with the reality that they no longer have job security. These workers are surviving in their full-time jobs but struggling if they lose them. The fate of retail and service workers and others in low-skill jobs changes marginally in the Gig Economy, but they continue to be the worst off. These workers are already in mostly poorly paid, insecure, part-time jobs with limited to no benefits, and no control over their schedule. Their wages are stagnating or declining, and their jobs are the most at risk of being automated.


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

Malign and benign forces that reduce inequality Type of society Malign forces Benign forces Societies with stagnant mean income Idiosyncratic events Wars (through destruction) Civil conflict (state breakdown) Epidemics Societies with a rising mean income Wars (through destruction and higher taxation) Social pressure through politics (socialism, trade unions) Civil conflict (state breakdown) Widespread education Aging population (demand for social protection) Technological change that favors low-skilled workers When it comes to malign forces, however, there is more similarity between preindustrial and modern societies because war and civil conflict play a role in both stagnant and expanding economies. The effect of wars on inequality in preindustrial societies probably varied depending on whether they were wars of conquest, like the ones prosecuted by the Roman Empire at its peak, which led to increased inequality through the creation of servile labor, or wars that resulted in state collapse and thus reduced inequality.

(Data on wage distributions in socialist economies are plentiful, and a number of studies have documented the wage compression.)44 The education premium was also reduced. Since most of the countries that became socialist were less developed than Western Europe and the United States, one might expect the skill premium to have been high (say, similar to what it was in Latin America). But nationalization of enterprises changed that: wages of low-skilled workers were relatively high and wages of high-skilled workers relatively low. Massive increase in schooling on the supply side, however, would have produced some reduction in the high-skill wage premium even if these were market economies. Nationalization of the means of production had two other effects on income distribution.

As argued many years ago by Lindert and Williamson (1985), by Polak and Williamson (1993), and more recently by Williamson in his book Trade and Poverty (2011), US inequality continued to increase after British inequality peaked because the arrival of new immigrants in the 1910s kept wages for low-skill jobs relatively low and caused overall US wage distribution to widen, or stretch out. This is the wage-stretching explanation for increased inequality, as contrasted with what van Zanden (1995) called the classical explanation, which sees an increasing share of capital in functional income distribution gradually leading to greater interpersonal inequality.


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

With rare exceptions, the pandemic put everyone, unexpectedly, in the same precarious predicament. For many Americans, the experience of losing everything—including their lives—was in sudden stark relief. But the disease and its economic fallout had the greatest impact in the poorest regions and zip codes. Young people, low-income and low-skilled workers, those without a college degree, and women (from all backgrounds) disproportionately bore the brunt of the economic effects in those communities and across America. Low-income workers and racial minorities also died in higher numbers. By 2021 everywhere looked like the Rust Belt with mass layoffs.

Ebac, which Elliott founded to make dehumidifiers and water coolers in Bishop Auckland in 1973, relocated to nearby Newton Aycliffe after expanding its production to air conditioners and washing machines. Elliott, who left school at fifteen to become an electrical engineering apprentice, wanted to ensure that local low-skilled workers would have the same opportunity that he had had to access a good manufacturing job. In an interview with the local newspaper, the Northern Echo, Elliott summed up his ethos: “As an employer you have a responsibility to support worthwhile causes in your community. We don’t try to make things easy for people, but to make things possible for them.”

.), 300 education effects/socioeconomic bias (UK), 297–99, 311, 320 environmental degradation and, 264 “essential workers” and, 296, 335–36 internet connectivity and, 297, 299, 299–300 masks/physical distance and, 265, 268 other natural disasters and, 264, 265 pandemic warnings and, 264 poor/low-skilled workers and, 295–97 populist countries’ failure with, 265, 266 Russia, UK, U.S. failures with, 265 unemployment, 296–97, 301–2 U.S. health system deterioration and, 267–68 wealthy people and, 301 women/single mothers and, 295–96, 300–301 COVID-19 pandemic/Trump and administration failures of, 267, 268–70, 335 GAO report, 267 inequalities and, 267–68 Lancet Commission report, 267–68, 335 press conferences/misinformation, 268–69 “winging it” vs. experts, 268–70 Crabtree, Charles (Charlie) information on scholarships/financial aid, 61–62, 77 life/activities, 61 question on USSR/Russia, 61–62, 237 creating opportunities exchanges and, 358, 361 hosting students, 358 mentoring, 357, 358, 359, 360 networks and, 359 overcoming biases, 357–61 overview, 357–61 programs’ information/access, 360 solutions (U.S.), 302–5 volunteering, 358, 359, 360 See also equality of opportunity (overview) critical thinking, 310 Cruz, Ted, 276, 278 Cuban missile crisis, 129–30, 198.


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

Since the United States is well endowed with land that is ideal for many types of agricultural production, with a large capital stock that includes expensive, highly-mechanized farm equipment, and with technological knowledge about agricultural techniques, seeds, and fertilizers, it is unsurprising that we export many agricultural products.1 Likewise, since the United States is well endowed with technologically sophisticated engineers, scientists, and computer scientists, and spends large amounts on research and development to enhance what those workers can do, it also exports goods that reflect these advantages, such as medical equipment and software. At the same time, the United States has fewer low-skill workers relative to other countries, and goods like textiles, shoes, steel, and many manufactured goods may be produced abroad at lower cost. This reduces demand for domestic workers in these industries, and lowers their wages. Since low-skilled workers are more likely to be in import industries and high-skill workers are more likely to be in export industries, trade may systematically worsen the income distribution.2 International trade may also play a role, indirectly, in the rise of the top 1 percent share of the income distribution.

Chapter 4 tackles the important distributional consequences of trade, showing that international trade generates both winners and losers. Without strong accompanying policies, we have no way to be sure that large segments of society are not harmed by trade. In the United States, international trade is more likely to reward capitalists and high-income, high-skill workers, while reducing wages and opportunities for low-income, low-skill workers. Chapter 4 also tackles other sources of workers’ woes, and most importantly, the effects of rapid technological change, including automation and the rapid spread of computers and the Internet. These technological forces have been more important than international trade in terms of harmful effects on low- and middle-income workers.

The losers from these global trends are not happy, and they have responded by voting for those that promise populist interventions, such as erecting trade barriers, imposing penalties on firms that send jobs offshore, and renegotiating, or exiting, prior trade agreements. Yet the populists proposing to turn back the clock on globalization do not suggest turning back the clock on technological innovation. Surely, if we all threw away our computers, or even banned computing, that would be a quick way to increase demand for low-skilled workers and return to the economy of yore. Suddenly, there would be an enormous demand for labor to do the myriad tasks that computers used to do for us. That argument is silly, of course. First, delaying technological progress, let alone reversing it, is very difficult to do. (Though not impossible.


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

But as technology improved, automation eliminated many of these positions -- robots now build the cars and computers manage the books. Technology allowed a relocation of other jobs to places with lower labor costs. A huge mass of middle-skilled workers suddenly found itself competing with low-skilled workers, in America and abroad, for low-skill jobs. At the same time, technology increased the return to high-skill positions. The Internet now allows a skilled designer to serve customers around the world, substantially increasing his potential returns. Economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin further argue that America's educational system has not been very successful at increasing educational attainment.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The near-impossibility of firing workers on permanent contracts who underperform may deter employers from taking the risk of employing those whose productivity is uncertain, such as young people and immigrants.36 It may also create dual labour markets, where some workers enjoy permanent contracts and others are trapped on temporary ones that offer less protection. In inflexible labour markets, there is a higher risk that migrants will end up unemployed. Low-skilled workers such as Mohammed and Souleymane deliver a sizeable drudgery dividend, providing vital services, doing jobs that locals don’t want to do and enabling locals to do better jobs that they prefer. Contrary to fears that they harm locals’ job prospects, studies find that they neither displace locals from jobs nor depress their wages.

But in 1991 Spain started requiring visas after it joined the Schengen Agreement that permits passport-free travel among European member countries. Moroccans duly tried to sneak in by boat, while temporary workers became permanent settlers and then brought over their families. To ensure that temporary migrants leave again, they need to have the possibility to come back. New Zealand’s seasonal migration programme for low-skilled workers from Pacific island states has an overstay rate of less than 1 percent because, while migrants can stay only seven months in any season, they can return in subsequent years.59 In contrast, Britain’s seasonal agricultural workers scheme, which was scrapped in 2013 and is set to be reintroduced once the post-Brexit immigration system is in place, had an overstay rate of as much as 10 percent because it was open only to students, who were tempted by other jobs in Britain and could not otherwise return.60 In contrast, within the EU, where people can move freely, people come and go all the time, and only a minority settle for good.

Moreover, both migrant workers and Maltese ones have benefited from rising wages.8 In short, migrants are making the Maltese more moneyed. Drudgery isn’t disappearing Contrary to public perceptions, less than a third of migrants in rich OECD countries in 2015–16 had a low level of education, a proportion that has fallen considerably since the turn of the century.9 While people in rich countries often view migrants doing low-paid, less-skilled jobs as a burden and a threat, the Maltese model highlights how they can in fact provide a sizeable drudgery dividend. A common misconception is that migrants’ economic contribution depends on their skill level, with highly skilled ones making a positive contribution and less-skilled ones having a negligible – or even negative – impact.


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

Around 20 per cent of low-skill jobs are taken by people born abroad, and according to Ian Gordon of the LSE, wages in the bottom 20 per cent may have been depressed by at least 15 per cent in periods of peak inflow.57 Until the big immigration surge starting in the late 1990s there were fewer people in London employed at the very bottom end of the labour market than elsewhere in the country, and they were better paid. Mass immigration has expanded the numbers at the bottom and increased the pay gap. Why would you employ a local school-leaver for a low-skill service sector job when you can hire a better motivated graduate with modest wage expectations from eastern or southern Europe?

Notwithstanding all these depressing statistics about ‘bad jobs’ it is also worth noting that 71 per cent of workers think they have a good job, according to that 2015 British Social Attitudes survey.46 And Andrew Oswald of Warwick University has found no correlation at all between levels of education and job satisfaction.47 Quite a few people in low-skill jobs have high satisfaction and some people with advanced degrees who are paid £200,000 have low satisfaction. The disappearing middle income/middle status jobs must also be kept in perspective. Even allowing for 40 per cent of high-skill jobs and 30 per cent of low-skill jobs that still leaves 30 per cent for middling ones, and although the ‘hollowing out’ of skill levels is well established there seems to have been much less hollowing out of incomes, with no significant reduction in the number of people in the middle income deciles.

Food manufacturing, for example, is Britain’s biggest manufacturing sector, employing around 400,000 people, and more than one third of production staff are foreign born, mainly from eastern Europe, up from almost zero in 2005. Britain is likely to remain quite a high immigration country for the foreseeable future, although after Brexit the number of low-skilled workers from the EU will eventually fall. The future direction of policy is likely to involve making a clearer distinction between permanent and short-term migrants—more than half of the annual net migration flow into Britain is short-term (students or workers) and, in the few years prior to the Brexit vote, only on average about 100,000 people a year were being granted permanent residence, in fact in the year to June 2016 it was only 67,000.22 (Just imagine how different the politics of immigration might have been if the government’s ‘tens of thousands’ target had been those granted permanent residence rather than net immigration.)


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

As we saw in the previous chapter, when the Industrial Revolution got under way in Britain, new machines were introduced to the workplace, new production processes were set up, and so new tasks had to be done. But it turned out that those without the skills of the day were often best placed to perform these tasks. Technology, rather than being skill-biased, was “unskill-biased” instead.11 A popular picture of the Industrial Revolution depicts a wave of machines displacing swaths of low-skilled workers from their roles—people who made their living spinning thread and wefting cloth with bare hands and basic tools finding themselves without work. But this is not what happened. It was the high-skilled workers of the time who were under threat. Ned Ludd, the apocryphal leader of the Luddite uprising against automation, was a skilled worker of his age, not an unskilled one.

Again, see the US Bureau of Labor Statistics “Household Data.” 27.  Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: First Mariner Books, 2013), p. 17. 28.  Ibid., p. 23. 29.  Ibid., pp. 82–5. 30.  Ibid., p. 89. 31.  Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “What If Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?,” New York Times, 11 January 2019. 32.  Moretti, New Geography of Jobs. 33.  Eurostat (2019) data, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Young_people_-_social_inclusion#Living_with_parents (accessed April 2019). 34.  Moretti, New Geography of Jobs, p. 157. 35.  

See, for instance, Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons, “Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technological Change and Offshoring,” American Economic Review 104, no. 8 (2014): 2509–26; David Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings,” Center for American Progress (April 2010); David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1553–97; and Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” Review of Economics and Statistics 89, no. 1 (2007): 119–33. 19.  For the 0.01 percent statistic, see Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” published online at https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/ (2016).


pages: 470 words: 148,730

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 third, closely related point is that employers may want to reorganize production to make effective use of the new workers, which can create new roles for the native low-skilled population. In the Danish case we discussed above, Danish low-skilled workers eventually benefited from the influx of migrants, in part because it enabled them to change their occupations.31 Where there were more migrants around, more native low-skilled workers upgraded from manual to nonmanual jobs and changed employers. While doing so, they also shifted to jobs with more complex tasks and that required more communication and technical content; this is consistent with the fact that the immigrants hardly spoke Danish when they first arrived and could not be rivals for these jobs.

So when there are more migrants, the price of those services tends to go down, which helps the native workers and frees them to take on other jobs.32 Highly skilled women, in particular, are more likely to be able to go out to work when there are many migrants around.33 The entry of highly skilled women to the labor market in turn boosts demand for low-skilled labor (childcare, catering, cleaning) at home or in the firms they manage or run. The effects of migrants will also crucially depend on who the migrants are. If the most enterprising move, they may start businesses that create jobs for the natives. If they are the least qualified, they might have to join the undifferentiated mass that native low-skilled workers will have to compete against. Who migrates typically depends on the barriers migrants have to overcome. When President Trump compared the migrants from “shithole countries” to the good ones coming from Norway, he most probably did not know that a long time ago Norwegian immigrants were part of the “huddled masses” Emma Lazarus talked about.34 There is actually a case study of Norwegian migrants to the United States during the age of mass migration, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 At the time, there was nothing to stop migration, other than the price of passage.

The decline started in 1990 and accelerated in the mid-2000s.71 Furthermore, there is a striking change in the pattern of internal migration.72 Until the mid-1980s, rich states in the US had much faster population-growth rates. Sometime after 1990, this relation disappeared; on average, rich states no longer attract more people. High-skilled workers continue to move from poor states to rich states, but now low-skilled workers, to the extent they still move, seem to be moving in the opposite direction. These two trends mean that since the 1990s, the US labor market has become increasingly segregated by skill level. The coasts attract more and more educated workers, while the less well educated seem to concentrate inland, particularly in the old industrial cities in the east like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.


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

In the workplace, so the story runs, computers are particularly good at replacing routine tasks: switchboards in telephone exchanges, repetitive tasks on production lines, giving out money at a bank. And in the last years computers have gotten even smarter: issuing boarding passes, checking you out at supermarkets, and answering routine questions over the phone. As these computers have gotten cheaper and cheaper, it’s become more and more worthwhile for firms to replace low-skilled workers with computers. Demand for those workers has fallen and so, therefore, have their wages. More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) have warned that, because of the speed with which information technology improves, computers may start replacing humans much faster than we are used to.

In the United States, the gap in income between skilled and unskilled workers, which initially gave rise to explanations based on skills-biased technical change, stopped diverging in about 2000. Since then, the big rises have accrued mostly to the top 1 percent. See figure 6.3. Figure 6.3. Income shares of the top 1 percent in English-speaking countries. Source: Alvaredo et al. 2013. It’s easy to imagine how low-skilled workers in developed countries might lose out if they don’t have the skills to work with computers, or if their jobs are threatened by lower-paid workers in other countries. But the way these changes would benefit only the very rich is less clear. Some of the very rich have gotten richer because of technology or because they employ cheap foreign labor.

This is a staggeringly good outcome for people in poorer countries, as Milanović’s (2005) research shows: the last two decades have seen a huge and long-overdue rise in prosperity of the developing world. But the working classes in the developed world have, it is argued, borne most of the costs. Immigration can play a similar role, increasing competition for low-skilled jobs (especially between new and recent immigrants). The third explanation for today’s inequality, focused on wealth inequality, is more basic: it is the idea that capital tends to accumulate unless some countervailing force prevents it. Piketty’s now famous r > g inequality (explained in box 6.2) implies that if returns on capital (r) exceed the growth of the economy as a whole (g), then the slice of the economic pie owned by the rich will generally grow.


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

Ludwig von Mises, who inspired generations of austere economists in the Austrian school and many modern conservative politicians, embraced immigration. By forcing people to endure economic hardship, von Mises believed that barriers to immigration led ultimately to war in Europe. Nevertheless, convincing voters in advanced economies to side with immigrants is a tough sell. The reasons are no mystery. Wages have stagnated for low-skilled workers—both blue-collar and service workers—and migration tends to reduce them further. New immigrants put pressure on public services from schools to housing to health care, stirring more resentment. Migrants who speak different languages and come from unfamiliar cultures provoke a social backlash, especially when nativist politicians malign them for partisan purposes.

They face transitional unemployment and a downward income spiral moving from high-paid jobs in manufacturing to lower-paid jobs in low-value-added service sectors (the “hamburger-flipping” jobs). Globalization can pose a threat, meantime, to anyone who feels their national, ethnic, cultural, or religious identity might suffer. Rural, low-skilled workers most fear this loss of status. Globalization and trade have hurt low-skilled blue-collar workers in advanced economies. A similar fate will increasingly hurt low- and semi-skilled white collar service workers where virtual access can substitute for physical presence. With a few months of training and no language barriers to worry about, virtual counterparts in emerging markets can fill many service jobs remotely.

Lawmakers have occasionally tried to assist workers who lose jobs for reasons stemming from trade. In 1962 Congress created the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, the first in a series of programs including the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Reauthorization Act of 2015. Aimed at unskilled and low-skilled workers who lose jobs because of trade, TAA programs don’t get much respect from skeptics. “Trade Burial Assistance” is what cynics call it. There is simply no easy way to replace jobs lost to trade. Proponents of basic trade theory have a naive answer to this controversy. They argue that when a rich country trades freely with a poor country, each one will pursue its comparative advantage.


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

James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in the 1770s ignited a surge of new innovations and technologies, including the transformation from hand to machine production, the introduction of mechanized cotton spinning (and with it the mass production of textiles), Jethro Tull’s (earlier) development of the horse-drawn seed drill (which helped increase food and agricultural production), the shift in energy sources from wood and charcoal to much cheaper coal, and the large-scale production of chemicals and iron. The beginnings of modern manufacturing and industrialization helped create millions of jobs for poor, low-skilled workers. While the wages they earned seem paltry by today’s standards, they were better than the low and highly volatile farm income that most left behind. As manufacturing grew more sophisticated and workers learned more specialized skills, which took several decades, wages began to grow. By the middle of the nineteenth century, incomes were rising faster than at any previous time in world history.

Nonfarm rural incomes also played a role, with people finding employment in small businesses making farm tools, building furniture, processing food, and selling goods in small retail shops. In the 1980s, Indonesia began to promote urban-based, labor-intensive manufacturing of shoes, textiles, garments, toys, jewelry, and many other goods for the export market. These enterprises created millions of jobs for low-skilled workers—many of them poor or near poor. All along, Indonesia complemented these strategies with efforts to invest in basic education, make primary health care available, and introduce one of the first (and largest) profitable microfinance programs in the world. The combination of sound macroeconomic management, political stability, and sensible economic policies promoted growth and helped create new economic opportunities for the poor.

Growth tends to help the poor most when economic activity is based in areas that provide the greatest job opportunities for unskilled workers, such as agriculture, manufacturing of simple consumer goods, and basic services. It is weakest where income is already highly unequal, or when growth is concentrated in natural resources or activities that use fewer low-skilled workers. But the cases in which the poor do not benefit from growth are the exception, not the rule. 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.


pages: 187 words: 55,801

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

We need only go back to 1929 when life expectancy was twenty years less than it is today to illustrate the point. But getting to the long run can be messy since economic growth in the short run usually creates losers as well as winners.8 During the industrial revolution, the short-run impact of growth was almost the opposite of what we see today. Technology favored not highskilled workers but low-skilled workers as machines combined with unskilled labor to make products ranging from textiles to bicycles to guns. It was higher-skilled workers—weavers, clock makers, and other craftsmen—whom the technology displaced. In some later periods, technology distributed its benefits more evenly. When John Kennedy was president, he could say “a rising tide lifts all the boats”9 and be substantially correct.

But these head-to-head comparisons tell us little since food preparation and serving workers are counted under one occupational title while jobs requiring significant education tend to be divided into many occupations (e.g., electrical engineering is one of sixteen major engineering occupations classified in BLS statistics). 44 CHAPTER 3 The shift that Jeremy Rifkin feared, a “deskilled” occupational structure, requires that the total number of low-skilled jobs ( janitors plus security guards plus food preparation and service workers, etc.) increases more than the total number of higher-skilled jobs (lawyers plus doctors plus electrical engineers plus mechanical engineers, and so on). These totals are the kind of occupational categories displayed in figure 3.2, where the food preparation and service workers are included in Service Occupations.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The researchers show what every young job seeker of recent years already knows, that “in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers”—thus the widely noted upsurge in file clerks and receptionists with bachelor’s degrees, for example. The next step: “This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” That finding not only makes intuitive sense, it also helps explain America’s unusually low overall employment rate and the stagnation of wages. FROM KNOWLEDGE WORKERS TO RELATIONSHIP WORKERS It sounds as if smart, highly educated people will be scorned in the coming economy—but that is not necessarily the case.

Information technology had developed to a point where it could take over many medium-skilled jobs—bookkeeping, back-office jobs, repetitive factory work. The number of jobs in those categories diminished, and wages stagnated for the shrinking group of workers who still did them. Yet the trend was limited. At both ends of the skill spectrum, people in high-skill jobs and low-skill service jobs did much better. The number of jobs in those categories increased, and pay went up. Economists called it the polarization of the labor market, and they observed it in the United States and many other developed countries. At the top end of the market, infotech still wasn’t good enough to take over the problem-solving, judging, and coordinating tasks of high-skill workers like managers, lawyers, consultants, and financiers; in fact, it made those workers more productive by giving them more information at lower cost.

“College is no longer the automatic ticket to success,” they have asserted, remarkably. “We saw that over the course of the twentieth century new technologies rewarded general skills, such as those concerning math, science, knowledge of grammar, and ability to read and interpret blueprints,” they say. Now, they say, that’s about to change because there’s ever more low-cost competition for high-skill jobs. The competition can come from humans in developing economies, and, in addition, “skills for which a computer program can substitute are also in danger.” So what’s the way forward in this new world? “Skills for non-routine employments and jobs with in-person skills are less susceptible” to low-cost competition, they point out.


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

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. Similar complex and fragmented production processes apply to the products that constitute around 85 percent of global GDP. This approach has created a rising wage premium for skilled labor and a growing number of poorly paid, insecure, low-skilled jobs. The process is exacerbated in developed economies by the shift from manufacturing to service industries, which are currently more difficult to relocate or automate.

It enhances the power of the financial sector and financiers, who can command higher incomes, further increasing their wealth. Healthcare, education, and childcare are essential to increased participation in and the quality of the workforce. In developed countries, higher skill levels are needed to escape low-skilled jobs and falling real wages. Occupations requiring a university education currently offer salaries two to three times higher than those requiring lesser qualifications. While manufactured products such as cars and electronics have decreased in price, healthcare, education, and childcare costs have risen more than general price levels and incomes.

China frequently uses workers from home on foreign projects, to take advantage of lower costs and avoid the employment conditions of the host country. Conflicts, sometimes violent, with the local workforce are common. Workers, irrespective of profession and skill, now face what John Maynard Keynes termed technological unemployment. The process was championed as reducing low-skilled monotonous jobs and increasing employment mobility, as well as providing greater employment and lifestyle choices. Economists lauded the new knowledge/bioengineered/clean and green (delete as required) economy. The displaced workers would become highly educated and skilled, finding new, intellectually challenging and highly paid jobs.


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

Allen, ‘Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 46(4), 2009, pp. 418–435 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2009.04.004>. 83 John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1923), p. 80. 84 Delphine Strauss and Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, ‘Dutch Court Rulings Break New Ground on Gig Worker Data Rights’, Financial Times, 12 March 2021 <https://www.ft.com/content/334d1ca5-26af-40c7-a9c5-c76e3e57fba1> [accessed 16 April 2021]. 85 Emma Peaslee, ‘Results from the City That Just Gave Away Cash’, NPR, 9 March 2021 <https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/03/09/975009239/results-from-the-city-that-just-gave-away-cash> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 86 Neil Lee and Stephen Clarke, ‘Do Low-Skilled Workers Gain from High-Tech Employment Growth? High-Technology Multipliers, Employment and Wages in Britain’, Research Policy, 48(9), November 2019, 103803 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.05.012>. 87 ‘Trade Union’, OECD.Stat <https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TUD>. 88 Ben Tarnoff, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 89 Irina Ivanova, ‘Amazon Picks Twitter Fight with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren amid Union Campaign’, CBS News, 26 March 2021 <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-union-vote/> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 90 Bethan Staton, ‘The Upstart Unions Taking on the Gig Economy and Outsourcing’, Financial Times, 18 January 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 91 ‘Table 5.

Page, eds, Freedom and Control in Modern Society, (New York: Van Nostrand, 1954), pp. 18–66 <https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.498862/2015.498862.Freedom-and_djvu.txt> Ledford, Heidi, ‘Millions of Black People Affected by Racial Bias in Health-Care Algorithms’, Nature, 574(7780), 2019, pp. 608–609 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03228-6> Lee, Neil, and Stephen Clarke, ‘Do Low-Skilled Workers Gain from High-Tech Employment Growth? High-Technology Multipliers, Employment and Wages in Britain’, Research Policy, 48(9), November 2019, 103803 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.05.012> Leiserson, Charles E., Neil C. Thompson, Joel S. Emer, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Butler W. Lampson, Daniel Sanchez et al., ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Top: What Will Drive Computer Performance after Moore’s Law?’

When we’re embedded in an environment, we get cues and clues about how things get done – what really matters, who matters, what the tradeoffs are, what the best shortcut is. Rarely is this written down – and even if it was, we would still likely learn this better from experience than by studying. There is a tacit dimension to our lives that is not codified, and perhaps never can be. This is perhaps even truer of supposedly ‘low-skill’ jobs than it is of ‘high-skill’ ones like a Wall Street trader. The anthropologist David Graeber was fond of pointing out that many jobs that we sometimes deem repetitive, task-oriented and perhaps easily automatable are, in fact, more like care work. They’re based less on specific tasks and more on human interaction and emotional labour.


pages: 338 words: 92,465

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century by Katherine S. Newman, Hella Winston

active measures, blue-collar work, business cycle, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, desegregation, factory automation, high-speed rail, information security, intentional community, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, performance metric, proprietary trading, reshoring, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

They will lead the way in overall job growth—accounting for nearly half of all new jobs—in places like Augusta (Georgia), Salt Lake City, Knoxville, and Vallejo (California).22 Among the states projecting the highest percentage of middle-skill jobs in 2018 are Indiana (54 percent), Arkansas (52 percent), Kentucky (52 percent), West Virginia (52 percent), South Carolina (51 percent), Mississippi (51 percent), and Pennsylvania (51 percent).23 In every one of these states but one—Washington—there are more jobs available than there are middle-skill workers to fill them.24 Seven of the top ten US employers see middle-skill jobs as the most difficult to fill.25 To be sure, this “skills mismatch”—in which we have fewer workers than we need in fields that are growing and a glut of people in occupations that are stagnating—is not unique to middle-skill workers. Some states—most notably southern and traditional Rust Belt states—have substantially more low-skill workers than low-skill jobs, while others—particularly those in the Northeast—have more high-skill workers than high-skill jobs. And then there are those states, like California, that have both more low- and high-skill workers than the market demands.26 Workers qualified for middle-skill jobs will find thousands of them on offer in American firms, but many job hunters will seek their fortunes in foreign subsidiaries.

This model, which is still common today throughout the state, requires kids to take academic classes at their local high school for half the day and then get on a bus to a “voc” school to attend technical classes, ultimately graduating from their local high school with a certificate of completion (or in some cases, such as cosmetology, a state license). According to Adams, starting in the ’60s, the school was for many years geared mainly toward providing low-skill training for minimum-wage jobs to “disaffected” or learning-disabled students. It offered subjects like upholstery—there were a couple of major clothing manufacturers in the area, all of whom left about forty years ago—low-level food occupations (e.g., line and short-order cook), and trained young men to run gas stations.

Most of them are in a two-year AA program, working toward a degree in mechatronics, which one of them describes as “the study of factory automation.” Some of the students in the class came to Piedmont Technical College (PTC) right out of high school, while others took a less direct route: They held low-wage fast-food jobs or low-skill factory jobs. PTC’s promotional materials emphasize that its graduates will be “career ready” the day they graduate and will earn 30 percent more than high-school graduates (they also note that some graduates start out earning more than $50,000 a year). They may do even better if they find their way to four-year institutions and obtain more advanced degrees, something that is facilitated (rather than impeded) by completing an AA degree.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

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

According to the theory, the country would be exporting goods that were intensive in skilled labor and importing goods that were intensive in unskilled labor. Greater openness to international trade was good news for American skilled workers, who could now access larger markets, but bad news for low-skilled workers, who had to put up with greater competition. As UCLA economist Edward Leamer put it in the early 1990s, “Our low-skill workers face a sea of low-paid, low-skilled workers around the world.”17 As a consequence, the gap between the wages of the two types of workers would increase. In fact, the theory had an even stronger implication. Unskilled workers would lose out not just in relative but also in absolute terms.

The Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of inequality that varies from 0 (no inequality) to 1 (maximum inequality, with all income going to a single household), rose from 0.40 in 1973 to 0.48 in 2012—a 20 percent increase.15 The country’s richest 10 percent raised their share of national income from 32 to 48 percent over the same period.16 What caused this dramatic change? One factor behind the rise in inequality was an increase in the “skill premium,” the gap between what high- and low-skilled workers earn. When economists first homed in on this gap beginning in the late 1980s, there was a plausible explanation at hand: globalization. The US economy had become much more exposed to international trade in recent years. Other advanced economies in Europe and Japan had largely caught up with the United States in productivity and now offered stiff competition.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

One study found that US counties that received larger numbers of immigrants between 1860 and 1920 had a 57 per cent average increase by 1930 in manufacturing output per capita and up to 58 per cent increase in agricultural farm values; and also, 20 per cent higher average incomes and education attainment, and lower unemployment and poverty rates in 2000.8 Nevertheless, considerable fears remain, particularly around the influx of low-skilled workers, since these jobs are the ones available to the widest population of native-born people, particularly those who are poorest. The terms ‘low-skilled’ and ‘high-skilled’ are used by policymakers and economists to describe the level of formal education that a person’s profession requires, with the highest skilled jobs – a cardiac surgeon, for instance – requiring multiple university degrees, whereas low-skilled jobs are associated with manual labour. In reality, the terms don’t fully reflect a person’s skillset, and ignore many other qualities that are important in employment, such as willingness to work or ability to learn.

Although these commuters had little effect on wages in these towns, they had a big effect on jobs – there was a large drop in native employment. This was because the Czech workers weren’t spending their wages in the host country, they were taking all the money home with them – because they weren’t immigrants. Another reason that low-skilled migration actually increases jobs is that it slows down the adoption of mechanization and automation, both of which require huge investments of capital and training, and often alter supply chains. A ready supply of affordable workers, especially for farm and factory work, makes labour-saving technologies less attractive to industry bosses.

Over the same period, California stopped producing crops for which mechanization wasn’t available, including lettuce, asparagus and strawberries. In other words, the jobs available to all workers reduced significantly once immigrants left. Immigration also triggers reorganization of the labour market, which is almost always beneficial to natives. Generally, low-skilled immigrants get the manual jobs, and native workers with local language skills and more experience are upgraded to non-manual jobs that require better communication skills, with higher wages. This kind of occupational upgrading was seen in the Danish studies, and also during the great European migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.


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

Asthana, A. and Slater, C. (2009), ‘Most Parents Can’t Find Enough Time to Play with Their Children’, Observer, 2 August, p. 17. Atkins, R. (2009), ‘Europe Reaps the Rewards of State-Sponsored Short-Time Jobs’, Financial Times, 29 October, p. 6. Autor, D. and Houseman, S. (2010), ‘Do Temporary-Help Jobs Improve Labor Market Outcomes for Low-Skilled Workers: Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3(2): 96–128. Bamford, J. (2009), The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, New York: Doubleday. Bennett, C. (2010), ‘Do We Really Need Advice on How to Deal with Boomerang Kids?’

The drive by the education system to improve ‘human capital’ has not produced better job prospects. An education sold as an investment good that has no economic return for most buyers is, quite simply, a fraud. To give one example, 40 per cent of Spanish university students a year after graduating find themselves in low-skilled jobs that do not require their qualifications. This can only produce a pandemic of status frustration. At present, the average lifetime monetary gain from going to a college or university is substantial – £200,000 for men in the United Kingdom (Browne, 2010). Imposing high fees may thus seem fair.

As most of the migrants were young and employed, they were net contributors to the social security system, while French citizens were net beneficiaries. But the state was building a precariat. Migrants’ wages are lower than those of French workers and they are more vulnerable to unemployment, partly because they are in low-skilled jobs, such as construction, and more affected by economic fluctuations, partly because of discrimination. Unemployed Maghrebians often do not have the contribution record needed to claim unemployment benefit and are obliged to rely on the means-tested RMI (Revenu minimum d’insertion). However, to be eligible for the RMI, housing benefit and health protection, non-French nationals must possess a residence permit and must have lived in France for five years.


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

The percentage of hardworking Belmont men began to slack off in the 2000s, drifting down to 40 percent by 2008. But that still left a gap between the work effort of prime-age Belmont men and Fishtown men that was more than twice the gap that had separated them in 1960. “It’s the Labor Market’s Fault” A natural explanation for the numbers I have presented is that the labor market got worse for low-skill workers from 1960 to 2008. More Fishtown men worked short hours because they couldn’t get work for as many hours as they wanted; more of them were unemployed because it was harder for them to get jobs; more of them left the labor market because they were discouraged by the difficulty of finding jobs.

But completed college educations are rare in Fishtown—only 8 percent of the adults had college degrees in 2000. Fishtown has many highly skilled blue-collar workers, such as electricians, plumbers, machinists, and tool and die makers, but also many people in midskill occupations—drywall installers or heavy-equipment operators, for example. Low-skill jobs are also heavily represented among the breadwinners in Fishtown—assembly-line workers, construction laborers, security guards, delivery truck drivers, or people who work on loading docks. Most families in Fishtown have incomes somewhere in the bottom half of the national income distribution—the median family income in 2000 was only $41,900—and almost all the people who are below the poverty line live in a place like Fishtown.

But these trends don’t explain why Fishtown men in the 2000s worked fewer hours, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive—an important proviso—falling hourly income does not discourage work. Put yourself in the place of a Fishtown man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you’ve been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter’s helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it?


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

Business services, financial services, computer services, communications, media – these are the areas where developed countries may be able to maintain a competitive advantage. Knowledge is providing the new jobs too. Go back to the early 1980s and almost half of UK jobs were unskilled or low-skilled jobs. Now it is about a quarter. People working in the knowledge industries accounted for a third of jobs in the early 1980s. Now it is closer to half. Knowledge services now account for more than two thirds of what Britain sells to the world. With low-skilled jobs disappearing and knowledge jobs expanding, it is obvious that the UK needs to invest in knowledge, to educate and train its workforce. Britain has a higher proportion of NEETs – young people not in education, employment or training – than any other OECD country except Greece, Italy, Mexico and Turkey.

The truth was that immigration controls were irrelevant to the million Eastern Europeans who had settled in Britain – all the Polish plumbers and Latvian labourers were free to come and go as citizens of the European Union. Nevertheless, anxiety driven by EU arrivals, about which the major parties could do nothing, prompted promises to crack down on non-EU immigration, about which a good deal had already been done – it had been the case for a number of years that no unskilled or low-skilled workers could legally come to Britain from beyond the EU, and there was little evidence that significant numbers of illegal migrants were still sneaking into the UK. The only way left to allay the public’s concerns, therefore, was to limit the arrival of those non-EU migrant groups that included people the country arguably needed and wanted – high-skilled workers and fee-paying students.


pages: 393 words: 102,801

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

The politics of immigration fundamentally changed and the case for high-skilled migration had, if anything, been made too successfully. The vital contribution of ‘low-skilled’ workers was minimised and dismissed right across the political spectrum following EU expansion, and the new low-paid EU migrants were massively taken for granted. While it is true that a high level of education is not needed for these types of job, labelling them disdainfully as low-skilled underplays how dirty, dangerous and demeaning yet also critical their roles are. The redesignation of these labourers from ‘low-skilled workers’ to ‘key workers’ during the coronavirus crisis was both welcome and overdue, but it would be optimistic to think this change of attitude is likely to last.

Each entry includes a SOC code, job description, examples of typical tasks and two minimum salary levels, one for experienced workers and one for ‘new entrants’ who had previously been degree-level students in the UK. Tier Three of the points-based system was already dead on arrival in 2008. It was intended for ‘low-skilled’ workers in specific industries, such as agriculture and food processing. Programmes like the venerable Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme, which allowed for the temporary and seasonal recruitment of farm workers from abroad, and more recent sector-based schemes in food processing and other low-paid and difficult but important jobs, would have slotted nicely into Tier Three.

Instead of a declaratory system in which everyone is lawful but some people lack proof, EU citizens are being forced to apply. Those who fail to do so will be illegally resident and will also, obviously, lack proof of lawful status. It will not be well-educated professionals who are caught out, but low-skilled workers with poor language skills and other vulnerable groups. There will be no easy route back to legality, either, as the government says that ‘good reason’ will be needed for not applying before the deadline. Not realising that you had to apply is never going to constitute a sufficiently decent reason, I suspect.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

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

Technological change inevitably interacts with different labor market institutions in different countries, and the relative strength of German trade unions is likely to go some way toward explaining these differences, as the authors argue. The general pattern across the industrial world, it seems, is that robots have not significantly reduced total employment, only low-skilled workers’ employment share. Automation, in other words, has caused employment opportunities for non-college-educated workers to dry up (G. Graetz and G. Michaels, forthcoming, “Robots at Work,” Review of Economics and Statistics). 36. D. H. Autor and A. Salomons, forthcoming, “Is Automation Labor-Displacing?

The American experience before the 1980s thus contrasts markedly with that of the British in the classic period of the Industrial Revolution, where the human costs of displacement were high because workers were left little choice but to take lower-paying jobs. As the factory replaced the domestic system, few had the means to acquire costly human capital to become managers, accountants, clerks, mechanical engineers, and so on. Instead, they were left competing for low-skilled production jobs that were simple enough to be performed by children. But if workers are able to shift into less hazardous, more enjoyable, and better-paying jobs, any distress will be short-lived. In the twentieth century, the abundance of semiskilled jobs in America’s offices and factories, brought by the Second Industrial Revolution, provided the best reassurance for those who feared unemployment.

In the twentieth century, the abundance of semiskilled jobs in America’s offices and factories, brought by the Second Industrial Revolution, provided the best reassurance for those who feared unemployment. Some Americans, it is true, failed to climb the economic ladder. As noted, older workers with highly specialized skills living in isolated areas often struggled to adjust and could be forced to shift into low-skilled jobs at lower wages and reduce their standards of living, at least temporarily. But while mechanization made a few workers worse off individually in the short run, the expectation that they would benefit in the medium term seemed justifiable to the vast majority of ordinary people. The End of Drudgery Perhaps the greatest contribution of mechanization was that it made the workplace safer and less physically demanding.10 Consider for a moment the stark contrast between the air-conditioned offices in which most Americans work today and the environment in which most citizens worked a century ago.


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

One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker. A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. One wants to protect the value of one’s property from rapacious and/or incompetent governments, and is more likely to have time to participate in politics (or to demand the right to participate) because higher income provides a better margin for family survival.

The financial crisis of 2008–2009 was one consequence of this trend.11 There are a number of sources of this growing inequality, only some of which are subject to control through public policies. One villain most commonly cited is globalization—the fact that lower transportation and communications costs have effectively added hundreds of millions of low-skill workers to the global labor market, driving down wages for comparable skills in developed countries. With rising labor costs in China and other emerging-market countries, a certain amount of manufacturing has started to return to the United States and other developed countries. But this has happened in part only because labor costs as a proportion of total manufacturing costs have gotten much smaller due to increases in automation.

There has been a constant substitution of technology for human labor over the decades, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought huge benefits not just to elites but also to the broad mass of people in industrializing countries. The major technological innovations of this period created large numbers of jobs for low-skill workers in a succession of industries—coal and steel, chemicals, manufacturing, and construction. The Luddites, who opposed technological change, proved very wrong, insofar as new, higher-paying opportunities for work opened up to replace the ones they lost. Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line for producing automobiles in his Highland Park, Michigan, facility actually lowered the average skill levels required to build an automobile, breaking apart the complex operations of the earlier carriage craft industry into simple, repeatable steps that a person with a fifth-grade education could accomplish.


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

As world trade has expanded, America, like China, has exported more, creating new jobs—for example, in the manufacture for export of motor vehicles and semiconductors. Studies by the economist Robert Feenstra and his collaborators have estimated that exports brought two to three million new jobs, similar to the number of jobs lost. But in parts of the country with higher concentrations of low-skilled workers, there was no positive offset to the loss of manufacturing jobs.12 The traditional escape route for displaced workers has been to move from cities without jobs to cities that have them, but this route has been limited in recent years by the high costs of living in successful cities. These high costs can be inflated by land-use or other policies imposed by those who live there to protect themselves and keep newcomers out.

A bachelor’s degree or beyond was a ticket not just to a high-paying job but also to a marriage with two high salaries. The worlds of the more and less educated have split apart, a divergence that we will see over and over in this book.6 At work, companies are today more likely to be segregated by education, and as we shall see later, firms are outsourcing many low-skill jobs that used to be done in-house, where people with different levels of education worked together and were part of the same company. The more and less educated are now more segregated in where they live, the successful in places where house prices are high and to which the less successful do not have access.

., 271n11, 279n12 Lienesch, Rachel, 265n8, 279n28 life expectancy, 21–22, 23, 44, 100, 134, 135, 140, 159, 180, 195; of African Americans, 27; decline in the twenty first century, 32–33, 114, 186; Europe and, 145, 260, 277n18; inequality and, 134, 140; Russia and, 107; in the twentieth century, 2, 21, 23, 41; United States healthcare system and, 114, 135, 186, 193–94 Lincoln, Abraham, 104 Lind, Michael, 284n51, 290n29 Lindner, Attila, 288n27 Lindsey, Brink, 255–56, 288n38, 290n27, 290n28 Lin Zexu, 109 Lipton, David, 263 living standards, 7, 11, 12, 19, 21, 149, 150, 151, 156, 173, 179, 181, 195; African American, 137; working class, lowering, 183, 212 Lleras-Muney, Adriana, 263 lobbying, 157, 209–11, 239, 241, 242, 255, 257; Google (Alphabet) and, 228; healthcare, 250; market power protected by, 232; taxation and, 232; in United States, 234 Lockheed Martin, 242 Logan, Trevon, 263 loneliness, 95, 98 Losing Ground (Murray), 70 Lowery, Wesley, 267n2 low mobility, 141 low-skill jobs, 52; concentrations of, 220 Luck, Phillip, 285n11 lung cancer, 23, 26, 29 Luthra, Shefali, 283n32 Lynch, Peter, 231 Ma, Hong, 285n12 Machin, Stephen, 278n6 Macy, Beth, 118, 274n13, 274n21 Maine, 33, 51, 86, 137 mainline churches, 177 malingerers, 92, 93 malpractice insurance, 198 mammograms, 196 Manning, Becky, 37, 49 manual work, 68, 84, 87, 91, 155 manufacturing, 4, 62, 162, 222; African American job loss in, 67–69; of cars, 221; China and, 219–20; jobs, 146, 161–62, 165, 214, 224, 243; rise of, 164; working class life and, 164, 219 Mare, Robert D., 280n4 Marino, Tom, 125 market barriers, 233.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The difference between the average wage for people with a bachelor’s degree and people with only a high school diploma doubled between 1977 and 2005, even as the supply of diploma bearers increased substantially. This occurred in part because of skill-biased technology change and the decline in real wages for low-skill workers. College credentials have also been locked in place as a required part of many large professions. Teachers, for example: There are 3.7 million elementary, middle, and high school teachers in America. Almost every one of them has a bachelor’s degree, and nearly half have a master’s degree. This did not happen because tens of thousands of school principals individually decided that it was impossible for someone to succeed in the classroom without first spending four years in a hybrid university.

Employers were also faced with another version of a familiar problem: how to sort through a lot of information with limited resources and limited time. Brassiere inventory management is a snap compared to figuring out human beings. As information technology destroyed jobs that involved simple and repetitive tasks, like painting car parts or shelving paper files, and globalization moved other low-skill jobs overseas, the American jobs that remained fell into several large categories. Some required creativity, judgment, and pattern recognition. Others involved interacting with other people by providing services of different kinds. It’s hard to tell if someone you don’t know personally will be good at either of those kinds of jobs.


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

The researchers concluded that both ICT and research and development (R&D) had raised the relative demand for college-educated workers and that, consistent with the ICT-based polarization hypothesis, this increase had come mainly from the reduction in the relative demand for middle-skilled workers rather than low-skilled workers (Michaels et al, 2010). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *(As per the Occupational Information Network ( ONET ) database, non-routine or abstract tasks are those that involve critical thinking, judgment/ decision making, complex problem solving, interacting with computers and thinking creatively.

While researchers and economists from MIT, notably Daron Acemoglu, established the correlation between skill acquisition and technological change, others, notably David Autor, were able to show that improvements in technology were leading to the creation of a polarized labor market, where growth was seen in jobs sectors that required high skills. Autor also found that an increasing demand was seen in jobs that involved “cognitive flexibility,” while at the same time, the demand for low-skill jobs requiring “non-routine manual tasks” also grew, creating a dip in the demand for jobs that involved tasks attributed to medium skill sets. However, more recent research from Beardy et al., 2013, has shown that there is also a reversal in the demand for jobs requiring cognitive flexibility, owing to the advancement in ICT.

By distinguishing and measuring the relative demand and supply mechanisms for tasks, the routinization hypothesis went on to prove that the effect of these demands on the labor market had led to the creation of a “polarized” work environment in which expansion was seen in the demand of high-skill and low-skills jobs, but coupled with a fall in the demand for routine or “middle-skilled” ** jobs, and that job polarization was leading to a shrinking concentration of employment in occupations in the middle of the skill distribution. The polarization effect also had an impact on the polarization of wage growth, with a relative growth in upper-tail and lower-tail earnings, relative to median or middle earnings.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

These fundamentals of yarn work are all bits of arcana now, because variations on the Jacquard loom were adopted internationally, eliminating these last few skilled weaving jobs. The elimination of essentially all high-skilled textile jobs by the eighteenth century meant massive job displacement, a devaluation of weaving skills and the degradation of working conditions for the remaining low-skilled workers who were retained to operate the machines. Similar effects were seen in other newly mechanized industries, leading to the destruction of the once powerful guilds. People soon realized that the craft skills they nurtured were no longer valuable in the nineteenth-century economy. As the skill requirement dropped and wages fell in newly mechanized factories, women and children became the preferred workforce, as they could be paid less than men (who were often fired when they reached adulthood and then supported by their factory-bound families).

That’s because the distributed ‘factory model’, whereby workers are rebranded as self-employed contractors (Deliveroo riders are called cycling micro-businesses), offers a way to further reduce labour costs: paying per job rather than per hour, eliminating the need for overtime, holiday pay, sick pay, parental leave or pensions. And in each of these jobs, the erosion of workers’ rights has started to become a serious social concern, resulting in the unreliable availability of work, depressed wages as low-skilled workers are interchangeable, dangerous working conditions, and denial of basic human comforts in the workplace. In the case of food-delivery service Deliveroo, the Guardian reported in 2017 that the company is now investing in ‘dark kitchens’,7 which take the form of windowless metal boxes not dissimilar to shipping containers kitted out with industrial kitchen equipment, where chefs frantically prepare meals to feed the increasing demand for takeaway food.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

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

Some countries accept considerable numbers of immigrants from abroad, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore (Table 22-1). These highly developed Western and Asian countries utilize immigration policy as a tool to resolve the shortage of low-skilled workers and certain highly skilled workers, notably in information technology (IT), health, and education (Constant and Zimmermann 2005). Asian countries in general are not so open to immigration; in 2008 the net immigration rates for Japan and South Korea were zero, and for Taiwan 0.04% (Table 22-1). However, the shortage of low-skilled workers since the late 1980s has forced the governments of these Asian countries to liberalize their immigration policy, at least for temporary immigrants.

Contributing factors include difficulties in obtaining recognition for both academic qualifications and vocational credentials and experience; a lack of knowledge of the local labor market; and above all a poor knowledge of the English language (Kempton, 2002, p. 6). Asylum seekers and refugees (the former disbarred from the labor market for the first 12 months of any claim) suffer particularly acute levels of unemployment and inactivity (Bloch, 2004). There is also evidence of exploitation, particularly among low-skilled workers, brutally evidenced by two tragic events: the death of 58 people in the back of a truck en route to the UK in 2000 and, in 2004, the drowning of 22 Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay in northwest England. Public and political pressure after this latter tragedy led to the enactment of limited legislation regulating the behavior of employers in particularly vulnerable sectors.

However, there are likely to be negative as well as positive effects, particularly for those at the bottom of the labor market and for previous waves of immigrants (for a full discussion see Sumption and Somerville, 2009b). In short, little account has been taken of distributional impacts. Migration’s positive wage and employment effects depend at least in part on the substitutability of migrant workers; new migrants likely have small adverse impacts on low-skilled workers who came in previous waves of immigration. Further, some estimates suggest that migrants are a drain on social benefits, despite the fact that noncitizens are limited from accessing many such benefits in the UK. A major House of Lords report found that immigration had neutral or no overall benefits, and called for a cap on the number of immigrants coming to the country (House of Lords, 2008).


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

These factories took tasks that once required high-skilled workers (for example, handcrafting textiles) and broke the work down into far simpler tasks that could be done by low-skilled workers (operating a steam-driven power loom). In the process, these technologies greatly increased the amount of these goods produced and drove down prices. In terms of employment, early GPTs enabled process innovations like the assembly line, which gave thousands—and eventually hundreds of millions—of former farmers a productive role in the new industrial economy. Yes, they displaced a relatively small number of skilled craftspeople (some of whom would become Luddites), but they empowered much larger numbers of low-skilled workers to take on repetitive, machine-enabled jobs that increased their productivity.

It will perform many kinds of physical and intellectual tasks with a speed and power that far outstrip any human, dramatically increasing productivity in everything from transportation to manufacturing to medicine. Unlike the GPTs of the first and second Industrial Revolutions, AI will not facilitate the deskilling of economic production. It won’t take advanced tasks done by a small number of people and break them down further for a larger number of low-skill workers to do. Instead, it will simply take over the execution of tasks that meet two criteria: they can be optimized using data, and they do not require social interaction. (I will be going into greater detail about exactly which jobs AI can and cannot replace.) Yes, there will be some new jobs created along the way—robot repairing and AI data scientists, for example.


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

Family incomes have kept up only because more women have been participating in the labor force, so that more families now have more than one earner. What then has been keeping wages down? Globalization is a part of the story; the manufacture of many goods that used to be made in the United States by low-skilled workers has moved to poorer countries, and many companies have sent offshore jobs that used to be done domestically, including “back-office” work (like claims processing) and customer call centers. Legal and illegal immigration has also been blamed for downward pressure on low-skill wages, though such claims remain controversial, and some credible studies show that the effect is small.

The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.17 The share of GDP going to health care, only 5 percent in 1960, was 8 percent in the mid-1970s but had risen to nearly 18 percent by 2009. Even among low-skill jobs, how people have fared depends on just what kind of skill they have. The worst situation is to have been a clerk in a mechanical office job that can be (and has been) performed by a computer, or has been outsourced to lower-cost workers in poorer (though not the world’s poorest) countries. Even so, among the occupations with some of the lowest average wages, both wages and employment have been rising.

Robert Frank, 2007, Richistan: A journey through the American wealth boom and the lives of the new rich, Crown. 19. David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney, 2006, “The polarization of the U.S. labor market,” American Economic Review 96(2): 189–94, and David Autor and David Dorn, “The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the US labor market,” American Economic Review, forthcoming, available at http://economics.mit.edu/files/1474. 20. David Card and Alan B. Krueger, 1994, “Minimum wages and employment: A case study of the fast food industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84(4): 772–93, and David Card and Alan B.


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

Much of the trade in manufactures carried out among advanced countries at similar levels of income raised few of the questions of distributional justice we confronted earlier. Other kinds of trade—in agriculture, say, or with developing countries—were different because they pitted domestic groups starkly against each other. They threatened farming groups, garment producers, or low-skilled workers with sharp income losses. So these types of trade were heavily circumscribed. Under the GATT priorities rested solidly in the domestic policy agenda, and this produced both its success and its endless departures from the logic of free trade. The WTO Regime: Striving for Deep Integration The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, after nearly eight years of negotiations and as the culmination of the so-called “Uruguay Round” (the last under the GATT), ushered quite a different understanding.

By some measures, wage inequality in the United States has stopped growing (or has even come down since the late 1990s), despite the rapid pace of outsourcing.18 Much of China’s exports are in technologically sophisticated and skill-intensive sectors such as computers, where they do not pose a particular threat to the wages of low-skill workers. Then there are ways in which China’s exports may have improved matters by reducing poor households’ cost of living: China tends to exports goods that make up a large share of what poor households consume.19 For these reasons, many economists continue to think that globalization accounts for just a small part—10 or 15 percent at most—of the rise in U.S. inequality since the 1970s.20 Even if the economywide consequences are small, however, they provide small comfort to the individual worker who gets displaced by imports and has to take on another job at a substantial pay cut.

South Africa in 2005 looked of course very different from Mauritius in 1960. A middle-income country with a fairly diversified economy, it was highly integrated with world markets and had a sophisticated financial sector. But the central challenge South Africa confronted was the same: where would the jobs needed to employ the large surplus of low-skilled workers come from? South Africa had undergone a remarkable political and economic transformation since its democratic transition in 1994. Following the end of white minority rule, it had managed to avoid a descent into acrimonious recrimination, endless redistribution, and populism that would have decimated the economy and turned the country into a sham democracy.


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

Unemployment in Europe has remained stubbornly high. People who lose their jobs do not automatically get new jobs. Especially when the unemployment rate is high, there may be an extended period of unemployment as workers search for a new employer. Middle-aged workers often fail to find any job at all—they simply retire earlier. Low-skilled workers are particularly likely to suffer. That is why people in the advanced industrial countries worry about losing manufacturing jobs to China or service sector jobs (like back offices of financial companies) to India. When the result of rapid trade liberalization is that unemployment goes up, then the promised benefits of liberalization are likely not to be realized.11 When workers move from low-productivity, protected jobs into unemployment, it is poverty, not growth, that is likely to increase.12 Even if they do not actually lose their jobs, unskilled workers in advanced industrial countries see their wages decrease.

The production of horse carriages declined with the arrival of the automobile. During the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot warned that there would be a “giant sucking sound” as jobs were pulled out of the United States. The response from the Clinton administration was that America didn’t want those low-wage, low-skill jobs, and that the market would create better-paid, higher-skill jobs. And during the first few years of NAFTA unemployment in the United States actually declined, from 6.8 percent, at the beginning of NAFTA, down to a low of 3.8 percent. Just as the United States and European countries made the transition from agriculture to manufacturing more than a hundred years ago, more recently they have made the move from manufacturing to services.

Just as the United States and European countries made the transition from agriculture to manufacturing more than a hundred years ago, more recently they have made the move from manufacturing to services. The share of manufacturing in employment and output has fallen not just in the United States but also in Europe and Japan (to 20 percent).3 As America and Europe lost jobs in manufacturing, they gained jobs in the service sector, a sector that includes not only low-skill jobs flipping hamburgers but high-paid jobs in the financial services sector. It was thought that America, with its high level of skills and its service-sector dominated economy would be protected from competition from abroad. What made outsourcing so scary was that even highly skilled jobs began to go abroad.


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

However, when all is said and done, most empirical studies indicate that minimum wage laws reduce employment in general,{351} and especially the employment of younger, less skilled, and minority workers. A majority of professional economists surveyed in Britain, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States agreed that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among low-skilled workers. Economists in France and Austria did not. However, the majority among Canadian economists was 85 percent and among American economists was 90 percent.{352} Dozens of studies of the effects of minimum wages in the United States and dozens more studies of the effects of minimum wages in various countries in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were reviewed in 2006 by two economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

However, the majority among Canadian economists was 85 percent and among American economists was 90 percent.{352} Dozens of studies of the effects of minimum wages in the United States and dozens more studies of the effects of minimum wages in various countries in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were reviewed in 2006 by two economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They concluded that, despite the various approaches and methods used in these studies, this literature as a whole was one “largely solidifying the conventional view that minimum wages reduce employment among low-skilled workers.”{353} Those officially responsible for administering minimum wage laws, such as the U. S. Department of Labor and various local agencies, prefer to claim that these laws do not create unemployment. So do labor unions, which have a vested interest in such laws as protection for their own members’ jobs.

“Labour costs are more than three-and-a-half times higher than in the most productive areas of China and a good 75% higher than in Malaysia or Poland,” according to The Economist.{364} With such artificially high costs of South African labor, it pays employers to use more capital, but this is not greater efficiency for the economy as a whole, which is worse off for having so many people unemployed, which is to say, with so many resources idled instead of being allocated. South Africa is not unique. A National Bureau of Economic Research study, comparing the employment of low-skilled workers in Europe and the United States found that, since the 1970s, such workers have been disproportionately displaced by machinery in European countries where there are higher minimum wages and more benefits mandated to be paid for by employers. The study pointed out that it was since the 1970s that European labor markets moved toward more control by governments and labor unions, while in the United States the influence of government and labor unions on labor markets became less.{365} The net result has been that, despite more technological change in the United States, the substitution of capital for labor in low-skilled occupations has been greater in Europe.


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

Many Americans came to celebrate wealth as a prime metric of success and became more judgmental of those who lost jobs, went bankrupt, used drugs or otherwise stumbled; the acme of this changing ethos was the election in 2016 of a billionaire president who was best known for ostentatious living and for his reality TV refrain: “You’re fired!” * * * — THE CAUSES OF ECONOMIC DISTRESS included automation and globalization, which affected workers in many countries, and real wages for low-skilled workers fell not only in the United States but also in Britain and Germany. So as part of our journey to understand what went so badly wrong, we wanted to see if workers battered by these global forces had suffered as severely across the border in Canada. As it happened, a sociologist named Victor Tan Chen had explored precisely that question after the Great Recession of 2008–09.

Eathan is smart and has a much-valued skill as a construction worker, while Ginnetta is pleasant and diligent and struck us as dependable. Eathan, like some others in Yamhill, blamed immigrants from Mexico. “I do resent them for the fact that it makes it harder for me to get a job,” he told us. It’s true that in places like Yamhill, immigrants may have taken some jobs from low-skilled workers. Several employers made the point to us that they would be crazy to hire a white high-school dropout who was often high on meth, wasn’t terribly interested in difficult outdoor work and would not show up reliably. One employer told us that he had tried to hire local people but ended up with an all-Mexican work crew because the immigrants are approximately twice as productive as local white residents.


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

Needless to say, investment in capability-building requires short-term sacrifices. But that is not a reason not to do it, contrary to what free-trade economists say. In fact, we often see individuals making short-term sacrifices for a long-term increase in their capacities, and heartily approve of them. Suppose a low-skilled worker quits his low-paying job and attends a training course to acquire new skills. If someone were to say the worker is making a big mistake because he is now not able to earn even the low wage he used to earn, most of us would criticize that person for being short-sighted; an increase in a person’s future earning power justifies such short-term sacrifice.

They are usually fixed in their physical qualities and there are few ‘general use’machines or workers with a ‘general skill’ that can be used across industries. Blast furnaces from a bankrupt steel mill cannot be re-moulded into a machine making computers; steel workers do not have the right skills for the computer industry.Unless they are retrained, the steel workers will remain unemployed. At best, they will end up working in low-skill jobs, where their existing skills are totally wasted. This point is poignantly made by the British hit comedy film of 1997, The Full Monty, where six unemployed steel workers from Sheffield struggle to rebuild their lives as male strippers. There are clearly winners and losers involved in changing trade patterns, whether it is due to trade liberalization or to the rise of new, more productive foreign producers.


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

Needless to say, investment in capability-building requires short-term sacrifices. But that is not a reason not to do it, contrary to what free-trade economists say. In fact, we often see individuals making short-term sacrifices for a long-term increase in their capacities, and heartily approve of them. Suppose a low-skilled worker quits his low-paying job and attends a training course to acquire new skills. If someone were to say the worker is making a big mistake because he is now not able to earn even the low wage he used to earn, most of us would criticize that person for being short-sighted; an increase in a person’s future earning power justifies such short-term sacrifice.

They are usually fixed in their physical qualities and there are few ‘general use’ machines or workers with a ‘general skill’ that can be used across industries. Blast furnaces from a bankrupt steel mill cannot be re-moulded into a machine making computers; steel workers do not have the right skills for the computer industry. Unless they are retrained, the steel workers will remain unemployed. At best, they will end up working in low-skill jobs, where their existing skills are totally wasted. This point is poignantly made by the British hit comedy film of 1997, The Full Monty, where six unemployed steel workers from Sheffield struggle to rebuild their lives as male strippers. There are clearly winners and losers involved in changing trade patterns, whether it is due to trade liberalization or to the rise of new, more productive foreign producers.


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

This thought strengthens the case for not relying on state benefits to do all of the sheltering, but also to look towards regulating, rewarding or otherwise nudging employers to do more for their staff on security, as well as pay. I have heard clever and well-meaning economists half-joke that the minimum wage is ‘a means-tested benefit, arbitrarily targeted on hourly wages rather than overall income, and arbitrarily funded through a ring-fenced tax on the employers who keep low-skilled workers off the dole’. There is an economistic way of looking at the world that sees things in that light. This is a vantage point from which it always looks tidier to shelter the vulnerable by raising income support than by telling employers what to do. That is not, however, the way that voters concerned about exploitation by unscrupulous employers see things, and anyone who is actually concerned about getting resources to those lashed by hard times must respect this reality.

Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for May 1993 and May 2013, reported in Ian Brinkley, Flexibility or Insecurity? Exploring the rise in zero hours contracts, Work Foundation, London, 2013, at: www.theworkfoundation.com/DownloadPublication/Rep­ort/339_Flexibility%20or%20Insecu­rity%20-%20final.pdf 49. David H. Autor and Susan N. Houseman, ‘Do temporary-help jobs improve labor market outcomes for low-skilled workers? Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2:3 (2010), pp. 96–128. 50. On the basis of a survey of around 1,000 employers, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimates that around 1 million British workers could be on zero-hour contracts. See ‘Zero hours contracts more widespread than thought – but only minority of zero hours workers want to work more hours’, CIPD press release, 5 August 2013, at: www.cipd.co.uk/pressoffice/press-releases/zero-hours-contracts-more-widespread-thought–050813.aspx On the basis of a less representative survey of its own members, the trade union Unite estimates that around 20% of workers were on zero-hour style arrangements, which produces a whole-workforce figure of 5.5 million.

The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the US Labor Market, Center for American Progress/Hamilton Project, Washington, DC, 2010, available at: www.brookings.edu/∼/media/research/files/papers/2010/4/jobs%20autor/04_jobs_autor.pdf Autor, David H. and Susan N. Houseman. ‘Do temporary-help jobs improve labor market outcomes for low-skilled workers? Evidence from “Work First”’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2:3 (2010), pp. 96–128. Beckett, Francis. Clem Attlee, Politico's Publishing, London, 2000. Bell, D.N.F and D.G. Blanchflower. ‘UK unemployment in the Great Recession’, National Institute Economic Review, 214 (2010), pp.


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

Anne Roder and Mark Elliott, Nine Year Gains: Project QUEST’s Continuing Impact (New York: Economic Mobility Corporation, April 2019), 1–4, https://economicmobilitycorp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/NineYearGains_web.pdf. 60. Chris Tomlinson, “San Antonio Program Moves Low-Skilled Workers into Middle Class,” Houston Chronicle, April 17, 2019, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/San-Antonio-program-moves-low-skilled-workers-13772983.php. 61. That translates to about a $5,000 annual boost. Roder and Elliott, Nine Year Gains. 62. Nelson D. Schwartz, “Job Training Can Change Lives. See How San Antonio Does It,” New York Times, August 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/economy/worker-training-project.html. 63.

Participants had 14 percent higher earnings (about $1,930) after three years.58 One standout is Project QUEST (Quality Employment through Skills Training), based in San Antonio, Texas. The program provides participants, overwhelmingly women of color, with comprehensive support and resources to earn community college degrees in high-demand areas like health care and IT.59 QUEST arose in response to a loss of good-quality low-skill manufacturing jobs in the San Antonio region. The nonprofit organization works with employers to determine fields and credentials that will be valuable, and provides tuition subsidies and a host of critical support services to low-income job seekers while they participate in two-year associate’s degrees or one-year certificate programs at area community colleges to earn those credentials.


Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

Maryland recently passed living-wage legislation that sets wages at a level higher than the Fixing Inner-Ring Suburbs / 149 federal minimum-wage standard. This legislation currently applies to those businesses that receive government contracts. This is typically the case with many living-wage ordinances. Baltimore City, one of the first U.S. cities to pass a living-wage law, successfully pushed for legislation that ensures higher wages for low-skilled workers involved in city contracts. State and local governments are stepping in when the federal government has not. Expanding the living wage to move beyond just businesses that receive city or state contracts is important. A living wage for the workforce of older inner-ring suburbs would help lift poorly paid workers out of poverty.

Forces shaping inner-ring suburbs Four primary forces include housing market dynamics, the new suburban demographic, labor-market restructuring, and metropolitan fragmentation. Policy for inner-ring suburbs No national policy exists, and growth management is insufficient. Regional coalitions are evolving. More federal and state funding is needed for fiscally stressed inner-ring suburbs. Other issues to consider are affordable housing and a living wage for low-skilled workers. Suburban poverty rose in U.S. metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2000. Some regional variation is apparent. Poverty, whether among inner-ring or outer suburbs, was most extreme in the South and the West. The number of cases of extreme suburban poverty increased, and, with the exception of the South, this increase was larger among inner-ring suburbs than outer suburbs.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

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

Adding so many workers to the global labour supply may have driven down the wages of unskilled workers in particular. However, many economists point to the influence of new technology, which they dub skill-biased technological change (SBTC). Workers who can handle new technology are more valuable than those who cannot, while low-skilled workers may be replaced by robots or computer programmes. But a problem with this theory is that the widespread use of computers really occurred in the 1990s, while the sudden jump in inequality occurred in the 1980s. Similarly, the gap between the earnings of college graduates and others did not widen significantly in the 1990s, but did in the 1980s.45 A related argument is that there has been a war for talent.

Those workers who only completed high school earned just three-fifths of the hourly wages of those who graduated from college and less than half the rate earned by postgraduates.10 Some of this education is supplied privately. But governments have seen it as in the country’s interests to expand education, especially as low-skilled jobs are being automated or shifted to low-wage centres in Asia. Health As late as 1820, life expectancy at birth was only around 29 worldwide, and 36 in Europe. By 1913, it had edged up to 34 worldwide but was in the mid-40s in Europe and America. By 1970, the global average was 60, and Europeans could expect to live into their seventies.11 By 2015, the global average was 71.4 years, more than double that of a century earlier.12 This is an immense, and oft-overlooked, achievement.

This “lump of labour” fallacy is hard to kill (see Chapter 9). As noted earlier in the book, the real culprit could be found elsewhere. A study by the IMF found that the reason for around half the decline in labour’s share of GDP was the impact of technology, as employers were able to automate low-skilled jobs. Another quarter of the shift was down to globalisation; companies in the developed world were shifting jobs to low-wage countries in the rest of the world.39 The sluggish overall level of growth that followed the financial crisis led some economists to rethink their previous models. Larry Summers, who was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, argued that longer-term forces were at work.


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

The study forecast that in the short term unskilled jobs would be displaced, although enhanced productivity would probably result in greater job creation in the long term.84 In the United States, Flynn analyzed 200 case studies of the employment impacts of process innovations between 1940 and 1982.85 He concluded that, while process innovations in manufacturing eliminated high-skill jobs and helped to create low-skill jobs, the opposite was true for information processing in offices, where technological innovation suppressed low-skill jobs and created high-skill ones. Thus, according to Flynn, the effects of process innovation were variable, depending upon specific situations of industries and firms. At the industry level, again in the US, the analysis by Levy and co-workers of five industries showed different effects of technological innovation: in iron mining, coal mining, and aluminium, technological change increased output and resulted in higher employment levels; in steel and automobiles, on the other hand, growth of demand did not match reduction of labor per unit of output and job losses resulted.86 Also in the United States, the analysis by Miller in the 1980s of the available evidence on the impact of industrial robotics concluded that most of the displaced workers would be reabsorbed into the labor force.87 In the UK, the study by Daniel on the employment impacts of technology in factories and offices concluded that there would be a negligible effect.

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.

These are, on the one hand, the growing flexibility of labor, that is the reduction of the proportion of the labor force with long-term employment and a predictable career path, as new generations, the majority of whom are hired for their flexibility, replace an old labor force entitled to job security in large-scale firms. Business consultants and service entrepreneurs have replaced automobile workers and insurance underwriters. On the other hand, there has been a parallel growth of highly educated occupations and low-skill jobs, with very different bargaining power in the labor market. Exaggerating the terminology to capture the imagination of the reader, I labeled these two types of workers “self-programmable labor” and “generic labor”. Indeed, there has been a tendency to increase the decision-making autonomy of educated knowledge workers who have become the most valuable assets for their companies.


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

The first sector consists of skilled workers and managers who have college degrees and command good and even very high salaries in our technological economy. I call this the FTE sector to highlight the roles of finance, technology, and electronics in this part of the economy. The other group consists of low-skilled workers who are suffering some of the ills of globalization. I call this the low-wage sector to highlight the role of politics and technology in reducing the demand for semi-skilled workers. The wages in the two sectors then can be seen in figures 2 and 3. Figure 2 shows the stagnation of average wages for the last generation.

Authers, John. 2015. “Infrastructure: Bridging the Gap.” Financial Times, November 9. Autor, David H. 2015. “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (3) (Summer): 3–30. Autor, David H., and David Dorn. 2013. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market.” American Economic Review 103 (5) (August): 1553–1597. Autor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103 (6): 2121–2168.


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

When you think about it, there is no reason why all Swedish bus drivers, or for that matter the bulk of the workforce in Sweden (and that of any other rich country), could not be replaced by some Indians, Chinese or Ghanaians. Most of these foreigners would be happy with a fraction of the wage rates that Swedish workers get paid, while all of them would be able to perform the job at least equally well, or even better. And we are not simply talking about low-skill workers such as cleaners or street-sweepers. There are huge numbers of engineers, bankers and computer programmers waiting out there in Shanghai, Nairobi or Quito, who can easily replace their counterparts in Stockholm, Linköping and Malmö. However, these workers cannot enter the Swedish labour market because they cannot freely migrate to Sweden due to immigration control.

If anything, the amount of productivity-related knowledge that an average worker needs to possess has fallen for many jobs, especially in rich countries. This may sound absurd, but let me explain. To begin with, with the continuous rise in manufacturing productivity, a greater proportion of the workforce in rich countries now works in low-skilled service jobs that do not require much education – stacking shelves in supermarkets, frying burgers in fast food restaurants and cleaning offices (see Things 3 and 9). Insofar as the proportion of people in such professions increases, we may actually do with an increasingly less, not more, educated labour force, if we are only interested in the productivity effects of education.


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

Giannone, “Skilled-Biased Technical Change”; David Autor, “Work of the Past, Work of the Future,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 109 (May 2019): 1–32, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20191110; Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, “What If Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?,” New York Times, 11 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/upshot/big-cities-low-skilled-workers-wages.html. 4. Joan Rosés and Nikolaus Wolf, “The Return of Regional Inequality: Europe from 1900 to Today,” VoxEU, 14 March 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/return-regional-inequality-europe-1900-today. 5. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter,” VoxEU, 6 February 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/revenge-places-dont-matter. 6.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, 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, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

In recent decades, lower-skilled workers displaced by machines have seen their earnings stagnate or decline, while higher-skilled workers have been made more productive by those same machines and have seen their earnings rise. These trends have been a key reason for the rising inequality of income in many countries, notably including the United States. Yet the ultimate effect of this tendency depends on two additional factors. To the extent that low-skilled workers can gain higher skills through increased education and training, the proportion of the workforce suffering from stagnant or declining earnings can be reduced. And even when market wages are pushed down, governments can compensate for those adverse market forces through increased taxation of those with high and rising incomes and increased transfers to those with low and falling incomes, so that all segments of society share in the gains from technological advance.

Some Lessons from the Digital Age The very success of economic growth in the Digital Age has laid several traps for an unwary world. The world economy is producing vast wealth, but failing in three other dimensions of sustainable development. Inequalities are soaring, in part because of the differential effects of digital technologies on high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Environmental degradation is rampant, a reflection of a global economy that has reached nearly $100 trillion in annual output without taking care to ensure that the impacts on the planet are kept to a safe and sustainable level. And the risk of conflict is rising, especially given the rapid shifts in geopolitics, and the anxieties that are being created in the US, China, and elsewhere.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

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

Technology and Human Capital Model Growth Model Output depends on physical capital (K), educated labor (S), and uneducated labor (U) as follows: Output = AKαSβ Uγ The parameters A, α, β, and γ capture the technology and the relative value of the three types of labor. The relative market wage for high- and low-skilled workers is:7 Cause of inequality: Technological changes that favor educated workers increase β and decrease γ. These changes, along with increases in the supply of low-skilled workers, increase inequality. The next model, the positive feedback model, can explain the increased variation within professions. It focuses on the tail of the distribution and, in particular, on entrepreneurs.

At the same time, increased college enrollments due in part to the GI Bill increased the supply of educated workers. In the 1980s, decreased incentives to attend college slowed the growth in the number of college graduates, and a subsequent inflow of immigrants with low education levels increased the supply of low-skilled workers. At the same time, technological changes—the rise of automated manufacturing and the transition to a more digital economy—increased the relative value of educated workers, and their rising wages reflected this value. Time series data on average incomes by education level fit this model reasonably well.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Software and computers are complementary to skilled and educated workers. So while they have replaced medium-skill work, they have boosted the productivity and therefore the income of highly skilled workers. As the income of these skilled workers has increased, so they have increased their demand for the services produced by low-skilled workers. The net effect of these substitution, complementarity and demand effects has been the hollowing out of the labour market. That described the first half of the chessboard. We are now entering the second half where computational power increases dramatically, so the concern is that the hollow gets wider and wider.

If she manages to save 14 per cent of her salary, then the analysis in Figure 2.7 suggests that if she wants to retire on 50 per cent of her final salary, she will have to work until the age of 80. With this sixty years of work in mind, is a scenario based on the 4.0 portfolio model (education/work/portfolio/retirement) viable? Jane will be entering the job market around 2019. Over the following decades, numerous high-skill and low-skill routine jobs will continually disappear. As a consequence, Jane will have to devote considerable amounts of time to developing new skills and foresight about market developments. She can preserve her productive assets by on-the-job coaching and training and by taking time out to retrain. If she wants to develop new portable skills on the job, she will have to find a company that supports her to do this.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

Only in recent years has the government really examined the skills the UK needs. This is not about a paucity of education but, rather, the right education. By 2030, it is estimated that without better planning, 6 million Brits risk being in jobs for which they are overqualified or being unemployed.12 Five million low-skilled workers will be chasing 2 million low-skilled jobs. Today, employers struggle to find high-skilled employees – at the time of writing there was an estimated shortfall of 3.4 million. Seventy-two per cent of UK businesses said they struggled to find people with the right skills.13 There are also gaps in basic literacy and numeracy.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

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

Renn, “The Lifeblood of Cities,” City Journal, January 9, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/lifeblood-cities-15639.html; Harrison Jacobs, “Incredible Maps Show How Working-Class Neighborhoods Are Disappearing From American Cities,” Business Insider, September 30, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/working-class-neighborhoods-are-disappearing-from-american-cities-2014-9. 5 Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bai, “What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?” New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/upshot/big-cities-low-skilled-workers-wages.html. 6 Gabriela Inchauste, Living and Leaving: Housing, Mobility, and Welfare in the European Union, World Bank Report on the European Union, World Bank Group, 2018, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/507021541611553122/Living-Leaving-web.pdf; William A.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In 1990, half of the regional health care workforce—56,665 people—consisted of professional and technical workers, who were the upper half of the occupational hierarchy ranging from technicians through physicians. By 2005, this number had increased to 77,537. The vast majority of workers in professional and technical job categories were found in hospitals—where they were needed for technologically intensive interventions—rather than in nursing homes, ambulatory clinics, or home health care, where “low-skill” workers remained closer to the old model of slow, life-sustaining care. This rapid growth thus marked a dramatic occupational stratification of the hospital workforce94 While the numbers of professional and technical workers increased in absolute terms, and dramatically as a relative portion of the flatlining hospital workforce, they shrank as a percentage of the booming overall health care workforce.

Disinvestment and austerity made the population sick, but that fact increased, rather than decreased, how much care flowed through the health system. As health policy scholar Buz Cooper observes (in a study of Milwaukee), “High utilization rates are a manifestation of … [the] long march toward racial and economic segregation; the painful loss of both its industrial prowess and the low-skill jobs that many of its largest businesses offer.”56 In the moment, many believed that massive industrial job loss would inevitably mean equivalent loss of health care access, since insurance coverage was so intertwined with employment. And layoffs of course did have this result, often ruinously, in individual lives.57 Nonetheless, the aggregate effect was not so straightforward, since it was the health care system—of all social services—that suffered the least from the disinvestment and austerity of these years.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

For instance, content moderation for Google and Facebook is typically done in the Philippines, where an estimated 100,000 workers search through the content on social media and in cloud storage.90 And Amazon has a notoriously low-paid workforce of warehouse workers who are subject to incredibly comprehensive systems of surveillance and control. These firms simply continue the secular trend of outsourcing low-skill workers while retaining a core of well-paid high-skill labourers. On a broader scale, all of the post-2008 net employment gains in America have come from workers in non-traditional employment, such as contractors and on-call workers. This process of outsourcing and building lean business models gets taken to an extreme in firms like Uber, which rely on a virtually asset-less form to generate profits.


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

There has been an 122 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 122 INEQUALITY AND THE FUTURES OF OUR CHILDREN expansion in both higher paid jobs and lower paid jobs. The crucial question is who gets them. Gregory argues that individuals who would normally be employed in the middle of the earnings distribution are taking the lower paid jobs. This has ominous implications for the low-skilled workers who would normally have access to these jobs. ‘When there are insufficient jobs in aggregate this serves to bump the least skilled off the earnings ladder’ (Gregory 1996). This is a very different situation from the one described by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) when unemployment rates were negligible, there was contraction in the lower skilled jobs, and rapid expansion at the top.

As Table 7.5 shows, this analysis takes account of the other key workplace factors likely to influence training, especially business size. For many of the other issues around low-paid jobs, Australian data are difficult to come by. Labour mobility figures in Australia show very little upward occupational mobility for low-skilled workers (ABS 1998, pp. 16–17) and research by Burgess and Campbell (1998) shows that the large growth in casual jobs during the 1990s did not provide a foothold into secure employment for most workers. From this we can infer that earnings mobility at the bottom of the labour market is quite limited.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Beyond these limits productivity seemed to fall by 2.5 to 3 per cent for each extra ten minutes spent in transit. Official disapproval and the general absence of facilities notwithstanding, commuting crept into the Soviet Union in the last decade of its ‘great stagnation’ (1964–85). The Stakhanovites of freedom of movement appeared in the main in small cities. They were categorized as ‘young, low-skilled workers, occupying positions requiring low qualifications and yielding low wages’, and served as cannon fodder during the USSR’s last, futile attempt to win the Cold War through communist economics. Their mobility was permitted by the state because it was cheaper than having to build new tower blocks in the cities, and ‘substituting migration with commuting’ became official policy.

Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2008, p. 135. 155 ‘a commission of specialists evaluated the car’, Tracy Nichols Busch, A Class on Wheels: Avtodor and the ‘automobilization’ of the Soviet Union, 1927–1935, Washington, Georgetown University, 2003. 159 ‘young, low-skilled workers, occupying positions requiring low qualifications’, quoted in ‘Suburbanisation, employment change and commuting in the Tallinn Metropolitan Area’ (2005), Institute of Geography, University of Tartu: http://epc2006.princeton.edu/papers/60516. 163 For Japan and the Honda Super Cub, see Jeffrey W.


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

In China’s case the upward swing was made stronger than usual by the fact that the structural transition also implied a systemic change, from rural-based socialism to urban capitalism. Thus both transitions pushed inequality up. What were the main drivers of this rise? Wage inequality has obviously risen as the economy has moved toward capitalism, and the wages of more efficient or more-skilled workers have gone up much more than the wages of low-skilled workers (at least until recently; see Luo and Zhu 2008, 15–17; Zhuang and Li 2016, 7). In one of the very rare papers that uses microdata from the usually inaccessible large survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, Ding, Fu, and He (2018) show that urban wage inequality increased between 1986 and 2009 within both state-owned and privately owned urban companies.

The explosion of growth in China has also been a prime driver of the explosion of inequality. It is thus the case that no matter how we slice the pie, that is, whether we look at inequality between regions, or between cities and villages, or between urban and rural workers, or between the private and the state sector, or between high- and low-skilled workers, or between men and women, inequality has increased for every such partition. It would be, I think, impossible to find any partition where inequality had not risen to a level higher than what it was before the reforms. The most interesting, and for our purposes the most important, recent development is the increase in the share of income from privately owned capital, which seems to be as concentrated in China as in the advanced market economies.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

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

, 1907), p. 44. c One of these complications is that surveying employers before and after a minimum wage increase has the fatal weakness of survey research in general— namely, that you can only survey survivors. Reduced employment of low-skilled workers in the wake of a minimum wage increase can take many forms. If all the businesses employing low-skilled workers were identical, then unemployment resulting from a minimum wage increase might be expected to be found in all the firms surveyed. But a more common circumstance is one in which some firms in an industry are quite profitable, others are less profitable and still others are struggling to stay in business.

Another complication is that people working for minimum wages are a small fraction of the people working, so that what happens to the employment of minimum wage workers can be lost in statistics about the total employment in an industry, due to all sorts of other fluctuations in the employment of a larger number of other workers. But if, instead of surveying surviving firms after a minimum wage increase, data are collected on unemployment rates among particular groups of inexperienced and low-skilled workers, such as black teenagers, a more accurate picture of the effects of minimum wages on unemployment can be obtained. d About ten percent of the black population in America had been free before the Civil War, and these “free persons of color” had a head start that made their descendants so much more experienced and more educated that they remained the elite of the black population on into the middle of the twentieth century.


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

Greatly increased concentration of property in the hands of the most affluent Americans and a massive rise in earnings disparities among workers both contributed to this development: the wealth share of the richest 1 percent of households more than doubled from about 14 percent in 1774 to 32 percent in 1860, whereas the Gini coefficients of earnings soared from 0.39 to 0.47.33 As I show in more detail in chapter 6, the Civil War leveled fortunes in the South but further boosted inequality in the North, two countervailing regional trends that left national metrics largely unchanged. Disequalization subsequently continued up to the early twentieth century: the top 1 percent income share almost doubled from approximately 10 percent in 1870 to about 18 percent in 1913, and skill premiums increased. Urbanization, industrialization, and massive immigration by low-skilled workers were responsible for this trend. A whole series of indices for top wealth shares likewise shows a sustained rise from 1640 to 1890 or even 1930. By one measure, between 1810 and 1910, the share of all assets held by the richest 1 percent of U.S. households almost doubled, from 25 percent to 46 percent.

Milanovic 2016: 112–117 voices healthy skepticism regarding the potential of various equalizing forces (political change, education, and an abatement of globalization pressures), placing hope on the slow dissipation of rents over time and the emergence of future technologies that might increase the relative productivity of low-skilled workers. He is particularly pessimistic about the short-term prospects of economic equalization in the United States, where all indicators point to a continuing rise in inequality in the near future (181–190, esp. 190). 13 Atkinson 2014a and 2015. In addition to Atkinson 2015: 237–238, I quote mostly from the summary version (2014a).

“Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the ‘other 99 percent.’” Science 344: 843–850. Autor, David H. 2015. “Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29: 3–30. Autor, David, and Dorn, David. 2013. “The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the U.S. labor market.” American Economic Review 103: 1553–1597. Autor, David, Levy, Frank, and Murnane, Richard J. 2003. “The skill content of recent technological change: an empirical exploration.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116: 1279–1333. Autor, David, Manning, Alan, and Smith, Christopher. 2010.


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

The CEA report offered a careful presentation of the demand-side explanation, focusing particularly on the evidence for decreasing demand for less-skilled labor in postwar America: If less-educated men were simply choosing to work less . . . this should raise the relative wages of the less-educated men who choose to continue participating in the workforce. Yet, in recent decades the opposite has happened: less-educated Americans have actually suffered a reduction in their wages relative to other groups. A number of studies have identified declining labor market opportunities for low-skilled workers and related stagnant real wage growth as the most likely explanation for the decline of prime-age male labor force participation, at least for the period in the mid-to late 1970s and 1980s. . . . More recently, economists have suggested that a relative decline in labor demand for occupations that are middle-skilled or middle-paying may have begun contributing to the decline in participation in the 1990s . . .


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

The stories of East Germany versus West Germany, Hong Kong versus mainland China, Singapore versus Malaysia, Zimbabwe versus Botswana, Brazil versus Bolivia, Greece versus Albania, and the United States versus Mexico all attest to the power of formal rules. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz claim in their book Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work that crossing the border from Latin America into the United States “appears to make the productivity of a low-skilled worker ten to twenty times higher, based on the wage differential.” Education entrepreneur and seastead humanitarian Michael Strong asks us to “[i]magine if you could walk across an invisible line and raise your income tenfold.” Dr. Francis Fukuyama writes in his magnum opus The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, “Poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions.”

average South Korean earns eighteen times as much . . . lives an average of ten years longer: S. Rogers, A. Sedghi, and M. McCormick, “South v. North Korea: How Do the Two Countries Compare? Visualised,” Datablog (blog), Guardian (UK), April 8, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2013/apr/08/south-korea-v-north-korea-compared. “low-skilled worker ten to twenty times higher”: Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), 136. “Poor countries are poor . . . because they lack effective political institutions”: Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 14.


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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

As financialization has advanced, the result has been to weaken the position of the middle of the income range. The upper and lower deciles of the income distribution, at least in the US, have done relatively better than the middle deciles. It appears that remuneration has behaved better among highly skilled and low-skilled workers, than among workers with moderate skills.28 The factors contributing to these trends are very complex and there is no easy way to connect them purely to technical change, such as the introduction of new technology.29 The broader aspects of the balance between capital and labour at the workplace must also be taken into account, as should the political and institutional framework of income distribution in the years of financialization.

A Review of Goldin and Katz’s The Race Between Education and Technology’, NBER Working Paper No. 17820, February 2012. 29 This is what Autor and Dorn attempt to do by claiming that computers have destroyed jobs of middle skill and pushed workers toward lower-paid jobs; David Autor and David Dorn, ‘The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market’, Cambridge, MA: MIT Department of Economics, 2012. However, the impact of computers on skills (and productivity) is far from clear, as was argued in the previous section. 30 For a succinct presentation of the rise and content of neoliberalism as ideology and framework for economic policy, see Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

., ‘Money and the form of value’, in The Constitution of Capital, ed. Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Atkinson, Anthony, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Top Incomes in the Long Run of History’, Journal of Economic Literature 49:1, 2011, pp. 3–71. Autor, David, and David Dorn, ‘The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market’, Cambridge, MA: MIT Department of Economics, 2012. Autor, David, Lawrence Katz, and Melissa Kearney, ‘The Polarization of the US Labor Market’, American Economic Review 96:2, 2006, pp. 189–94. Autor, David, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, ‘The Skill Content of Recent Technological Innovation: An Empirical Investigation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118:4, 2003, pp. 1279–333.


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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

An Investigation of Amending Hours Legislation to Create Employment. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2008. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Holt. Erickcek, George, Susan Houseman, and Arne Kalleberg. 2003. “The Effects of Temporary Services and Contracting Out on Low-Skilled Workers: Evidence from Auto Suppliers, Hospitals, and Public Schools.” In Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, edited by Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Murnane. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 368–406. Erickson, Chris, and Daniel Mitchell. 2007.

The gains from trade between the two countries are still positive for the second country, but diminished from the period prior to the first country “catching up” to the second.28 Studies of the impact of offshoring on manufacturing jobs a decade ago found evidence of positive associations between rising import shares and decreasing employment, but that overall effect was relatively small. Skill-biased technologic change, where new technologies lead to displacement of low-skilled jobs by those demanding higher skills, represented a far larger factor in explaining employment declines.29 Estimates of service offshoring similarly indicate that the effects have so far been small when compared to the overall size of the labor market. But for those service activities that are vulnerable to outsourcing because they require provision of what the economist Alan Blinder calls “impersonally delivered services,” the opportunities for future movement are significant, spanning skill levels from low-skill work like scanning books and newspapers to high-skill work such as architecture and financial analysis, and sectors from parts of health care to financial services.30 Even fervent adherents of the classic gains from trade view accept that there may be deleterious distributional impacts from offshoring: the economy can benefit overall, even though certain groups are adversely affected (sometimes severely) by it in the form of lost jobs and earnings.


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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

Developed countries are happy to accept highly skilled migrants—doctors, nurses, computer engineers—from anywhere at any time, and, indeed, they compete aggressively for them, attracting the few doctors and nurses from the poorest countries. The developed countries, meanwhile, are deeply conflicted internally about absorbing large numbers of low-skilled workers. The economics of such in-migration are more favorable than the politics. In economic terms, such in-migration of low-skilled workers tends to be a win for the source country, the host country, and the migrant. A low-skilled immigrant arriving in a rich country experiences an immediate jump in income that can be a factor of ten or more. The migrant’s employment tends to be in areas that are largely complementary with the host-country labor force, for example, in low-cost labor-intensive services (personal services, delivery boys, busboys, child care) that offer significant benefits for the host population.


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The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

During Britain’s EU debate one millionaire pro-EU entrepreneur insisted that migration into Britain was necessary because he didn’t want his daughter to become a ‘potato picker’.12 Aside from the racial insinuation that we are above such roles whereas others are eminently suited to them, we should ask ourselves why our young people are (if they are) ‘above’ such tasks. It is also necessary to ask ourselves whether we are entirely happy with this pay-off. There are many young people across Europe who are unemployed. Many do not have the skills necessary for high-end employment. So why import people to do low-skilled work when so many low-skilled workers already exist in Europe? Sometimes mass immigration is advocated because of the advantage it gives in supporting pensioners, sometimes because of the advantage it allegedly gives in stopping young people from doing jobs they don’t want. But in both cases it is an argument that if allowed to run will only encourage a greater and greater problem with every year that passes, as more ageing people need support and as fewer young people have any chance of getting into work.

As with every other country, these migrants had been portrayed by the Swedish government and media as consisting almost entirely of doctors and academics. In reality a huge number of low-skilled people who did not speak the language had been imported into a country with very little need for low-skilled workers. And while the government reluctantly tightened up its border procedures, political and community leaders continued to insist that there should be no borders and that immigration could be limitless. Archbishop Jackelén insisted that Jesus would not approve of government restrictions on immigration.


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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

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. Roughly put, technology brought an increased demand for educated workers, but that demand was consistently outpaced by the number of people prepared to meet it.

What was in relatively short supply were employees willing to take on low-paid jobs requiring only the most basic skills—reading, writing, and math on a junior high school level. The problem was not that workers lacked skills but rather that employers could not find enough workers with even the most basic skills willing to take their low-paid jobs. Osterman and Weaver do not discuss the reasons for this difficulty in attracting low-skilled workers, and it remains something of a mystery. But I believe I found at least part of the answer in Brodhead, Kentucky, a small town at the head of the Dix River about an hour’s drive from Lexington. I went there to visit Bobby and Tammy Renner and their four grown children, one of whom, Robert, we’ll meet later on, in chapter 10.


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

2.2 Predictive power isn’t all it is cracked up to be Nearly all textbooks claim widespread agreement among economists about non-normative economic questions. Many cite a 1992 survey for support. For example, Parkin and Bade (2006: 14) claim that ‘at least 7 out of every 10 econ­ omists broadly agree’ that: a minimum wage increases unemployment among young workers and low-skilled workers. Mankiw et al. (2002: 32) claim that this proposition was endorsed by 79 per cent of economists – a number they call ‘an overwhelming majority’. Let’s consider this purported consensus. There have been three surveys published, the results of which are contained in Table 2.3. 32 Generally agreed Agreed with provisos Disagreed 1979* 1992† 2003‡ 68 22 10 56.5 22.4 20.5 45.6 27.9 26.5 Note: * Kearl et al. 1979; † Alston et al. 1992; ‡ Fuller and Geide-Stevenson 2003 From Table 2.3 we see that to get 79 per cent agreeing with the minimum wage proposition on the 1992 survey, one must add the ‘generally agree’ category to the ‘agree with provisos’ category.

In brief, the empirical studies conflict to such an extent that we used it as a case study to illustrate the limitations of hypothesis testing and predictive power as criteria for model selection. The consensus concerning the effects of minimum wages has broken down – though this is not generally reported in the textbooks. What we have yet to explain is why moderate increases in the minimum wage might not reduce employment of low-wage, low-skilled workers. There are several possible explanations, all of which depend on ‘frictions’ – imperfect information or mobility costs. One category of explanation is the ‘efficiency wage’ thesis. If work effort is hard to monitor, workers may shirk. Wage increases make the job more ­desirable and provide an incentive not to get caught shirking (which might result in getting fired).


pages: 158 words: 45,927

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016 by Ian Dunt

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy security, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, Silicon Valley, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Ministers would be able to tell the British public that they had taken back control of the border. It is unlikely hardline Brexiters would be satisfied with this arrangement, however. They would prefer a sector-by-sector work permit system. High-income, high-skill workers would be allowed into the UK. Low-income, low-skill workers wouldn’t. Free movement for bankers, passport control for plumbers. This option would also allow the government to create exemptions for low-pay industries which struggle to find British workers, such as fruit picking, which could be granted seasonal permits. This deal is unlikely to appeal to Europe.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

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

“They’re marginal malls because they’re in marginal areas, in many cases,” says retail analyst Kenneth Dalto, noting how demographic shifts have drained the revenue base. The fall of the mall is a problem for the consumer: with local businesses decimated and chain stores departed, those without Internet access and credit cards can struggle to procure goods. But the fall of the mall is a bigger problem for low-skill workers. Materialism may remain rampant, but now its spaces are secret. Retail work has been replaced with jobs in online shopping warehouses where “pickers” labor unseen in brutal conditions. “We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves.


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

TRADE GLOBALIZATION Another explanation that is often put forward holds that the increase in inequality is due to the effects of trade globalization, which is to say the growing proportion of world production that crosses international boundaries.15 The opening up of commerce through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, and subsequently in the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, put low-skilled workers in developed countries in competition with those in emerging and developing countries. The increase in inequality in developed countries was predicted and explained more than seventy years ago by one of the most important results of international trade theory, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem.16 Trade liberalization, the theorem states, leads to increased demand for unskilled workers in the countries of the South (where they are supposed to be “abundant”) and a relatively greater demand for skilled workers in the countries of the North (for the same reason), which leads in turn to an increase in inequality in rich countries and a corresponding reduction of inequality in poor countries.17 Subsequently it became necessary to explain why Stolper and Samuelson’s model had been contradicted by events, since trade did not take place to the extent forecast between countries richly endowed with skilled labor in the North and countries richly endowed with unskilled labor in the South, but predominantly between countries in the North instead.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

., Labor and Trade Unionism (New York: Wiley, 1960). One study that surveyed the views of workers in four countries found that skilled workers were concerned with having jobs that were intrinsically interesting or fulfilling, while unskilled workers were more interested in income. Many new entrants and low-skill workers, moreover, believed that having a factory job in the first place conferred significant social status. William H. Form, “Auto Workers and Their Machines: A Study of Work, Factory, and Job Satisfaction in Four Countries,” Social Forces 52 (1973): 1-15. 27On the Hawthorne experiments, see Hirszowicz (1982), pp. 52-54. 28See Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933), and The Social Problems of an Industrialized Civilization (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). 29Ian Jamieson, “Some Observations on Socio-Cultural Explanations of Economic Behavior,” Sociological Review 26 (1978): 777-805.

Unsmiling new managers with reputations for ruthlessness are brought in; long-time employees are fired or fear for their jobs, and the former atmosphere of trust gives way to one of suspicion. The strong traditional communities of the midwestern rust belt were devastated over the past generation by chronic unemployment and out-migration to the West or South in search of jobs. Loss of low-skill jobs in manufacturing and meatpacking contributed significantly to the descent of part of the postwar urban black population into its current underclass hell of drugs, violence, and poverty. The negative consequences of capitalism for community life are only part of the story, however, and in many ways not the most important one.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Robert Shapiro, “Race, Ethnicity, and the Job Market,” Journal of Democracy, no. 53, Summer 2019. 23. Patricia Cohen, “Is Immigration at Its Limit? Not for Employers,” New York Times, August 22, 2019. 24. Matthew Yglesias, “DREAM On: America Needs Much Bigger, Bolder Immigration Reform—for Low-Skilled Workers, Not Just Supergeniuses—to Boost the Economy,” Slate, June 20, 2012. 25. “The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights” (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, August 2010). 26.


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

Increases in youth unemployment cause increases in burglaries, thefts, and drug offenses.44 Declines in unemployment rates reduce the crime rate, which seems to be highly responsive to employment opportunities for low-skilled men.45 Wage rises significantly lower the crime rate. Higher wages for low-skilled workers reduce both property and violent crime, as well as crime among adolescents.46 The impact of wages on crime is substantial; one study estimates that a 10 percent increase in wages for non-college-educated men results in approximately a 10 to 20 percent reduction in crime rates. Hansen and Machin (2002) find a statistically significant negative relationship between the number of offenses reported by the police over a two-year period for property and vehicle crime and the proportion of workers paid beneath the minimum before the introduction of the minimum wage.

A recent major study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017) found that when measured over a period of more than ten years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small. Prior immigrants—who are often the closest substitutes for new immigrants—are most likely to experience wage impacts, followed by native-born high school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to those of the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States. The study concluded that the literature on employment impacts finds little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers. However, they noted, recent research shows that immigration reduces the number of hours worked by native teens (but not their employment rate).


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

Arthur Lewis, who found that there is a point in the development process where cheap and excess rural labor is negated by wage increases as the supply of “surplus” labor is exhausted.11 At this point in the developmental process the comparative advantage of countries like China begins to erode—thus causing a fundamental shift in the structure of the labor market (especially for low-skilled workers)—and forces them into the Middle Income Trap. Thus the “trap” (precisely what China faces now) is that the economy needs to transition up the productivity ladder by producing more knowledge-intensive goods, investing in innovation, and retraining workers from production to service and other value-added industries.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

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

*2 It’s important to note that, in his study of Facebook, Luis Armona found that wage increases caused by Facebook were larger for female students and students from lower-middle-class families, suggesting the potential for the Hype Machine to reduce gender and income disparities. However, Armona’s sample was limited to 760 selective four-year universities, the graduates of which are likely drawn from the high end of the skills distribution. Low-skilled workers studied by Caldwell, Harmon, and Hargittai were mostly excluded from Armona’s analysis as a consequence of his sample. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Today we’re at a crossroads of privacy and security, free speech and hate speech, truth and falsity, democracy and authoritarianism, inclusion and polarization.

Median household income increased 17 percent in Democratic districts, typically in cities and suburbs, with higher levels of education and greater availability of professional jobs; meanwhile it fell 3 percent in less-educated, working-class, rural Republican districts with agricultural and low-skilled manufacturing jobs that are more vulnerable to overseas competition. Third, the partisan polarization of cable news media has likely reinforced political identities and increased affective polarization between the parties. That said, partisans also select into right- or left-leaning media audiences, making it difficult to determine whether the news media causes polarization or if an already-polarized public simply chooses which polarized media to watch.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Instead, Nike moves factories to China for cheap labor and the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, calls for $15 minimum wage even though he doesn’t institute it at his own company. (A brilliant move, by the way, because if it was ever passed, the higher wages would crush small businesses—including Walmart’s competition.) Artificially enforcing higher wages for low-skilled workers always ends badly because it ushers in automation, which replaces people with computers. Just look at McDonald’s, where many cashiers have now been replaced by iPads. They’ve gone from low wage to no wage, which neatly takes me on to Social Security . . . Yes, some type of safety net is good for those who need it most, but it should be a short-term gap.


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

For instance, in innovation, we can do this both by the kind of basic and applied research that the government funds and by forcing firms to pay for their full environmental damage. That will provide them with incentives to save on resources, diverting their attention away from replacing workers. Rather than across-the-board low interest rates (as now), which encourage the replacement even of low-skilled workers by machines, we could use investment tax credits to encourage investment; but the credits would be given only for investments that save resources and preserve jobs, not for investments that destroy resources and jobs. Throughout this book, I’ve emphasized that what matters is not just growth, but what kind of growth (or, as it’s sometimes put, the quality of growth).

It used to be part of the conventional wisdom that a small part (at most a fifth) of the increase in inequality was due to globalization. (For instance, Florence Jaumotte and Irina Tytell, “How Has the Globalization of Labor Affected the Labor Share in Advanced Countries?,” IMF Working Paper, 2007, argues that technological change was more important than globalization, especially on the wages of low skilled workers.) But more recently, Paul Krugman has argued that the impact of globalization may be larger than was previously thought. “Trade and Inequality, Revisited,” Vox, June 15, 2007; see also his paper “Trade and Wages, Reconsidered,” Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Spring 2008. Part of the difficulty is that globalization is intertwined with the changing productivity within the United States, the weakening of unions, and a host of other economic and societal changes.


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

Other things being equal, more widespread education means more equality, as the increased supply of high-skilled workers puts downward pressure on higher incomes, while the decreased supply of low-skilled workers puts upward pressure on lower incomes. That dynamic is offset by technological progress, which increases the demand for (and hence the incomes of) high-skilled workers and lowers the incomes of low-skilled workers. Hence, the title of the groundbreaking book that aims to explain the ups and downs of income equality over our period is The Race Between Education and Technology.68 The massive growth of public secondary education beginning in the early twentieth century and of college education after World War II—see Figures 2.6 and 2.7—had two important consequences: It raised the rate of national economic growth, and it increased the rate of upward mobility, by giving a fairer start to kids from the wrong side of the tracks.


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

Conditional Cash Transfers and Incidence,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2 (2010): 177–79; David Lee and Emmanuel Saez, “Optimal Minimum Wage Policy in Competitive Labor Markets,” Journal of Public Economics 96 (2012): 739 (“With a binding minimum wage . . . an EITC expansion would increase after-tax incomes of low-skilled workers dollar for dollar.”). support middle-class jobs and wages: “Sens. Warner, Casey, and Stabenow Introduce Proposal to Encourage Employers to Provide Job Training That Moves Workers up the Economic Ladder,” Mark R. Warner, U.S. Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, October 31, 2017, www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?

Super-skills (and hence also the educations and degrees that provide and mark skill) become increasingly essential not just to securing high incomes and high status but also to avoiding low incomes and low status. Frenzied competition now dominates the top jobs. And the broader labor market, once characterized by a continuum of job types with a center of gravity composed by a large mass of mid-skill, middle-class jobs, has lost that center. Middle-class jobs have been displaced by low-skill jobs at the bottom and high-skill jobs at the top. At the same time, the divergence between both the productivity and the pay of the top jobs and of all the others has increased tremendously—hence the struggle to get and stay on top. The new work order reflects a deep economic and social logic rather than just a passing adjustment in commercial habits and office customs or a mischief born of political miscalculation and elite greed.

Over roughly the past half century, the principal financial technologies and the skill profiles of finance-sector workers have both changed dramatically: an industry that was once dominated by technologies that favored mid-skilled, middle-class workers is now dominated by technologies that favor super-skilled, superordinate workers. A large mass of mid-skilled jobs has been eliminated and replaced by relatively fewer jobs, with super-skilled elite professionals, in glossy jobs, dominating the industry and deprofessionalized, low-skilled support staff, in gloomy jobs, playing only subsidiary roles. The labor market for finance workers has become polarized. Home mortgage lending illustrates the transformation. Mortgages channel capital into the housing market by allowing people to borrow money in order to own and live in dwellings that they will eventually pay for out of future earnings.


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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

Skill-biased technological change, for instance, means that information technology serves as a valuable complement for skilled “knowledge workers” while substituting for less-skilled manual and clerical workers. The slowdown in the growth of workers’ average years of schooling completed means that the relative supply of skilled workers lags behind relative demand. Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged. People increasingly marry within their social class, reducing the marital pathway to social mobility. The factors contributing to outsized gains at the very top are similarly diverse. They include the rise of “winner-take-all” markets produced by information technology’s network effects as well as globalization’s expansion of relevant market size; a huge run-up in stock prices; continuing growth in the size of big corporations (which has helped to fuel rising CEO pay); and a big drop in the top income tax rate (which has facilitated the use of high compensation as a strategy for attracting top managers, professionals, and executives).


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

To disprove this fallacy, we can turn to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies – a think tank that opposes immigration – which found that immigration has virtually no effect on wages.37 Other research even shows that new arrivals lead to an uptick in the earnings of the domestic workforce.38 Hardworking immigrants boost productivity, which brings paycheck payoffs to everybody. And that’s not all. In an analysis of the period between 1990 and 2000, researchers at the World Bank found that emigration out of a country had a negative effect on wages in Europe.39 Low-skilled workers got the shortest end of the stick. Over these same years, immigrants were more productive and better educated than typically assumed, even serving to motivate less skilled natives to measure up. All too often, moreover, the alternative to hiring immigrants is to outsource work to other countries.


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

One is the corrosive effect of long-term unemployment: if workers who have been jobless for extended periods come to be seen as unemployable, that’s a long-term reduction in the economy’s effective workforce, and hence in its productive capacity. The plight of college graduates forced to take jobs that don’t use their skills is somewhat similar: as time goes by, they may find themselves demoted, at least in the eyes of potential employers, to the status of low-skilled workers, which will mean that their education goes to waste. A second way in which the slump undermines our future is through low business investment. Businesses aren’t spending much on expanding their capacity; in fact, manufacturing capacity has fallen about 5 percent since the start of the Great Recession, as companies have scrapped older capacity and not installed new capacity to replace it.


pages: 232 words: 71,024

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

Just before the delivery date someone noticed that there was no testing! Snapshots of the Gantt chart were found showing original dates and that a test section did exist earlier. Minimal testing was squeezed in, and to the horror of the PM, one client could see and access the data of another. PMHell / August 11, 2013 / 2:43 pm Indian engineer: Too many low-skilled workers here Regarding your comment on emerging markets, I am a high performer (1-rater as they call it in IBM) for the last 3 years in IBM India. Some points that I have noticed over the last 8 years of my career at IBM India : 1) No smart engineer in India wants to work for IBM. It has a reputation of workplace with a lazy, flexible work environment that is often abused by employees..


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The federation’s largest corporate groups and financial institutions, whether owned by shareholders or directly by the state, are dominated by either the UAE’s federal government or a member of one of the seven ruling families. Despite a heavily hyped embrace of foreign investment and free-market capitalism, the UAE remains a typical Persian Gulf monarchy. Emirati nationals, who represent just 20 percent of a population of about 5 million people made up largely of low-skilled workers from developing countries in South and Southeast Asia, accept heavily subsidized goods and services in return for political loyalty. Dubai’s colorful ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, has taken a corporatist approach to managing his emirate. He’s the hands-on proprietor of most Dubai-based large corporations and investment institutions and manages its internal affairs with no federal supervision.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

For families already financially stretched, in neighborhoods prevented from changing or evolving to a higher state of intensity, where is that time and money going to come from? The resources aren’t there, and so homes begin to fail, dragging down entire neighborhoods. There is also a sad irony to much of the maintenance of modern development. Traditional building materials require a base level of ongoing maintenance, tasks perfectly suited for the low-skilled worker willing to learn a trade. Modern maintenance-free materials don’t have these ongoing costs, which seems like a good thing, until they fail. That’s when they impose a huge replacement cost. As Steve Mouzon points out in The Original Green, maintenance-free simply means not able to be maintained.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

“We have reached a point at which more of the same will only result in more of the same frustration, more of the same explosive violence, and more of the same fear,” Nixon argued in one April speech, hewing closely to Greenspan’s thesis that government aid and ghetto violence were caught in a vicious cycle.53 Nixon would then lay out Greenspan’s program of stimulating inner-city businesses with tax breaks—there would be credits to build housing, train low-skilled workers, and encourage businesses to locate in poor urban districts. This new program for black capitalism would replace the handout culture of government programs, fostering a sense of ownership and pride, and removing the frustrations that bred violence. Nixon’s embrace of Greenspan’s ideas about black capitalism signaled that the fight with the Dakota wolves had been forgiven.

It was simply that, for an inflation-targeting central bank, worrying about bubbles was a secondary priority.38 Greenspan’s diagnosis of the productivity acceleration represented a clear triumph. But his policy response to that acceleration was a mixed blessing. By using the space created by productivity-driven disinflation, Greenspan presided over a glorious period of growth, high-tech investment, and job creation that boosted living standards among low-skilled workers; in the era of globalization, the late 1990s stand out as one of the few periods in which inequality retreated. But by allowing this bonanza, Greenspan also signaled an unwillingness to confront bubbles, with consequences that ultimately proved more serious than he imagined. • • • On October 30, 1996, Alan arranged a surprise dinner for Andrea.

Indeed, this stealthy tax on draftees was three times higher than the rate paid by equivalent civilians; servicemen were, in effect, bearing a heavy load so that everyone else could have an army on the cheap—it was a scandalously regressive income transfer. Building on this first argument, the economists asserted that because the true costs of military labor were obscured, military planners overused manpower and distorted the national labor market. A large supply of cheap draftees dulled the Pentagon’s incentive to free up workers from low-skilled jobs that could be mechanized. The national economy was paying a price because manpower was being wasted. One day the army wheeled out General William Westmoreland, the famously hard-nosed former commander in Vietnam, to testify in the draft’s favor. Seeking to silence the economists’ jabber about hidden taxes and labor-market distortions, Westmoreland harrumphed that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries.


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

The problem lies in the fact that these terms have long transcended the academy and are tossed around casually to describe not only the jobs but the workers themselves. From the pages of the New York Times to the screeching talking heads on Fox News, it’s common to refer to people in many jobs as “unskilled” or “low-skilled” workers. This language is used by conservatives and progressives alike, and I used it myself until I heard a speech given by Barbara Ehrenreich at a conference on inequality sponsored by my organization, Demos. Ehrenreich referred to her time working in low-paid jobs for her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed.


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

India’s growing economic spikes—city-regions such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and parts of New Delhi—are also pulling away from the rest of that crowded country. As Stanford University’s Rafiq Dossani has noted, India’s technology and business services—industries that are quickly growing—lack the broad employment base enjoyed by China’s manufacturing industry.21 Until India figures out how to provide jobs to its low-skill workers, globalization will only deepen the country’s internal economic, political, and social divisions. The backlash to the spiky world extends beyond emerging economies. In 2005 France and the Netherlands rejected the European Union constitution, fueled by concerns among lower-skilled suburban and rural workers who understandably fear globalization and integration.


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

There is little doubt that xenophobia, racist resentment, and Islamophobia are closely linked with voting for parties with anti-­ immigrant platforms.1 Our theory cultural tipping points predicts that threat perceptions and feelings of insecurity among the losers from long-­ term cultural change will lead to latent authoritarian predispositions.2 But debate continues about why immigration is perceived as a threat.3 Are anti-­immigrant sentiments mainly driven by fear of competition from low-­skilled workers?4 Or are concerns about the erosion of European cultural norms, the decline of Christianity, and threats to white predominance more important?5 Or are anti-­immigrant sentiments more closely interlinked with the threat of terrorism?6 And are all immigrants seen to be equally threatening, or are fears most intense concerning those of different racial and ethnic backgrounds?

On the one hand, the middle-class professionals, managers, and executives in the service sector, typically university educated, affluent, and mobile, seem to have benefitted from EU membership through the lower costs of imported goods, and the broader access to trade and investment opportunities, while taking advantage of opportunities for international travel and broader educational and professional possibilities within a borderless Europe.39 By contrast, however, those with low-­ paid, low-­skill jobs, without college degrees, found themselves competing with migrant workers from Poland, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, while competing with companies employing cheaper labor in China and India. Economic globalization has been blamed for a trade ‘shock’ hitting the profitability of manufacturing, jobs, and the domestic costs of labor.40 These developments have been linked with the growing proportion of low-­wage, unskilled immigrant workers, drawn from within and outside the EU, and outsourcing as companies moved jobs abroad.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

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

Obviously, it’s no longer that easy to pick up your bags and move into an affordable place in Greenwich Village or, for that matter, Harlem, but even as you work your way out—to Jersey City, or easy-commute towns like Maplewood, New Jersey—you see the cost of renting or buying skyrocketing. For a low-skilled worker, the higher wages in those cities do not always make up for the much higher rental costs. And the reason is that those cities are so, so expensive, at least in the parts where most productive workers are willing to live.32 Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 a month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

The work ethic, along with cuts to arts budgets (and unemployment benefits, which bohemians have historically used as a sort of unofficial arts budget) have also made it less feasible for cultural creators to wing it for a few years in order to hone their craft and perhaps find a way to make a living from it. As they leave the bosom of the university, many students are also realising that graduates are no longer free from the kinds of risks and uncertainties previously thought to be the preserve of low-paid, low-skilled workers (Brown et al., 2011). This climate of uncertainty puts a strong premium on the ability of students to take an active approach to their employability and think in practical, instrumental ways about how to secure their futures. Furthermore, the student debt caused by rising tuition fees and the abolition of student grants may be tying young people to a need to earn, long before they have had a chance to reflect on the trade-off between the benefits of a good income and the sacrifices of work.


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

According to the EU, ‘at the heart of the new regulations is the restriction of low-skilled [Bulgarian and Romanian] workers to existing quota schemes in the agricultural and food processing sectors’.11 In effect, this means that any increase in the numbers of low-skilled Bulgarians and Romanians coming into the UK will have to be offset by a reduction in the numbers of non-EU low-skilled workers. In a sly announcement on 8 April 2009, the UK government declared, first, that ‘Strict working restrictions for Eastern Europeans will not be scrapped’ and, second, that ‘the Government is delivering on its promise to be tougher on European criminals and remove those that cause harm to our communities.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

But Switzerland was not the only foreigner parking its artillery on Clerkenwell’s lawns, for there was another challenger waiting in the wings, ready to take on all comers. A new system of manufacture had been developing slowly through the nineteenth century and, by the 1870s, cheap watches and clocks, mass-produced in factories using specialist machines powered by steam engines and operated by low-skilled workers, were rolling off the production lines that formed part of the system. The old ways of manufacture were disappearing, trumpeted a British watchmaking journal in 1875, to be “superseded by the disciplined organization of the factory, the youthful hand, the automaton machine, and the steam-engine!


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

Sawhill and Guyot 2020. 37. Bloom et al. 2013. 38. Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth 2021. 39. Deming 2017. Work by the economists Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Richard Blundell, and Rachel Griffith has shown that soft skills, particularly teamwork, are very important for helping wage progression for low-skilled workers and are all the more important if such workers are in high-tech firms (Aghion et al. 2019). Chapter 7 1. Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary 2020. 2. European Union 2020. 3. De Loecker and Eeckhout 2018. 4. Andrews, Criscuolo, and Gal 2016. 5.


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

I had a rough spell of it recently with an interaction with my manager but I’m hopefully getting beyond that because that really did have a negative effect on me, to the point where I was contemplating not coming back in. I was really close to saying: “Sod it. It’s not worth it. I’d rather have something minimum wage and not deal with that.” But I came back and I’m still here.’ Unqualified or low-skilled workers used to be valued for the things they did – work that may have exacted a physical toll, but might leave them enough mental space for the life they wanted to live outside of it. Now they are valued for emotional resilience, and the shortfall is left to Seroxat and Heineken. Would T be happy to think that his identity came from what he does all day?


pages: 353 words: 91,520

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

The bulky organizational pyramids of the last century are being replaced by millions of tiny inverted pyramids—small, agile organizations consisting almost entirely of innovative, creative employees. These agile organizations draw on employees and outsourced partners spread around the globe. Some of these organizations hire a few low-skilled workers; many hire none. With the proliferation of these companies, career options for creative problem-solvers will become ever more abundant, while options for hoop-jumpers will be dismal. * * * Ted is on the board of a fast-growing start-up called Xamarin, which makes software for creating mobile applications.


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

Fears about the slowing of the economy in general are met with calls for the education of the workforce, as though that, rather than increasing consumer demand, will guarantee that every individual somehow has a high-paying job. In fact, automation has caused the hollowing out of the wage structure; the highest-paid people continue to be highly paid, while middle- and low-skilled workers conduct a race to the bottom for lower-skilled jobs. Without some degree of redistribution and the provision of more public goods “such as food, housing, education and health care that are necessary for a modern life to go well,” there is no guarantee that economic output will have any relationship to well-being.72 The path of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010) provides a good illustration of the problems caused by divergent partisan ideologies and powerful framing narratives.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

Unsurprisingly, trade unions and those whose jobs and livelihoods were at risk strenuously objected to this strategy, pointing out it wasn’t just them that were at risk. Although it might have been attractive for CEOs at the time to reduce the payload and the operational expense and offload low-skilled workers, while investing in skilled IT generalists who could perform a variety of task, the premise was flawed. 243 244 Chapter 15 | Getting From Here to There: A Roadmap Paul Krugman, back in 1996, imagined a scenario where: “Information technology would end up reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers, because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing —indeed, replaced more easily than a lot of manual labor.”


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

Changes in the distribution of income are attributed to changes in technology and to investments in human and physical capital, which have the effect of increasing the skills and productivity of certain individuals. Inequalities are explained because people with skills in high demand in sectors such as IT and finance have seen their earnings rise, reflecting their superior productivity, while low skilled workers have fallen behind. Under marginal productivity theory the solution to inequality is to increase education and job training opportunities for workers in order to increase skills and productivity across the population. This ‘supply-side’ approach has dominated economic policy making in recent decades, despite the marginal productivity theory being subject to a number of theoretical and empirical flaws.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Also, these former construction workers are accustomed to being paid a healthy wage rate because of their construction skills, but the new manufacturing plants cannot afford to pay that high a wage because the workers, even after being retrained, still have a great deal to learn. Unemployment insurance provides an incentive for workers not to take a lower-paying job. Also, the minimum wage law keeps small businesses from hiring low-skilled workers at a wage rate that would allow their businesses to be profitable, so entry-level workers cannot gain the skills to become more productive and thereby paid at a higher level. The ripple effect continues. Manufacturing is a primary industry. The manufacturing workers, if they had jobs, would be able to buy more food, clothes, and other things, creating other jobs in other industries.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

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

Yet when labour is extraordinarily abundant, and when workers have no choice but to seek jobs to provide for themselves and their families, the downward pressure on pay can become intense. Cheap labour can facilitate employment growth in a few different ways. Low wages can encourage people to use more of some kinds of manual or service labour. As pay for low-skill workers stagnates, for example, more households might find it attractive to hire a house-cleaning service or a landscaping firm, to get nails done at a salon rather than at home, or to retain the services of a personal trainer. The more labour is available at very low pay, the more extensive this low-pay service economy can become.


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

He was not a full-throated supporter of trade unions in the manner of John Stuart Mill (he may have worried that trade unions were growing too quickly, a reasonable concern: from 1890 to 1920 the share of workers in a trade union rose from 10% to nearly 40%). But he saw that they could serve some useful purpose in providing benefits and security to workers. After all, he clearly recognised the uneven bargaining power which low-skilled workers faced when looking for a job. Sounding almost like Marx, Marshall argued that “when any group of them [unskilled labourers] suspends work, there are large numbers who are capable of filling their place”. Marshall was also interested in the possibility of introducing a minimum wage “fixed by authority of Government below which no man may work”.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

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

Rather, it involves the substitution of machines (or algorithms) for tasks previously performed by labor. Advances in automation technology can increase average productivity and at the same time reduce average real wages. Furthermore, technology’s inequality implications can be much more amplified when automation encroaches on the tasks performed by low-skill workers, reducing their real wages while raising the returns to capital and the wages of higher-skilled labor (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2022). It is important to emphasize that automation can—but does not necessarily—reduce wages. Theoretically, it displaces workers from the tasks they used to perform and thus is predicted to always reduce the labor share in value added (how much of total production value goes to labor as opposed to capital).

American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 109:1‒32. Autor, David H., Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, and Bryan Seegmiller. 2022. “New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940‒2018.” NBER Working Paper no. 30389. DOI:10.3386/w30389. Autor, David H., and David Dorn. 2013. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” American Economic Review 103, no. 5: 1553‒1597. Autor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103:2121‒2168. Autor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. 2019.


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

At the same time as the labour share has been falling, more of it has been going to workers at the top of the earnings scale and less to those in the middle and bottom. Across advanced economies, higher-skilled workers claimed an additional 6.5 percentage points of the labour share between 1980 and 2001, whereas low-skilled workers saw their portion shrink by 4.8 percentage points.22 Meanwhile, those at the very top of the income distribution have done exceedingly well. In the US, between 1975 and 2012, the top 1 per cent gained around 47 per cent of the entire total of pre-tax increase in incomes (see Figure 8). In Canada over the same period it was 37 per cent, and in Australia and the UK over 20 per cent.23 In the US, the incomes of the richest 1 per cent rose by 142 per cent between 1980 and 2013 (from an average of $461,910, adjusted for inflation, to $1,119,315) and their share of national income doubled, from 10 to 20 per cent.


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

If Anthony hears that Google’s Akron office needs programmers, he can look for programmers. Anthony will still gain from the sponsorship, as will the migrant worker and the local economy. Who would come? Most likely a mix of unskilled workers like Bishal and skilled ones as in our Google example. The illegal economy is currently dominated by low-skilled workers—strawberry pickers, nannies, gardeners, slaughterhouse workers. VIP would put this work on a legal footing, while channeling some of the surplus away from the employers and into the pockets of native workers. Skilled migrants would be treated like any other migrants under our system. They would earn far greater income than unskilled migrants and thus there would be substantial competition among hosts to gain a share of their income.


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

Plantronics, one of the largest audio-engineering companies in the world, which supplies headsets for air-traffic controllers, pilots, astronauts, emergency workers, and ordinary consumers, was one of the first communications equipment companies to discover the city. While earlier maquiladoras had used low-skilled workers, Plantronics needed people who could assemble precision equipment. And it also built its own design team of more than a hundred engineers drawn from Tijuana’s universities, which were pumping out a new generation of educated professionals. To retain employees, the company invested in a gym, a basketball court, and employee-wellness programs.


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

They compared the employment performance and wage developments in the low-paying industries of all neighboring counties located in two different states, only one of which saw changes in the state minimum wage. They found no evidence for employment loss, but strong evidence of an improved income situation for low-skilled workers in these industries. Neumark and Wascher (2007) did a number of studies in which they found a negative impact for young workers in France in particular. Young workers tend to be less productive. This makes it likely that for relatively large numbers of them a minimum wage which might be moderate for experienced workers is far above what is justified by their own productivity level.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

By increasing the wages of knowledge workers, these drugs would boost the amount these laborers paid for services performed by relatively unskilled laborers. They would spend more in restaurants, hire additional domestic servants, and consequently raise the salaries of the unskilled. Cognition enhancers would also allow some low-skilled workers who hadn’t been smart enough to become highly skilled professionals to find better jobs, which would benefit both them and those who remained in low-skill occupations (who would then face less competition). Cheap cognitive-enhancing drugs would reduce chronic unemployment. Even at a wage of zero, many adults are unemployable—so low-skilled they can’t contribute anything to a company, while their very presence at a job site costs a business something because they take up space and can cause accidents.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Thomas Paine felt that UBI could guarantee the capacity of citizens to say no to despots hoping to exploit their economic desperation. UBI has come to the fore as a way to make sure workers with limited skills aren’t left behind as technological progress races past them. But universal basic income assumes that “low-skill” workers need an economic floor because they will have no options once machines beat them out for jobs. Here’s what’s wrong with that logic. This argument assumes that AI will eventually conquer all and people will be irrelevant to its advancement or extending the services that it proposes. But, as suggested by the history of task churn common to platforms, humans do not go away in the future of AI.


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

Case and Deaton, for instance, argue that much of the blame for the immiseration of non-college-educated Americans can be laid at the doorstep of our exorbitantly costly health care system, a system that is an outlier among high-income countries.39 I argued in Part I of this book that genetic differences between people cause differences between them in their social and behavioral outcomes, but that genetic causation must be understood in terms of a lengthy and complex causal chain that spans multiple levels of analysis, from the actions of molecules to the actions of societies. The length and complexity of this causal chain means that there are multiple opportunities to intervene in the connection between genotype and a complex phenotype. Changing the health care system so that wages for “low-skilled” workers were not dragged down by the immense cost of employer-provided health insurance would not change anything about people’s DNA—but it might weaken one link in long causal chain connecting genetic differences among people with differences in their income. Moreover, the relative emphasis we put on equity can differ at different links in the chain.


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

It seems Amazon considered the automation of its own warehouses to be so valuable that it would forgo the profits from selling the system and keep the technology away from its competition. Today, Amazon uses the Kiva solution in its own warehouses to minimise warehouse workers and order fulfilment costs while improving order accuracy. Amazon offers us a glimpse of something that we’ll see often in the future: automation technology reduces the need for and number of low-skilled workers and highly paid sales and marketing employees while creating an entirely new division within the company of highly skilled roboticists and AI software workers. We said earlier that every person and company needs a robot strategy. Who are the early leaders in robot strategy and what are they doing?


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The networking software senses a component failure (a dying hard drive, say) and immediately bypasses the component, routing the work to another, healthy piece of hardware in the system. No single component matters; each is dispensable and disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing failed parts with fresh ones. You hire a low-skilled worker, or build a robot, and when a component dies, the worker, or the robot, swaps it out with a good one. Such a system requires smart software. It also requires cheap parts. 3. Executing an algorithm with a physical system is like putting a mind into a body. 4. Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, gave an interesting speech at a European tech conference a couple years back.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

“This program also has a coterie of female dancers who perform between sketches.” The news from Britain was not so upbeat for potential job seekers from Bulgaria and Romania. One report summed up their situation. “When the two countries joined the European Union in January, Britain capped the number of low-skilled workers it would admit to 20,000, despite offering an open door to migrants from new EU states such as Poland three years ago.”7 If over 600,000 eastern Europeans had come to Britain following the 2004 EU enlargement, only 40,000 Bulgarians and Romanians were expected to arrive in 2007. To be sure, one report suggested that it was not anti-Balkan discrimination but a skill set not fitted to the British labor market that may have kept the numbers low: “Rather than the plumbers and builders many expected, the top profession listed by Romanians is ‘circus artiste.’


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

Electricity became standard in every home, and its applications included the washing machine, air conditioner, and refrigerator. They made life easier, healthier, and cleaner for everyone and greatly helped to emancipate women. And the industries that electricity and transportation helped create opened many middle-class job opportunities, even for medium- and low-skilled workers. Factory machines this time were complementary to workers, relieving them from heavy physical duty while still requiring them in great numbers. And drivers, telephone operators, secretaries, and cashiers all were in high demand in an economy that increasingly held the middle between one based on manufacturing and one based on services.


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

Electricity became standard in every home, and its applications included the washing machine, air conditioner, and refrigerator. They made life easier, healthier, and cleaner for everyone and greatly helped to emancipate women. And the industries that electricity and transportation helped create opened many middle-class job opportunities, even for medium- and low-skilled workers. Factory machines this time were complementary to workers, relieving them from heavy physical duty while still requiring them in great numbers. And drivers, telephone operators, secretaries, and cashiers all were in high demand in an economy that increasingly held the middle between one based on manufacturing and one based on services.


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

EU expansion granted those populations mobility rights they had long desired but been denied. By 2014, over 14 million EU citizens were living in an EU country outside the country of their birth.56 Globally, some 17 million people migrate to a new country each year, in a variety of visa categories. They include 3.5 million low-skilled workers who migrate each year from countries such as the Philippines and India to the Middle East and elsewhere, and some 300,000 who cross the border from Mexico into the US.57 Year by year, migrants are tying every region of the world together at the family level. See Figure 3-3. The rest of us are lucky they do.


pages: 356 words: 112,271

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

Since the referendum, they have dealt with upheaval on all fronts. Irish goods are instantly more expensive in the UK. Even if British imports are cheaper, that might have a worrying knock-on effect. For every biggish SME, there is a smaller plant nearby, employing perhaps 10 to 15 relatively low-skilled workers making parts for that bigger company. Cheaper British imports mean that smaller companies may be priced out, with no other potential clients for their products. The Small Firms Association (SFA) has been monitoring business sentiment post-Brexit. ‘There was a bit of denial at first,’ says Acting Director Linda Barry.


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

In a way this is just as well, given that, as we have seen, technological change is tending to produce larger and larger redundant and even disposable populations among the less skilled.8 The gap between too few high-skill workers and a massive reserve of unemployed and increasingly unemployable medium- and low-skill workers appears to be widening, while the definition of skills is evolving rapidly. So would it be possible for capital accumulation to move beyond the exponentials it has exhibited over the past two centuries on to a similar S-shaped trajectory as has occurred in the demographics of many countries, culminating in a zero-growth, steady-state capitalist economy?


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Though Amazon was intensely focused on its software and systems, there was another key element of its distribution system—the low-wage laborers who actually worked in it. As Amazon grew throughout the decade, it hired tens of thousands of temporary employees each holiday season and usually kept on about 10 to 15 percent of them permanently. These generally low-skilled workers, toiling for ten to twelve dollars an hour in places where there were few other good jobs, could find Amazon to be a somewhat cruel master. Theft was a constant problem, as the FCs were stocked with easily concealable goodies like DVDs and jewelry, so the company outfitted all of its FCs with metal detectors and security cameras and eventually contracted with an outside security firm to patrol the facilities.


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

Such restrictions failed partly for the economic and political reasons described above, but also for a third reason: When immigrants are brought over without their networks of relatives and village neighbors, they are more likely to become isolated and unsocialized, to fall into criminality or social conservatism. This happens when family-reunification migration is restricted or when countries rely on temporary guest-worker programs to attract low-skilled workers without their families, as Germany did in the 1970s and Canada and Australia are attempting today. When settlement of families is restricted, arrival cities and their supportive networks are unable to take shape, and behavior changes. A study by Dennis Broeders and Godfried Engbersen at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, examined immigrants forbidden to bring over relatives: Without family networks to support them, the migrants were forced into a “dependence on informal, and increasingly criminal, networks and institutions.”19 Arranged marriages, often to a cousin from a distant village whom the primary-immigrant spouse hadn’t met, became commonplace, even when the migrants are from countries such as Bangladesh or Turkey, where these practices are dying out.


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 need to be hardheaded about what kinds of new jobs can be successfully nurtured. An advanced industrial economy competes best in jobs that involve high levels of skill and intellectual content, like technology and financial services. We simply cannot win with prosaic, commoditylike products that require large numbers of low-skilled workers. As tough as recent decades have been for Detroit's Big Three, the car industry is better positioned to compete than many other U.S. manufacturing businesses because labor is a relatively small part of the cost of building a car—only about 7 or 8 percent. Our current economic problems—and the massive doses of government stimulus spending in response to them—have brought back occasional mentions of an almost forgotten phrase, industrial policy.


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

Stifling this discussion on campus is a disservice to our peers in the campus political minority, and to our own educational growth.49 Second, the loss of viewpoint diversity among the faculty means that what students learn about politically controversial topics will often be “left shifted” from the truth. There is a range of reasonable opinions on many factual questions. (For example: How much does raising the minimum wage cause employers to hire fewer low-skilled workers? How much of an influence do prenatal hormones have on the differing toy and play preferences of boys versus girls?) But students in politically homogeneous departments will mostly be exposed to books and research studies drawn from the left half of the range, so they are likely to come down to the “left” of the truth, on average.


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

In such cases, there is no such tradeoff, because investment in poor kids raises the rate of growth for everyone, at the same time leveling the playing field in favor of poor kids. That has been the core rationale for public education throughout U.S. history, and much empirical research confirms that premise.5 The costs of underinvesting in poor kids are even greater in an era of globalization, because of a “skills mismatch” between what low-skilled workers can do and what employers need in an age of rapid technological change. This leads, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz put it, to the “decreased utilization of the less educated” and slower economic growth.6 Our contemporary public debate recognizes this problem but assumes it is largely a “schools problem.”


pages: 497 words: 123,778

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

The economic gloom of the past decades is often described as though it had been caused by natural forces over which politicians have no control. Technological progress and automation, so this story goes, have displaced millions of jobs.10 The rise of competitors from China to Bangladesh has lowered wages and reduced employment for low-skilled workers.11 Perhaps the citizens of democracies in North America and Western Europe just have to face up to the fact that the era of their unrivaled affluence is over.12 There is a large grain of truth to this story. It would be extremely difficult for a national government to halt technological progress or stop international trade.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

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

In some Leave voting areas, immigrants, who previously made up one in fifty of the local population, numbered as many as one in four at the time of the referendum. These places had also suffered the biggest cuts in jobs and services. Migration to these areas, concentrated in the North and on the south coast of England, is largely comprised of younger, non-English-speaking, low-skilled workers. The combination of unemployed locals and an abundance of employed migrants, competing for scarce resources in a time of recession and cutbacks, creates a greater feeling of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. A lack of inter-cultural interactions and understanding between the local and migrant populations results in rising tensions.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Customs and the Secret Service, for instance, had been part of Treasury. Immigration enforcement fell under the Department of Justice. The Transportation Security Administration agents we see at the airport previously reported to the Department of Transportation. III. While we tend to focus on “high-skilled” immigration, Silicon Valley was likewise built by “low-skilled” workers who assembled many of the tech industry’s best-known products. In the 1980s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that perhaps a quarter of Silicon Valley workers were undocumented. Epilogue In 2019, German chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the graduating class of Harvard University.


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

Corporal punishment in schools, widespread throughout much of the twentieth century, is now prohibited in more than 120 countries.50 Evolving attitudes towards nationalism and immigration have life-changing implications for the hundreds of millions of international migrants;51 one estimate found that, on average, for a low-skill worker, moving to the United States boosts their annual income by over $15,000 per year.52 And it’s not only people who are affected by our values. Landscapes and ecosystems can be reshaped by the extent to which we value nature. Our attitudes towards animal welfare have huge implications for the billions of animals that are raised in factory farms.53 Values changes are significant because they have major impacts on the lives of people and other beings.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

There is broad agreement that the state has an important role in making flexible labor markets work efficiently and fairly. Governments have an obligation to provide training for less skilled workers, given that companies have little incentive to invest in people who have few opportunities to move elsewhere, and given that low-skilled workers are also bearing the brunt of economic change, as manual jobs are shifted offshore or mechanized out of existence. But it is also arguable that governments have a further obligation to mitigate the impact of flexible work on family life. The most perplexing problem with the new world of work is the impact that it has had on children.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

I still speak to her from time to time. She’s a receptionist with a real estate firm, and she also does something else, she works for a hotel. She does well. I mean, it’s not fantastic. She’s not working in Silicon Valley, but she’s doing well for where she was.” In the rough-and-tumble marketplace, then, low-skilled workers can often be rescued by a low-cost gamble, a few minutes of attention and teaching. “One young lady we were about to terminate ’cause she couldn’t get to work on time,” said Hazel Barkley of Sprint. “She’d never ridden a bus” and simply did not know how. So her supervisors showed her. “Now she can read a schedule, she takes the bus, she’s fine.”


pages: 511 words: 132,682

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

The United States has one of the highest poverty and inequality levels among the OECD countries,” and also ranks near the bottom among wealthy countries in terms of labor markets, safety nets, and economic mobility.5 The middle class, in the United States and in much of Europe, is shrinking—down to just over 50 percent in the United States and 60 percent in the European Union.6 Once-thriving manufacturing centers where workers could earn a decent living have been reduced to a state of rusting decay brought about by declines in labor’s share of profits, low-skilled workers’ wages, labor force participation, and the start-up rate of new firms (due to barriers erected by powerful incumbents).7 Yet, our elected officials continue to defend the competition ideology, to insist that it will pay off, even as our pocketbooks, health care, and social rights tell us otherwise.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Martín, ‘The impact of the Great Recession on mental health and its inequalities: the case of a Southern European region, 1997-2013’, International Journal for Equity in Health 15 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-015-0283-7. Note also, however, that men regained jobs faster than women: Dominic Rushe, ‘Women Hit Hardest in US Economic Recovery as Jobs Growth Slows’, Guardian, 6 April 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/apr/06/women-hit-hard-us-economic-recession; Brian Groom, ‘Low-skilled workers hit hardest by recession’, Financial Times, 20 July 2011, https://www.ft.com/content/9e874afa-b2b4-11e0-bc28-00144feabdc0. 40 Indeed when Princeton’s Noam Gidron and Harvard’s Peter Hall analysed voting patterns in 20 higher-income countries between 1987 and 2014 (countries including Britain, the US and France) what they found was that the more a person perceived the social status of ‘people like them’ to have declined in the previous 25 years, the more likely that person was to vote right-wing populist.


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

Lori G. Keitzer, Job Loss from Imports: Measuring the Costs (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2001), 4. 37. Senator Byron Dorgan, “Jobs in America,” speech delivered on the Senate floor on Nov. 4, 2003; Greg Barrett, “Forces of Global Economy Usher In Uneasy Change for Low-Skilled Workers,” Gannett News Service, Dec. 3, 2002. 38. “American Bargain Shopping Holds Down Wages of Foreign Workers,” NBC News Transcripts, Dateline NBC, June 17, 2005; “How Can Wal-Mart Sell a Denim Shirt for $11.67?” New York: National Labor Committee, June 20, 2005, available at nlcnet.org; Testimony of Masuma, factory worker from Bangladesh, National Labor Committee, available at www.nlcnet.org, www.nlcnet.org/campaigns/ bangtour/maksuda.shtml. 39.


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

And most of these everyday face-to-face service and care jobs, from car mechanic to mail deliverer and nursery nurse, cannot be exported or done by a robot. Low-skill work is not, as widely predicted by economists, disappearing. In Gordon Brown’s penultimate budget speech as chancellor of the exchequer in 2006, he predicted there would be just 600,000 low-skill jobs in the United Kingdom by 2020. Depending on how one defines “low-skill,” there are likely to be at least 8 million low-skill jobs in the British economy next year. Indeed, one of the explanations for the slowdown in productivity growth in rich economies in recent years, associated with the theory of economist William Baumol, is that workers no longer needed in the more automated sectors end up in low-productivity jobs.

In 2017 it was 36 percent for men and 40 percent for women.47 Universities, law schools, and medical schools are now at least 50 percent female, and although few women are CEOs of top companies, roughly half of the jobs in the top managerial and professional class are now taken by women.48 The top end of the labor market has been almost completely gender desegregated, but the middle and bottom end remains highly segregated, with women overwhelmingly concentrated in caring sectors like primary education, nursing, and social care. This is one reason why the graduate premium is higher for women than men: because of the bigger earnings gulf between professional women and often part-time women workers in the lowest-paid corners of the economy. Men in low-skill jobs such as garbage collection and postal delivery tend to be better paid than women in low-skill jobs, partly because the jobs have historically been unionized. Employment status is usually more connected to well-being in men than in women.49 Women on average place a higher priority on home and children than men do, and household income is a stronger predictor of well-being among women.

But German employers, like those in the United Kingdom, complain that graduates’ expectations make them poorly motivated employees. There is also a 35 percent dropout rate from degree courses with most people falling back on an apprenticeship. Over the next few years, we will discover whether Germany can sustain an apprenticeship system that has succeeded in giving status to many middling- and even low-skill jobs or whether it will opt for UK-style mass higher education, with what seems to be its attendant squeeze on higher manual and technical skills. Too Much Signaling? Our societies would not work properly if people only had the education levels of the early nineteenth century. But that does not mean more academic education is always the answer to our ills.


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

A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. “With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten. Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.


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

All this is like picking someone’s pocket, then opening their wallet and giving them a few dollars back, telling them with a smile what a good deal they’ve got. And monopolising trends have hit workers hard, in countries around the world. Since the 1970s workers’ wages have fallen by a whopping 10–15 per cent of national income in rich countries. As a result, our economies may have grown overall but workers, and especially low-skilled workers, aren’t seeing the fruits of this growth. It has been estimated for the US that if wages hadn’t fallen by this much, then (all other things being equal) net corporate profits would have been two-thirds lower. Slicing this another way, if British workers’ share of national income were at 1975 levels, then (again all other things being equal) the average British employee would be £6000–£9,000 better off each year.31 There are other reasons for these changes – technology, outsourcing, tax cuts for billionaires, weaker unions, the extractive financialisation of our economies and the long hangover from the global financial crisis – but some studies suggest that monopolisation, which overlaps with all of the above factors, has played a starring role.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have calculated that imports from China explained 21 percent of the decline in manufacturing employment during the years 1990 to 2007—or the loss of 1.5 million jobs. In particular, America’s decision to establish normal trade relations with China in 2001 was followed, in short order, by both a surge in imports from China and an unusually large fall in manufacturing employment. These job losses were concentrated among low-skilled workers who had little chance of getting equally well-paid jobs in the future: for example, the clothing industry lost about half a million jobs in the years 1995 to 2005.2 China’s challenge was existential as well as just commercial. In the early years of the Bush administration China became the world’s second-biggest economy.


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

They do this by stimulating economic growth by lowering costs for the tasks they do well: Computers “shift work away from routine tasks and towards … expert thinking and complex communication.” The jobs they tend to displace don’t involve much independent thought, but rather raw computational or processing ability. They get rid of these low-skilled jobs in two ways: (1) by doing them themselves (e.g., through voice recognition phone trees); and (2) by allowing others in lower-wage labor markets to do them for us (as in the much maligned and much celebrated call centers in India). The result is that the jobs created over the last forty years have not gotten more specific; they have actually gotten broader.36With computerization, we are not, on average, rendered into mindless number punchers.

There is always a new surprise just around the corner for the knowledge worker. The boring jobs that can be delegated to computers have been. Others that can’t have been outsourced to low-wage labor markets (the famous Indian call centers), thanks to telecommunications technologies. The only low-skilled jobs that really remain in the United States are those which involve personal contact that cannot be performed from afar. It’s no surprise that the fastest-growing low-wage occupations are food service preparation, followed by home health care workers.37 After all, you can’t very well get a computer or a call service center to wipe your incontinent grandmother or serve her three hot meals a day.

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. So, what’s happening here? It’s an indirect effect: the inequality itself creates the low-wage serving jobs. After all, the high-wage workers are—for the first time in history—working more hours than their lower-wage counterparts. In other words, the substitution effect (greater opportunity costs of not working) is swamping the income effect (greater ability to afford not to work).


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

“constitutional limitations”: David Edwards, “NC GOP Bills Would Require Teaching Koch Principles While Banning Teachers’ Political Views in Class,” Raw Story, April 29, 2011. “I was a Republican”: Jim Goodmon, interview with author, which first appeared in Mayer, “State for Sale.” opposition to minimum wage laws: In an interview with the author, Roy Cordato, a vice president at the John Locke Foundation, argued that “the minimum wage hurts low-skilled workers, by pricing them out of the market,” and that concern about worker exploitation was “the kind of thinking that comes from Karl Marx.” In Cordato’s view, “any freely made contracts among consenting adults should be legal,” including those involving prostitution and the sale of dangerous drugs.


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

Hamersma dragged on, and Jack continued to live in his house, until, two months later, he died there. * * * Weidner’s head was always about to explode. His mind filled with visions of a decadent kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties—America’s masses fed on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card, low-skill workers structurally unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren’t coming back, the banks in Gotham leeching the last drops of wealth out of the country, corporations unrestrained by any notion of national interest, the system of property law in shambles, the world drowning in debt.


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

As predicted by Stolper-Samuelson, this issue cleaves the nation along the abundant-scarce factor fault line: among those earning more than $100,000 per year, only one-third agreed, whereas among bluecollar workers and union members, two-thirds agreed.22 Stolper-Samuelson does fail in at least one area by predicting that freer trade should decrease inequalities in developing nations by helping low-skilled workers. In fact, the opposite occurs: the most highly skilled industrial workers earn better pay in call centers and multinational-owned plants, increasing the gap between those who are fortunate enough to find such work and those who are not.23 Although working conditions in an Asian Nike factory may appall people in the developed world, positions in American-associated factories are the most sought-after jobs in Vietnam's "development zones."


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

The hollowing out of the middle of the market is pushing older mid-tier workers back down the ladder, cutting off the rungs young people traditionally used to ascend their own career ladders—and has pushed a lot of Millennials completely off of any career ladder at all. Younger workers would have a leg up if the only thing employers cared about was finding warm bodies to do low-skill jobs cheaply—since younger workers are generally less skilled but cheap. But what employers increasingly care about, even in “low-skilled” jobs, is finding workers who are able to perform nonroutine tasks well. Older workers, with more life and career experience, will often have an advantage. No wonder that when economists David Autor and David Dorn looked at the age distribution within hollowing-out professions, they found that for each percentage point that a particular job role’s share of total employment fell between 1980 and 2005, the average age of the people doing that job increased 0.78 years.

As he put it, one of the hallmarks of an economy that works for Americans is that American businesses “look out for American workers.”40 What were the characteristics of that old, mid-twentieth-century economy the Boomers were trying to capture? The standout feature was a sense that the gains of economic growth were more fairly distributed between workers and companies. The transition to a high-skilled economy, which is actually a polarization toward both high- and low-skilled jobs, clearly was not pulling enough workers into the high-skilled category: one analysis found that a total decline in labor share of 4.4 percentage points in manufacturing industries was only partly offset by a 2.5 percentage point gain in labor share for more highly skilled business and professional services.41 Along with a yearning for the shared prosperity Boomers remembered from their youth, they also missed a greater sense of economic security.

Siu, “The Trend Is the Cycle: Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18334, August 2012. 16. Ibid. 17. Imani Moise, “For the Elderly Who Are Lonely, Robots Offer Companionship,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2018; David H. Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (August 2013). 18. Rachel E. Dwyer, “The Care Economy? Gender, Economic Restructuring, and Job Polarization in the U.S. Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 3 (June 2013). 19. Jaimovich and Siu, “The Trend Is the Cycle.” 20.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

It was hard to believe that only two years before, Moore needed to build his own furnaces and Noyce had to scrounge for photolithography lenses at a camera shop.63 Sweeping developments unrelated to electronics also benefited Fairchild Semiconductor and Bob Noyce. The increasing mechanization of agriculture in California freed up thousands of low-skilled workers for work in electronics assembly plants. An aggressive state-sponsored infrastructure-building spree changed zoning regulations and installed a network of roads and sewer pipes to attract people and industry to California. In the two decades after the end of the Second World War, the state of California also established its consolidated system of 9 universities, 19 colleges, and 106 community colleges, which could provide an educated workforce for high-tech industry.64 Noyce had never before felt as at home in a place as he did in this patch of California, where so much was new, and life changed so quickly.


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

Americans need to believe that they live in a country where the borders are controlled. But they also need to understand that to thrive as a country we need a steady flow of legal immigration. Our ability as a country to embrace diversity is one of our greatest competitive advantages. We need to control low-skilled immigration so our own low-skilled workers are not priced out of jobs, while removing all limits on H-1B visas for foreign high-skilled knowledge workers. We should also double the research funding for all of our national labs and institutes of health to drive basic research. Nothing would spin off more new good jobs and industries than that combination of more basic research and more knowledge workers. 7.


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

As we discuss in Chapter 6, this is happening in the USA, and it undermines the solidarity that was once forged by uncertainty or incomplete information. The bifurcation of risks, and information about such risks, has parallels in a number of historical cases. Japan is a case in point because of starkly divergent unemployment risks between high- and low-skilled workers – a bifurcation that has been reinforced by a system of employment protection and company-provided benefits that substitute for labor mobility (Aoki 1988). In Latin America, formal sector workers have historically enjoyed a much higher level of protection than those in the informal sector, with an order of magnitude difference in labor market risks (Wibbels and Ahlquist 2011).


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

London is an essentially migrant-based labour market; four out of every ten employees in London were born outside the UK. Of these, about three-quarters were born outside the European Economic Area (EEA), the remaining quarter from the other European countries in the EEA. Of course, it is true that many (around half) of those working in London but born outside the UK work in low-skilled jobs. But the other half work in skilled jobs and are often particularly highly qualified. Even among migrant workers in low-skill employment, a surprising large number have academic qualifications well in excess of those required for their jobs. Although the pace of non-EEA immigration slowed after the election of a Conservative-led coalition which cut back on those parts of immigration subject to UK control, the growing economic recession in Europe associated with the problems of the euro led to a massive rise in immigration to the UK from within the EU (especially from Southern Europe).

article=1021&context=confpapers INDEX Accenture Fintech Innovation Lab ref1 accommodation ref1, ref2, ref3 cheap ref1, ref2, ref3 cramped ref1 displacement of ref1 proximity to amenities ref1 Advanced Card Systems ref1 advertising/marketing ref1, ref2 campaigns ref1 digital ref1 investment in ref1 online ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 role of creativity in ref1 Aerob ref1 AirWatch ref1 Alibaba ref1, ref2 floated on NYSE ref1 Allegra Strategies ref1 Allford, Simon ref1 Allford Hall Monaghan Morris ref1 Amazon.com, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3 Apple, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3 development kits ref1 facilities of ref1 product lines of ref1 Argentina Buenos Aires share of GDP ref1 Association of London Councils ref1 AT&T Inc. ref1 Australia ref1 Sydney ref1 Austria Vienna share of GDP ref1 Bangladesh economy of ref1 Dhaka ref1 Bank of England investment guidelines ref1 BASF SE ref1 Bell Telephones personnel of ref1 Bennet, Natalie leader of Green Party ref1 bicycles ref1 fatalities associated with ref1 sales of ref1 use in commuting ref1 big data ref1 Birmingham Science Park Aston Innovation Birmingham Complex ref1 Bold Rocket ref1 bonuses ref1 use in property market ref1 Boston Consulting Group ref1, ref2 British Bars and Pubs Association ref1 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) BBC Scotland ref1 Brough, Graham ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2 Burkina Faso Ouagadougou ref1 Burt, Prof Ronald ref1, ref2 Cable and Wireless assets of ref1 Cameron, David economic policies of ref1, ref2 immigration policies of ref1 Canada ref1 Montreal ref1 Toronto ref1, ref2 Vancouver ref1 capital rate of return ref1, ref2 capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3 profits ref1 Catholicism ref1 Centre for Cities ref1, ref2 Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 estimates of UK economic growth ref1 offices of ref1 personnel of ref1, ref2 Centre for Retail Research ref1, ref2 champagne sales figures ref1, ref2 Channel 4 ref1 China Beijing ref1, ref2, ref3 Haidian district ref1 economy of ref1 Golden Shield firewall (Great Firewall of China) ref1 government of ref1, ref2, ref3 Hong Kong ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Cyberport ref1 Hong Kong Stock Exchange ref1 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ref1, ref2 special economic zones Hangzhou ref1 Shenzhen ref1 Zhongguancun Innovation Way (Z-innoway) ref1 China Mobile ref1 China Telecom ref1 China Unicom ref1 Cisco Systems facilities of ref1 cloud computing ref1, ref2 Coalition Government immigration policy of ref1, ref2 coffee shops culture of ref1 cyber cafes ref1 growth of market ref1 Commonwealth migration from ref1 Companies House ref1 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) ref1, ref2 personnel of ref1 Confucianism ref1 Conservative Party ref1 Cooper, Wayne ref1 Corporation of London ref1, ref2, ref3 Crafts, Nick ref1 creative economy ref1 Cridland, John leader of CBI ref1 Cromwell, Oliver ref1 Crow, Bob ref1 Daily Mail ref1 Danone ref1 Danticat, Edwidge ref1 Davis, Charles ref1 Decoded ref1 Deloitte ref1 deregulation of financial markets (1986) ref1 digital economy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 emergence of ref1, ref2 role of creativity in ref1 Dorling, Danny ref1 Dunne, Ronan CEO of O2 (UK) ref1 Durden, Tyler ref1 Economic Journal, The ref1, ref2 Economist, The ref1, ref2, ref3 Edinburgh University ref1 Eggers, Dave Circle, The (2013) ref1 Egypt Cairo ref1 share of GDP ref1 employment ref1 growth ref1 immigrant labour ref1 in FWE ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 job creation ref1 low-skilled jobs ref1 public sector 1112 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) ref1 growth of ref1 shortages ref1 end user demand ref1 Engels, Friedrich ref1 Entrepreneurs for the Future (E4F) ref1 entrepreneurship ref1, ref2, ref3 e.Republic Center for Digital Government and Digital Communities Digital Cities award programme ref1, ref2 Esquire (magazine) ref1 European Economic Area (EEA) ref1 migrants from ref1 contribution to fiscal system ref1 migrants from outside ref1 contribution to fiscal system ref1 European Union (EU) free movement of labour in ref1 member states of ref1, ref2, ref3 taxation regulations ref1 Eurostar ref1 Eurozone ref1, ref2 Crisis (2009–) ref1, ref2, ref3 economy ref1 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 IPO of ref1 Falmouth University ref1 Fan, Donald Senior Director for Office for Diversity of Walmart ref1 FanDuel ref1 Farage, Nigel leader of UKIP ref1 feudalism ref1 financial services ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 lifestyles associated with ref1, ref2 Financial Times (FT) ref1 FT Global Top 500 Companies ref1 Fintech ref1 First World War (1914–18) ref1 fiscal transfer ref1, ref2, ref3 net ref1 potential use to cover local deficits ref1 Flat White Economy (FWE) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 advantages of immigration for ref1, ref2, ref3 business model for ref1 development and growth of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 employment in ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 shortages ref1 impact on UK economy ref1, ref2 model of ref1, ref2, ref3 replicating ref1-ref2 role of creativity in ref1 startups in ref1 business model ref1 Flat Whiters ref1 accommodation data for ref1 social culture of ref1 fashion ref1 nightlife ref1 transport ref1 technology used by ref1 Forbes (magazine) ref1 France ref1 education system of ref1 Paris ref1, ref2, ref3 share of GDP ref1 Paris-Sarclay ref1 creation of (2006) ref1 potential limitations of ref1 promotion of ICT in ref1 Forst and Sullivan ref1 France ref1, ref2 Freeman, Prof Christopher ref1 Fujitsu Ltd. ref1 Funding Circle ref1 Gates, Bill ref1 Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 Berlin ref1 economy of ref1 Glaeser, Edward ref1 Triumph of the City, The ref1 Global Financial Crisis (2007–9) ref1, ref2 Banking Crises (2008) ref1 impact on migration ref1 UK recession (2008–9) ref1 Global Innovation Index ref1 globalisation ref1, ref2, ref3 Glyn, Andrew ref1 Goodison, Sir Nicholas Chairman of the Stock Exchange ref1 Google, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 acquisitions made by ref1 development kits ref1 offices of ref1, ref2 Greater London Authority (GLA) ref1, ref2 Green Party members of ref1 Gröningen Growth and Development Centre ref1 Guardian, The ref1, ref2, ref3 Harbron, Rob ref1, ref2 Harrison, Andy Chief Executive of Whitbread ref1 Harvard Business School ref1 Harvard University Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis ref1 HCL Technologies ref1 Heisnberg, Werner uncertainty principle ref1 Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) ref1 Huawei Technologies ref1 immigration ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 advantages for FWE ref1, ref2, ref3 economic impact of ref1, ref2 impact on social cohesion ref1 impact on wages ref1 legislation ref1 access to state benefits ref1 quota systems ref1 non-EEA ref1, ref2 restrictions on ref1, ref2, ref3 Imperial College, London facilities of ref1 India ref1, ref2 Calcutta ref1 IT sector of ref1 Karnataka ref1 Bangalore ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Electronics City ref1 Mumbai ref1 inequality ref1 potential role of London in ref1, ref2 sources of wealth ref1 Infosys Ltd ref1 initial public offering (IPOs) ref1 innovation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 hubs ref1, ref2 independent ref1 investments in ref1 projects ref1 Institute for Public Policy Research ref1 intellectual property protection of ref1, ref2 Intel Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3 facilities of ref1 personnel of ref1 International Business Machines (IBM) ref1, ref2 facilities of ref1, ref2, ref3 personnel of ref1, ref2, ref3 internet usage ref1 investment ref1, ref2, ref3 advertising and marketing ref1 capitalising of ref1 in innovation ref1 process of ref1 Israel ref1, ref2 Defence Ministry ref1 Haifa ref1 tech sector of ref1 IT spending ref1, ref2 accounting for ref1 software ref1 Italy ref1 Frascati ref1 Rome ref1 ITC Infotech India Ltd ref1 Japan ref1 economy of ref1 Tokyo ref1 share of GDP ref1 Johnson, Boris Mayor of London ref1, ref2, ref3 Johnson Press plc ref1 Judaism ref1 Kaldor, Nicholas ref1 Keynes, John Maynard ref1 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The ref1 KPMG ref1 labour ref1 division of ref1 immigrant ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 market ref1 shocks ref1 share of income ref1, ref2 supply of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Labour Party ref1 immigration policies of ref1 Lai, Ian ref1 Laserfiche ref1 Lawson, Nigel ref1 Leeds Beckett University ref1 Level 39 ref1 Liberal Democrats immigration policies of ref1 lifestyles ref1 associated with financial services ref1 Livingstone, Ken ref1 Lloyds ref1 London School of Economics (LSE) ref1 MadRat games ref1 MagnetWorks Engineering ref1 Mahindra Satyam ref1 Mainelli, Michael Gresham Professor of Commerce ref1 Malaysia ref1 Kuala Lumpur ref1 Manchester Science Parks (MSP) ref1 market capitalisation ref1, ref2 market economy ref1 Marx, Karl ref1, ref2 Labour Theory of Value ref1 Marxism ref1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ref1 campuses of ref1 Technology Review ref1, ref2 MasterCard ref1 McAfee, Inc. ref1 McKinsey Global Institute ref1 McQueen, Alexander ref1 McWilliams, Sir Francis ref1 Pray Silence for Jock Whittington (2002) ref1 Medvedev, Dmitry ref1 technology policies of ref1 Metcalfe, Robert ref1 Metcalfe’s Law concept of ref1 Mexico ref1 Mexico City ref1 share of GDP ref1 Microsoft Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 facilities of ref1 Future Decoded conference ref1 personnel of ref1 Windows (operating system) ref1 Migration Advisory Committee ref1 Miliband, Ed immigration policies of ref1 MindCandy ref1 Moshi Monsters ref1 offices of ref1 Mitsui Chemicals ref1 Mohan, Mukund CEO of Microsoft Ventures in India ref1 Mongolia Ulan Bator ref1 Moore, Gordon Earle Moore’s Law ref1 MphasiS ref1 National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) ref1, ref2 Netherlands Amsterdam ref1 network effects ref1 relationship with supereconomies of scale ref1 Network Rail offices of ref1 New Scientist ref1 New Statesman ref1 Nitto Denko ref1 Nokia Oyj ref1 O2 (Telefónica UK Limited) ref1 offices of ref1 personnel of ref1 Office of Communications (Ofcom) ref1 Olympic Games (2012) ref1, ref2 online shopping ref1, ref2 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Osborne, George ref1 Outblaze ref1 Pareto Principle concept of ref1 Passenger Demand Forecasting Council ref1 PayPal ref1 PCCW ref1 Poland accession to EU (2004) ref1 Pollock, Erskine ref1 Procter & Gamble Co. ref1 property markets ref1, ref2 commercial ref1, ref2 housebuilding ref1, ref2 house/property prices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 property crisis (2007) ref1 residential ref1 use of bonuses in ref1 public spending ref1, ref2, ref3 Barnett formula ref1 relationship with taxation ref1 Qualcomm facilities of ref1 Reinartz, Werner ref1 Republic of Ireland ref1 research and development (R&D) ref1, ref2, ref3 definitions of ref1, ref2 expenditure ref1, ref2 hubs ref1, ref2 industrial ref1 Research Council for the Arts and Humanities ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’ ref1 Rogers, Everett Diffusion of Innovations (1962) ref1 Russian Federation ref1 economy of ref1 Defence Ministry ref1 Moscow ref1, ref2 Skolkovo Innovation Centre ref1, ref2 Saffert, Peter ref1 sales and advertising ref1 Sarkozy, Nicolas technology policies of ref1 Scottish Media Group (STV) ref1 Second World War (1939–45) Blitz, The (1940–1) ref1 shared accommodation ref1 Silicon Canal ref1 Silicon Roundabout ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Silicon Valley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 role of US government defence spending in development of ref1 social culture of ref1 Silva, Rohan Senior Policy Advisor to David Cameron ref1 Singapore ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 government of ref1 Research, Innovation and Enterprise Plan (RIE 2015) ref1 research centres of ref1 A*Star Biopolis ref1 Fusionopolis ref1 Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (Create) ref1 CleanTech Park ref1 Singapore Science Park ref1 Tuas Biomedical Park ref1 skills drain ref1 Skyscanner ref1 small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) ref1 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ref1 Small Business Service Household Survey of Entrepreneurship ref1 Smith, Adam Wealth of Nations, The ref1 Smith, Michael Acton founder of MindCandy ref1 Social Democratic Party (SDP) formation of (1981) ref1 social media ref1 restrictions on ref1 Solow, Robert ref1 South Africa Johannesburg share of GDP ref1 South East Regional Assembly ref1 South Korea Seoul ref1 share of GDP ref1 Spain Barcelona ref1 Ibiza ref1 Sprint Corporation ref1 startups ref1 business models of ref1 in FWE ref1 Stigler, George ref1 supereconomies of scale concept of ref1 relationship with network effects ref1 Sweden Stockholm share of GDP ref1 Tata Consultancy Services ref1 taxation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 allowance ref1 corporation ref1 EU regulations ref1 National Insurance ref1, ref2, ref3 regional variation of ref1 relationship with public spending ref1 Tech City ref1, ref2, ref3 technology clusters ref1, ref2, ref3 identification of ref1 Techstars/Barclays ref1 telecommunications ref1 Thatcher, Margaret ref1, ref2 Thile, Peter ref1 trade unions ref1 Transport for London (TfL) ref1, ref2 UK Independence Party (UKIP) members of ref1, ref2 United Kingdom (UK) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Bath ref1 Birmingham ref1, ref2 Bristol ref1 Cambridge ref1 Cheshire ref1 Civil Service ref1 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills ref1, ref2 Department for Transport ref1 economy of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 contribution of creative industries to ref1 growth of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Edinburgh ref1 GDP per capita ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Glasgow ref1, ref2 media clusters in ref1 government of ref1, ref2, ref3 Index of Multiple Deprivation ref1 ‘Innovation Report 2014’ ref1 Hounslow ref1 labour market of ref1 Leeds ref1, ref2, ref3 London ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23 business sector of ref1 Camden ref1, ref2 City Fringes ref1, ref2 City of London ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 cultural presence of ref1 economy of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 migrant labour in ref1 expansion of ref1, ref2, ref3 GDP per capita ref1, ref2 GVA of ref1, ref2, ref3 Hackney ref1, ref2, ref3 Haringey ref1, ref2 Islington ref1, ref2 Old Street ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 share of national GDP ref1 Shoreditch ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Tower Hamlets ref1 transport infrastructure of ref1 Crossrail ref1 Westminster ref1, ref2, ref3 Manchester ref1, ref2, ref3 Midlands ref1 Milton Keynes ref1, ref2 Newbury ref1 Newcastle ref1 Northern Ireland ref1 Northampton ref1 Office for National Statistics (ONS) ref1 Oxford ref1 Parliament House of Commons ref1 House of Lords ref1 pub industry of ref1 Reading ref1 Salford ref1 Slough ref1 United States of America (USA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Baltimore, MD ref1 Boston, MA ref1, ref2 Buffalo, NY ref1 Cambridge, MA ref1 Chicago, IL ref1 Columbus, OH ref1 Detroit, MI ref1 economy of ref1 government of ref1, ref2 Irving, TX ref1 Jacksonville, FL ref1 Los Angeles, CA ref1 Minneapolis, MN ref1 Nashville, TN ref1 New York City, NY ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ref1 Palo Alto, CA ref1 Portland, OR ref1, ref2 Raleigh, NC ref1 Salt Lake City, UT ref1 San Diego, CA ref1 San Francisco, CA ref1 Seattle, WA ref1, ref2 Washington DC ref1 Winston-Salem, NC ref1 University of Chicago faculty of ref1, ref2 University of London ref1 University of Sussex faculty of ref1 venture capital ref1, ref2 Visa facilities of ref1 Vodafone offices of ref1 wages ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 depression of ref1, ref2 growth of ref1 impact of immigration on ref1 low ref1, ref2 Walmart personnel of ref1, ref2 Waze acquired by Google ref1 We Are Apps ref1 Whitbread Costa Coffee ref1 personnel of ref1 Wikipedia ref1 Wilson, Harold ref1 administration of ref1 Wipro Technologies ref1 Wired (magazine) ref1 Woolfe, Steven UKIP spokesman on migration and financial affairs ref1 World Bank ref1 Xiaomi ref1 Yorkshire Post, The ref1 ZopNow ref1


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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

Only impersonally delivered services can be moved offshore.21 Impersonally delivered services bear some similarity to, but are not exactly the same as, jobs requiring “rule-based logic,” which, as noted in the previous chapter, are the jobs that the MIT economist Frank Levy and the Harvard economist Richard Murnane deem most vulnerable to automation. But impersonally delivered services include a lot more high-skill jobs (though they include lots of low-skill jobs, too). Securities analysis (high-skill) can be delivered remotely; so can keyboard entry (low-skill), radiology (high-skill), and customer complaint centers. Governments have become enthusiastic exporters of service jobs, though in the United States it’s typically done through private-sector subcontractors.

How the offshoring of service jobs affects income inequality depends on how many of Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts” end up delivering services impersonally from Bangalore or someplace like it. In a 2009 paper, Blinder took a closer look at the skill question and concluded that slightly more high-skill jobs than low-skill jobs were vulnerable to getting shipped offshore in the future. Managers and lawyers, he found, will be harder to offshore than employees and paralegals, but in the sciences and engineering higher skills will make workers more offshorable. Computer operators (low) are difficult to offshore; computer engineers (high) are less difficult; and computer scientists (high) aren’t difficult at all.

“Tellers,” in Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010–2011 Edition (Washington: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010), at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos126.htm: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics Survey, National Employment and Wage data, May 2010. At http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm. 13. David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market,” June 2011, at http://www.cemfi.es/~dorn/Autor-Dorn-LowSkillServices-Polarization.pdf; and David Autor, interview with author, June 7, 2010. 14. Harry Holzer, Julia I. Lane, David Rosenblum, and Fredrik Andersson, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?


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

“A not-insignificant percentage believe their workers are lazy, unreliable, undisciplined, and maybe even criminal. This makes it hard for executives to believe that higher pay could be a good business decision.” She added that this also diminishes “a sense of moral urgency, which might otherwise be a motivator.” This concept of “low-skill” jobs warranting lesser pay than “high-skill” jobs is part and parcel of the way that many of those with the most prestige—not just CEOs—look at the world. As journalist Annie Lowrey has put it, “any number of white papers, panels, and conference colloquiums will tell you” that the nation is full of people “without the credentials and chops to succeed in tomorrow’s economy.”

Over the past 30 years, retail industry productivity has more than doubled—and it’s certainly logical to think that the skills mastered by cashiers and other frontline workers had something to do with that. Yet their real wages have barely moved during that timeframe. All of which is to say, these are not low-skill jobs. They are just low-paid. In late 2016, Doug McMillon went to Philadelphia to deliver the keynote speech at a conference put on by Net Impact, an organization of students and young business leaders who want to build a more just and sustainable world. It was the perfect forum to take stock of how far Walmart had come as a socially responsible company—and where it was planning to go.


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

The consistent findings about cognitive ability and job performance that apply most directly to group differences in cognitive ability are these: Measures of cognitive ability and job performance are always positively correlated. The size of the correlation goes up as the job becomes more cognitively complex. Even for low-skill occupations, job experience does not lead to convergence in performance among persons with different cognitive ability. For intellectually demanding jobs, there is no point at which more cognitive ability doesn’t make a difference. Increases in IQ scores are statistically associated with increases in productivity at every level of cognitive ability.

But the three studies do have enough people in more normal occupations to do so, and the sample weights used by the studies enable us to reach estimates that are representative of the national population, so I can return to using the IQ metric. Table 6 below shows mean IQs and the sizes of the race differences for nine familiar occupations ranging from cognitively demanding (accountant) to a low-skill job (janitor or building cleaner). They are a selection from a larger set of occupations for which data are presented in the online documentation. I have ordered the occupations by the European mean IQ from highest to lowest. With just one exception (vehicle mechanics), all of the European–African differences are greater than the 0.85 SD national estimate from Chapter 3.


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Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

Second-rate ‘unis’ are, if you like, the political elite’s condescension to meritocracy – the utopian idea that opportunity in life can bear no relation to the prosperity enjoyed by one’s parents. 12 At Admiral I would go on to meet quite a few university graduates – products, in most instances, of the former polytechnics. A 2015 report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that more than half (58.8 per cent) of graduates were in jobs that did not require a degree.5 In recent decades the UK economy has been creating low-skilled jobs at a faster rate than high-skilled jobs. Between 1996 and 2008, for every ten middle-skilled jobs that disappeared in the UK, around 4.5 of the replacement jobs were high-skilled whereas 5.5 were low-skilled.6 Thus many students who were promised a leg-up into the professions find, on emerging from the glass-plated ‘aspirational’ production lines with a mountain of debt, that the ladder has been kicked away and the spaces at the top are already stuffed with those who went to more privileged universities.

.: These Poor Hands 23, 149, 190 courier firms 211, 215, 217, 223, 236, 244–7, 250, 256, 257 Cwm, Wales 147, 148, 187, 190, 195, 196, 197 Cwmbran, Wales 143 Daily Express 124–5 Daily Mail 66, 134, 188 Dan (bicycle courier) 248, 249 Dangerfield, George 72 Davies, Idris 148–9 Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) 148 ‘The Angry Summer’ 174 debt 62, 69, 146, 151, 153 Deliveroo 215, 217, 223, 250, 256, 257 democratic socialists 192 Department for Work and Pensions 133 Dickens, Charles 29, 205, 210, 249; Hard Times 138–9 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88–90, 109–10, 214 Dorothy (housemate of JB) 203, 204–5 DriveNow 217 Dropit 217 Eastern Europe, migrant workers from 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 45, 57, 61–2, 75, 114–16, 128–9, 154, 203–4, 260–1 see also under individual nation name Ebbw Vale, Wales 147, 149, 154; legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 Elborough, Travis 93 emergency housing 96 employment agencies 1, 16, 19, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 65–6, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 127, 130, 158, 189, 194 see also under individual agency name Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) 248 employment contracts/classification: Amazon 19–20, 53, 58 care sector 87–8, 107–8, 116 Uber 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 zero-hours see zero-hours contracts employment tribunals 38, 229–30, 243–4 English seaside, debauchery and 92–3 Enterprise Rent-A-Car 214 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programmes 115–16 European Economic Community (EEC) 195 European Referendum (2016) 61, 195–6 Evening Standard 208, 241 Express & Star 59–60 Fabian Society 109 Farrar, James 229–31, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 241–2, 250, 254, 255–6 Fellows of the Academies of Management 17 Fernie, Sue 182 financial crisis (2008) 1, 2, 45, 125, 195, 209 Flash (former miner) 165–8, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 176–8, 179, 188, 196 Fleet News 246 Foot, Michael 149 football 56, 58, 92, 94, 97, 98, 126, 135, 169 fruit picking 61 FTSE 123, 262 Gag Mag 122 Gallagher, Patrick 246 Gary (homeless man, Blackpool) 96–104, 105 Gaz (Gag Mag seller, Blackpool) 122 GDP 146 General Election (2015) 109 General Strike (1926) 148, 149, 173 gentrification 219 Geoff (former miner) 189, 190, 191, 193 ‘gig’ economy 2, 208–10, 217–18, 232, 236, 242, 243–4, 248, 249–50, 252, 257 see also Uber Gissing, George: New Grub Street 64 GMB union 36 grammar schools 261 Guardian 5, 235 Hamstead Colliery, Great Barr 169 Hazel (home carer) 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 235–6 Hemel Hempstead 54, 70 Henley, William Ernest: ‘England, My England’ vii Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy 45 home care worker (domiciliary care worker): Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks 88–90, 109–10 employment contracts 87–8, 107–8, 116, 118, 120 length of home care visits 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets 114, 115 migrant workers as 114–16 negligent 86–7 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 recruitment 82–4 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 societal view of 106 staffing crisis 85–6, 119 suicide rate among 100 typical day/workload 110–14, 118 unions and 88 view job as vocation 86–7 wages/pay 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 Home Instead 119 homelessness 95–105, 138, 187, 208 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 housing/accommodation: Amazon workers, Rugeley 20–2, 24–6 Blackpool 80, 124, 137–8 buy-to-let housing market 24 emergency housing 96 homelessness and 95, 96, 101, 102, 137–8 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 inability to buy 62 landlords and 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 London 203–8 migrant workers and 20–2, 24–6, 197–8 social housing 62, 206 Swansea 124, 150 housing benefit 96, 137–8, 248 immigration 26–7, 61, 115–16, 128–9, 144, 193, 197–9, 236, 259–61 see also migrant workers indeed.co.uk 83–4 independent contractors 209, 248, 251–2 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) 230, 257 inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 226, 238, 262, 263 inflation 2, 122 job centres 19, 96, 133–6, 139–40, 156, 158 Joe (housemate of JB) 22 John Lewis 23, 83 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 70, 159 June (call centre employee) 181–2, 183, 184 Kalanick, Travis 215, 228, 229, 233, 235 Kelly, Kath 66 Khan, Sadiq 256 Koestler, Arthur: The God that Failed 228 Labour Party 7, 57, 59, 61, 109, 144, 149, 150, 173, 174 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London 219 Lamb, Norman 109 Lancashire Evening Post 104–5 landlords, private 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire 31–2, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lea Hall Miners’ Social Club, Staffordshire 55, 56, 74 Len (step-grandfather of JB) 143–4 Lili (London) 203–4 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 Lloyd George, David 172 loan sharks 151, 156 local councils 104–5, 164 London 201–57 accommodation/housing in 65, 203–8, 218 gentrification in 219 ‘gig’ economy in 208–57, 263 homelessness in 95 migrant labour in 205–6, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry 4, 205 McDonald’s 52, 68, 83 Merkel, Angela 196 Metcalf, David 182 middle-class 6, 39, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 74, 75, 149, 178, 205, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263 migrant labour: Amazon use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 care home workers 114–16 ‘gig’ economy and 203–6, 213, 239 restaurant workers 154 retail sector and 128–9 Miliband, Ed 109 mining see coal mining Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Morecambe, Lancashire 137–8 Morgan family 156–8 Morgan, Huw: How Green Was My Valley 147 Moyer-Lee, Jason 257 National Coal Board (NCB) 54, 170, 171 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 108 National Union of Miners (NUM) 174, 176 New York Times 222 NHS (National Health Service) 106, 108, 247 Nirmal (Amazon employee) 45–6, 51 Norbert (Amazon employee) 71–5 nostalgia 3, 60, 93–4, 216 Nottingham 2, 151–2 objectivism 228 oil crisis (1973) 122–3 Oliver, Jamie 154 Orwell, George 56, 169 Palmer, William 29 pay see wages and under individual job title and employer name payday loans 156 PayPal 216 Pimlico Plumbers 251–2 platform capitalism 215 PMP Recruitment 19, 189–90 Poland, migrant workers from 128–9, 130, 135, 197–8 ‘poor, the’ 145 Port Talbot, Wales 166, 176, 190, 196 ‘post-truth’ discourse 199 ‘post-work’ world 165 poverty: Blackpool and 132, 137 class and 4 darkness and 96 diet/weight and 137 ease of slipping into 5 Eastern Europe and 26 monthly salary and 156 as a moral failing 188–9 press treatment of 66–7 time and 67 working poor living in 194 Preston, Lancashire 100, 105, 138–9 private school system 123 progressive thought 262 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 107 Putin, Vladimir 71 Rand, Ayn 228–9, 235, 236; The Fountainhead 228, 229 recession (2008) 1, 45, 104, 121, 125, 156 ‘regeneration’ 55, 60–1, 146 rent-to-own 157–8 retirement, working in 58–9 Reve, Gerard: The Evenings 160 Robin (Cwm) 196, 197 Rochelle (home care worker) 117–19 Romania, migrant workers from 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 32, 44, 46, 51, 53, 61, 65, 71–5, 203, 206, 258 Ron (former miner) 170, 195 Royal London 59 Royal London pub, Wolverhampton 71 Royal Mail 151 Rugeley, Staffordshire 28–35 Amazon distribution centre in 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 decline of coal mining industry in 31–2, 54–6, 57, 169 disappearance of manufacturing jobs from 54–63 high street 28–35 immigration and 30–4, 193–4 Tesco and 58–9, 62–3 Scargill, Arthur 175 scientific management theories 17 Scotland Yard 90 self-employment: ’gig’ economy and 214–15, 222, 229–30, 234, 243–4, 245, 246, 249, 250–1 increase in numbers of workers 2, 209 ‘independent contractors’ and 209, 248, 251–2 Selwyn (former miner) 175, 178, 179, 263–4 Senghenydd, Glamorgan pit explosion (1913) 169–70 Shelter 104 Shirebrook Colliery, Derbyshire 55 Shu, William 250 Silicon Valley, California 210, 232 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 2, 3, 94 Sky Sports News 126 social democracy 3, 263 social housing 62, 206 socialism 7, 56, 131, 144, 148, 149, 173 social mobility 58, 199, 261 South Wales Miners’ Museum, Afan Argoed 166, 196 South Wales Valleys 141–200 accommodation in 150, 197 Amazon in 145–6 beauty of 148 call centre jobs in 153–64, 180–6 coal industry and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 immigration and 197–9 JB’s family history and 143–4 legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 nostalgia and 147 radical history of 149–50 see also under individual place name ‘spice’ 95 Sports Direct 55 squatting 96, 99 steel industry 176, 180, 188, 189, 190, 196–7 Steven (housemate of JB) 124, 126, 127–31 Stoke-on-Trent 58–9 suicide 99–100 Sunday Times 175 ‘Best Companies to Work For’ 154 Rich List 125 Swansea, Wales 145–6, 150–2, 154–64, 176, 178, 197, 205 Tata Steel 190 tax 65, 69, 70, 118, 146, 158, 159, 163, 164, 212, 229, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255 Taylor, Frederick W.: The Principles of Scientific Management 17 Tesco 35, 57, 58–9, 62–3 Thatcher, Margaret 122, 123, 146, 174–5, 193, 207, 263–4 Thorn Automation 57 Thorn EMI 59 trade unions: Amazon and 36 B&M and 130, 131 call centres and 160, 181, 184–5, 186 care sector and 88 coal industry decline and 55–6, 173, 174, 263–4 decline of 2, 3, 35 ‘gig’ economy and 230, 257, 261 objectivism and 228 oil crisis (1973) and 122 Thatcher and 123, 174, 193, 263–4 Wales and 144, 149 see also under individual union name Trades Union Congress (TUC) 173 transgender people 40–1 Transline Group 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 Transport for London (TFL) 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society 247 Trefil, Wales 149 Trump, Donald 7 Uber 207, 211–57 ‘account status’ 221 clocking in at 218 corporation tax and 229 customers 221, 222, 226–7, 237–41, 244, 257 driver costs/expenses 214, 217, 233, 241, 246, 253–5 driver employment classification/contract 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 driver hours 221, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 246, 253, 255 driver numbers 211–13, 233–5 driver wages/pay 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 employment tribunal against (2016) 229–34 flexibility of working for 213–14, 218, 230–3, 248, 250–1 James Farrar and see Farrar, James migrant labour and 213, 236 ‘Onboarding’ class 224–5, 238, 241, 256 opposition to 215–17 philosophy of 228–9, 235, 236 psychological inducements for drivers 222–3 rating system 225–7, 232, 238, 239, 243, 253 rejecting/accepting jobs 221–2, 224–5 ride process 219–21 surge pricing 237, 238, 253 TFL and 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Travis Kalanick and see Kalanick, Travis UberEATS 256 UberPOOL 225, 240–2, 253, 255–6 UberX 212, 225, 240, 241, 255 VAT and 229 vehicle requirements 214 unemployment 2, 32, 36, 62, 121–3, 132, 138, 148, 157, 172, 178, 179, 189–95, 199, 218 Unison 88, 108 Unite 55, 160 United Private Hire Drivers 230, 257 university education 3, 6, 61, 62, 123, 150–1, 152, 153–4 USDAW 130–1 Vettesse, Tony 138 Vicky (care sector supervisor) 86, 87 Wade, Alan 121, 123–4 wages: Amazon 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 call centre 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 care sector 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Uber 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 wage stagnation 2 see also under individual employer, job and sector name Wealth and Assets Survey 207–8 wealth inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 238 Wells, H.


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Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

He was drawn to Bloomingdale’s with the siren promise that he would succeed the incumbent president, Marvin Traub, as chieftain of the retailing giant. But Crandall found retailing exquisitely boring. Inventory automation didn’t begin to approach the intellectual challenge of airline reservations. Nor did he particularly like managing low-wage, low-skill workers. And he perceived a caste system in retailing in which merchants were Brahmans and everybody in the back office was scum. Bob Crandall had to get back to the airline business. It had everything he wanted from a career. Later on he would observe that “the airline business is fast-paced, high-risk, and highly leveraged.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

He did this other thing where he would rub on a chip with a pink pencil eraser and it would start working again for a few seconds, and then it would go away and he knew that was the bad chip. I said, ‘This is voodoo, man.’” Although the Cuban technician lacked Seiler’s university background, he was often very effective at repairing the boards. “He fixed more boards than I did,” says Seiler. Dozens of low-skilled workers assembled the game machines, turning out dozens every day. “It was all these crazy Cubans building these pinball machines,” says Seiler. “I think part of the Cuban language is spoken with hammer.” The high failure rate of many electromechanical games was the result of over complexity at the design level by Seiler’s mentor.


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

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. As we saw in Chapter 2, advancing automation technology will increasingly threaten highly paid knowledge workers with college educations. These jobs will also, of course, be subject to offshoring.


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

., 14 October 2020, https://twitter.com/jjcharlesworth_/status/1316418588207648774 21 ‘Covid-19: low-skilled men have highest death rate of working age adults’, BMJ (2020), no. 369; ‘Coronavirus related deaths by occupation, England and Wales: deaths registered between 9 March and 28 December 2020’, ONS, 25 January 2021. 22 ‘You can’t buck the market’, The Independent, 5 April 1998. 23 ‘Tony Blair’s conference speech 2005’, The Guardian, 27 September 2005. 24 ‘Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech’, The Guardian, 22 June 2006; ‘Gordon Brown – 2007 Mansion House speech’, Political Speech Archive. 25 The Observer, 18 October 2008. 26 ‘Pope Francis: Politics cannot be “slave” to economy, finance’, The Hill, 24 September 2015. 27 Quoted in David Goodhart, ‘How to make low-skilled jobs seem more attractive’, BBC News, 17 February 2013. 28 Jonathan Cribb, ‘How are younger generations faring compared to their parents and grandparents’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 17 October 2019. * The Miners’ Strike of 1984–85 has been romanticised as a great last stand for a way of life, but Scargillism, with its belief that a strike should be imposed on a membership (with a ballot frequently being denied), its overtly political desire to supplant domestic authority and its frequent rejection of potential settlements, meant that the damage caused to British industry and mining communities was even greater than it otherwise would have been.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Migration from Commonwealth countries, especially India, the West Indies, South Africa and Australia has helped solve critical skills shortages in teaching, nursing and IT. Eastern European immigrants now account for approximately a quarter of workers in the construction industry. In 2014, nearly half of the 1.4 million Londoners employed in low-skill jobs were born abroad, partly because migrant hourly pay is 10 to 15 per cent lower than UK-born pay on average (Keijonen, 2014; Gordon, 2014b). The city’s growth in lower-skilled service jobs has to a large extent been conditional on the availability of an elastic supply of cheap labour made possible by large-scale immigration in the 1990s (Gordon and Kaplanis, 2013).

The trend towards settling in more affordable commuter towns such as Hatfield, Watford, Crawley, Thurrock and Gillingham, has potential longer-term implications for migrant access to regional economic opportunity (Datu, 2014). Despite the pockets of poverty and inactivity, London’s labour market is performing very strongly, with its employment rate of 72 per cent at its highest since records began in 1992 (GLA Economics, 2014). With a GVA now well in excess of £300 billion, and the share of low-skilled jobs set to fall over the next two decades (Keijonen, 2014), London is again placed in the highest esteem by global standards, and is widely recognised as one of the most influential urban nodes in a reconfigured global economy. The feared decline in the capital’s financial and business services reputation failed to materialise.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

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

Alan Blinder showed that offshorable jobs in the United States had suffered an estimated 13 percent wage penalty as of 2004.31 Another study found a 1 percentage point increase in the low-wage import share is associated with a 2.8 percent decline in blue-collar wages.32 On balance, however, the technical change explanation emerges as the most important driver of increasing income inequality.33 This is not the popular perception. When a factory or call center closes in the United States and reopens in China or India, or when cheap clothing imports put domestic manufacturers out of business because they can’t compete, or when immigrant workers seem to bid down wages for low-skill jobs in the neighborhood, it seems pretty obvious that globalization is the culprit for the fact that low-income families have been faring poorly in recent decades. There is indeed evidence that globalization has played a part in the inequality trends described here. But even though no one is smashing computer terminals the way the Luddites in nineteenth-century England smashed the newfangled textile machinery that was destroying cottage industry, the evidence suggests that a larger part has been played by technological change.

These “winner take all” markets have spread superstar pay to many other sectors of the economy, outside sport and the performing arts where they were originally observed.35 Moreover, this trend means that the increase in inequality due to skills and technology has what is known as a “fractal” character, which means that it is occurring within categories as well as in the overall income distribution: top lawyers’ pay has risen relative to those on low incomes; but the top top lawyers have pulled further ahead of the average top lawyer too.36 So to sum up, structural changes in the economy driven by new technologies are the fundamental driver of greater inequality, in much the same way that the wave of innovation of early capitalism in the nineteenth century led to great inequality until the workforce as a whole developed the new skills that were needed. Technology has interacted with globalization to exacerbate the trend toward greater inequality, contributing to income inequality within countries through the move of low and medium skill jobs overseas, and creating a rich global elite. The failure of some of the poorest countries to participate at all in these economic trends has made greater inequality a global phenomenon. These structural changes have been universal.37 The extent of the increase in inequality varies between countries depending on the scope of structural economic change they have experienced.

What’s more, the big increase in international migration from about the mid-1990s has brought about quite widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in countries ranging from Sweden and Italy to the Anglo-Saxon lands, such as Australia, the United States, and United Kingdom. Some of this is understandable concern about competition for scarce housing, for example, or pressure on health services and schools, or the impact on the native-born in low-skill jobs, and their wage levels. Few studies in key destination countries for international migration such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland have found any large economic impacts from increased migration at all—the most frequent finding is that there is some small downward pressure on the wages (in real terms) of the native-born low skilled.


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 software and hardware on which apps and platforms draw are often the direct result of truly revolutionary innovation and breakthroughs, from GPS locators and the Internet, to powerful proces- sors that fit into the palm of your hand. Contrary to the industry’s claims, however, the underlying business model is anything but novel. Low-skill tasks instead of complex jobs; powerful intermediaries controlling large workforces; * * * Nothing New under the Sun 73 hybrid arrangements between open market and closed hierarchies: the gig economy is but the latest (and perhaps the most extreme) example of labour- market practices that have been around for centuries.

Two elements are said to be of par- ticular importance to gig-economy innovation here: first, the reversal of ‘pro- gressively greater specialisation’ observed ‘for most of the past 500 years, and specifically since the advent of industrialization’ through the re-emergence * * * 76 The Innovation Paradox of a low-skilled workforce; and second, a new ‘immediacy of labor supply’ in ‘task economies’, in which jobs are broken down into small constituent units and ‘labor efficiency is increased not by extracting more out of existing employees but rather by foraging for lost moments of time that can be turned into work’.17 Both the existence of a large pool of workers competing for routine and often low-skilled jobs and the resulting competition for work have a long historical pedigree. The transformation of a workforce into a taskforce, in other words, was one of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century labour mar- kets in the UK and beyond. At their most fundamental, both the gig economy and nineteenth-century outwork break jobs down into small units that can easily be standardized, controlled, and measured.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Digital technology has proven very good at creating two types of jobs: high-paying, highly specialized jobs at the top (such as software designers and CEOs), and low-paying, low-skill jobs at the bottom (such as Foxconn phone assemblers and Amazon warehouse fulfillers). The result is an economy of increasing inequality. Across the Western world between 1992 and 2010, the share of employment by middle-skill workers has fallen dramatically, even as high-skill and low-skill jobs have grown. “For a long time, from the end of WWII to the 1970s, we had a lot of high paying jobs that didn’t require college education,” said David Autor, an economics professor at MIT.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

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

The American sociologist, Katherine Newman, has called this group the ‘missing class’ or the ‘near poor’ and estimates their size at 57 million, a group at high risk of poverty caused by job loss or illness.119 As in the UK, it is a trend that has been underway since the early 1980s. There has been a continuing growth in jobs that pay well and require high skill, and in lowwage, low-skill jobs, but thanks to de-industrialisation, off-shoring and the impact of technology, ‘middle-tier’ jobs have been on the wane. 120 Some former industrial heartlands like Detroit, the once thriving metropolis where Henry Ford built his first mass production plant in 1913, is now little more than a ghost town with row upon row of derelict factories and street after street of abandoned homes.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

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

Even if we set aside the possibility of an actual reduction in the number of these jobs as new technologies emerge, any decline in the rate at which they are created will have dire, cumulative consequences for employment over the long run. Many economists and politicians might be inclined to dismiss this as a problem. After all, routine, low-wage, low-skill jobs—at least in advanced economies—tend to be viewed as inherently undesirable, and when economists discuss the impact of technology on these kinds of jobs, you are very likely to encounter the phrase “freed up”—as in, workers who lose their low-skill jobs will be freed up to pursue more training and better opportunities. The fundamental assumption, of course, is that a dynamic economy like the United States will always be capable of generating sufficient higher-wage, higher-skill jobs to absorb all those newly freed up workers—given that they succeed in acquiring the necessary training.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

It’s in one of the prosperous Remainer corridors that stretches out from London towards cities of techies, hipsters, students, academics, bankers and cosmopolitan retirees: Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol. Matt Cross, the nearest thing Bristol has to a Maciej Badora – he’s director of investment at an agency called Invest Bristol & Bath – told me the UK was at the top of an evolutionary tree of skills, and as low-skilled factory jobs went to cheaper countries, new, high-wage, high-skill jobs were being generated, not necessarily when foreign investors came in, but sometimes, counter-intuitively, when they moved out, releasing highly qualified people into the West Country’s ferment of start-ups. A spokesperson for Mondelez, Gemma Pryor, told me the company had increased the number of researchers working on its products in Britain from 25 to 250, intended to keep all its remaining British factories going, and was ‘upskilling our wider workforce at Bournville’, where £75 million has been invested to keep manufacturing going ‘for the next generation’.

A bigger market, greater prosperity for all, a peaceful commonwealth, warplanes into chocolate. The chief of the many flaws in this version is that at both ends of the Somerdale-Skarbimierz journey, the new jobs are worse than the old Somerdale ones. Even supposing all the redundant Somerdale workers, and their children, found similar low-skilled jobs, they would never be as well-paid as they were at Somerdale, and, crucially, wouldn’t have the same generous final salary pensions. Some of the Somerdale workers’ children, no doubt, will enter the higher-wage higher-skill world of the professional tech class, but the flipside of Matt Cross’s optimism is that those jobs will be few, and the zero-hours army many.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Blacks were expected to remain apart; in the minds of many whites, blacks did not have the innate capacity to become like “us.” Compared with the white, Anglo response, the African American reaction to the newcomers was often more troubled and sometimes violent. The poor Latin immigrants threatened to take low-skill jobs away from blacks, and the entrepreneurial Asians and Cubans often worked their way into the middle class by profiting from businesses in black neighborhoods. The newcomers too often seemed like both competitors and exploiters, getting ahead at the expense of the native-born minority that had long suffered white oppression.

Over the next two and a half years, the city lost an estimated $50 to $60 million in convention business owing to the boycott, the cost of the bitter rift between the Hispanic and African American communities. In southern California, the rift was perhaps not so pronounced, but there was tension owing in part to competition between blacks and Latinos for low-skilled jobs. Moreover, it seemed that the newcomers had an advantage in the contest for employment. By the early 1990s, Los Angeles janitorial firms had largely replaced their unionized black workers with nonunion immigrants. A 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly commented on the “almost total absence of black gardeners, busboys, chambermaids, nannies, janitors, and construction workers in a city with a notoriously large pool of unemployed, unskilled black people.”


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have published two seminal books on the subject: Race Against the Machine, and The Second Machine Age. A report in September 2013 by the Oxford Martin School estimated that 45% of American jobs would disappear in the next 20 years, in two waves. (21) The first would attack relatively low-skilled jobs in transportation and administration. Some of this would come from self-driving vehicles, which are likely to appear on our roads in significant numbers from 2017. Some 30 US cities will be experimenting with self-driving cars by the end of 2016, for instance. (22) There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US alone, (23) 650,000 bus drivers (24) and 230,000 taxi drivers. (25) There are numerous hurdles to be overcome before all these jobs become vulnerable.



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

To some extent, this was borne out: even China’s service sector grew relative to manufacturing while it became the world’s leading industrial power. In countries like France, Britain and the United States services now comprise 80 per cent of both economic output and jobs. There is only one problem with the presumption that services, high-or low-skilled, will provide jobs where industry and agriculture no longer will. It turns out that any repetitive endeavour – whatever the industry – can be automated within the context of rising digitisation. Just as we reached ‘peak horse’ a century ago, as one paradigm came up against another, within a generation we are set for peak human.

In other words, it is harder to build a machine that can wash the dishes than one that can solve complex mathematical problems. This contradiction is known as Moravec’s Paradox, after the technologist who defined it. From the perspective of technological unemployment it was a hugely important observation, showing how even ‘low-skilled’ jobs, from construction to fruit picking, could remain immune from automation. Even as machines beat chess grandmasters and former supercomputers found their processing power equalled by $400 games consoles, they could barely walk up a flight of stairs. For a while this paradox appeared intractable.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

In 2006, 1.4 million adults were taking government-subsidized English for Speakers of Other Languages classes, and there were waiting lists in at least fourteen states.) But other factors suggest that the linguistic isolation numbers may not come down so fast. First, because the jobs that draw immigrants to America today, unlike in past decades, are primarily the low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans pass up, today’s immigrants come to America with less foreign language training, and less education generally, than used to be the case. Before 1970, fewer than one-third of foreign-born immigrants to America spoke English “less than very well.” In the 1990s, that proportion was over 60 percent.

With the decline of manufacturing jobs, the expectation that women will work outside the home, and a majority of Americans at least starting college, college-educated nannies are suddenly available, and they match the new desires on the part of Moms to have nannies who reflect their own personalities and lifestyles. Child care has had an ambivalent but growing role in the American household, and the glut of college dropouts suggests that we will see a lot of previously low-skilled jobs taken by a new class of worker. (Just ask your massage therapist, hairdresser, or flight attendant the name of her sorority, or what her major was.) And, of course, watch out—and make sure you have a signed nondisclosure agreement—or your family’s private conflicts and shortcomings might get exposed to the world, via the cunning pen of your onetime nanny/liberal arts major from Harvard.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

The glut of lawyers in the U.S. may be the most obvious example, but even in the traditional STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), which were long considered lock-ins for employment, people with related degrees are struggling harder to find jobs than they were a decade ago. Jobs in almost all industries are becoming increasingly commoditized. It makes sense to us that low-skilled jobs with lower barriers to entry are being affected by globalization and technology, but why is it affecting the more highly-credentialed ones? The Cynefin Framework and Your Career The Cynefin framework23 (pronounced Kih-neh-vihn) was developed by Dave Snowden after studying the management structure at IBM.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

It’s increasingly a suburban issue,” says Elizabeth Kneebone, Brookings fellow and coauthor of a recent Brookings book on the topic, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America. The reasons for this shift are many. During the growth years of the 1990s and 2000s, low-skill construction and service jobs boomed in the suburbs. Soon immigrants began bypassing cities and immigrating directly to the suburbs and exurbs. But these low-skill jobs were the first to vaporize in the housing bust and ensuing recession. At the same time, the longer-term collapse of the manufacturing industry outside midwestern cities pushed many people into poverty. Some of this is also due to the squeeze on the middle class in general.


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

In these pages I paint a vision of a future which at first appears truly strange, but at least to me is also discomfortingly familiar and indeed intuitive. As a blogger and economics writer, I find that the question I receive most often from readers is—by far—something like: “What will the low- and mid-skilled jobs of the future look like?” This question is on everyone’s mind with a new urgency but it goes back to David Ricardo and Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century. Ricardo was a leading economist of his time who wrote on “the machinery question,” while Babbage was the intellectual father of the modern computer and he—not coincidentally—also wrote on how radical mechanization was going to reshape work.

Here is what the trend for the United States looks like: © Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (Redrawn by Daniel Lagin) If there is one picture that sums up the dilemma of our contemporary economy, it is that one. Of course, there is a lot going on within the category of labor earnings. The longer-term trend is fewer jobs in middle-skill, white-collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations. Demand is rising for low-pay, low-skill jobs, and it is rising for high-pay, high-skill jobs, including tech and managerial jobs, but pay is not rising for the jobs in between. This is not just a story about America, as broadly similar patterns are occurring in the major industrialized nations of Europe. In sixteen major European nations, from 1993 to 2006, middle-wage occupations declined as a share of employment.


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

Another aspect of this same phenomenon has been that mid-skilled jobs have fallen relative to both low- and high-skilled jobs, see Diagram 7.4, so that those in the lower middle class who could not raise their human capital were forced back into lower skilled jobs,4 see Autor (ibid., Figure 5, p. 10), also see Borella et al. (2019). This is best documented for the USA, but we believe it to be also the case in most other advanced economies. Diagram 7.4 Changes in occupational employment shares among working age adults, 1980–2016 Minimum Wages Concerns about the transition from semi-skilled to low-skilled jobs, the resulting loss of bargaining power in the gig economy, and rising income inequality, may well have been factors in recent hikes to minimum wage rates both in AEs and EMEs.


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

So why did people move from the hunter/nomad model to the farmer? Simple: the farmer model could sustain a larger population, though at a lower standard of living. Unlike the hunter/nomad model, which produced high-skilled “hunter” jobs but not enough of them, the agrarian model produced a lot of low-skilled jobs, jobs, jobs, or what some would now call “McJobs.” In a sense, while the higher-skilled hunter model led to a better way of life, the farmer model was better at—well, giving people work to do but not with very high rewards. That seemed to echo the U.S./Europe debate. The European model, like the hunter model, may produce better types of jobs, but the U.S. model, like the farmer model, could produce far more jobs.


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

In addition, as worker-owners who are actively engaged in managing the business and paying taxes, LLC members may have an easier time regularizing the workers’ immigration status or, at the very least, not creating a tax liability issue for the workers with the Internal Revenue Service. Finally, the experience of receiving training, and becoming knowledgeable in running a business, can assist workers in taking what otherwise could be seen as a “dead end” low-skilled job and transforming it into a much better opportunity for advancement. Many of the advantages for low-wage immigrant workers inherent in a worker-owned business form could also improve the lot of gig-economy workers. Another intriguing and potentially fruitful possibility for organizing platform cooperatives would be for the platform to incorporate and obtain certification as a B Corporation.


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

My point is this: get rid of humans and you have probably found a rich vein of productivity and therefore wealth. I know, I know, it sounds so awful. So Scrooge-like—fire Tiny Tim’s father on Christmas Eve to generate wealth. Okay, it’s not that bad. That’s the goal of every economy—to increase the standard of living of its participants. If that means over a generation replacing low-skill jobs with higher-skilled careers developing more productive tools, then you are creating wealth for the entire economy. We went from Stone Age to Iron Age to Industrial Age to Space Age and we’re now firmly in the Idea Age. Wealth and success are no longer guaranteed by working long hours climbing the corporate ladder of success at Amalgamated Widgets, hand over hand with knives in the backs of your coworkers.


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

In the UK these are far more likely to be bankers than in the US because, compared to their respective national economies, the City of London is much bigger than Wall Street.4 This matters because financiers have started to use qualifications as a means to try to legitimise their take, including securing masters of business administration degrees (MBAs). It is the young who tend to dominate in low-paid, unlicensed jobs. In 1993 7 per cent of employed young women between sixteen and twenty-four worked in low-paid, low-skilled jobs in the UK, but by 2013 that had increased to 21 per cent. For young men in these ‘elementary occupations’, the figure increased from 14 per cent to 25 per cent in the same period.5 On hearing of these statistics one MP, Teresa Pearce, responded: ‘This saddens me but does not surprise me. I see this among my own constituents, with young women sometimes working two jobs just to try and pay the rent.’6 In contrast to the majority of workers, those people employed in licensed occupations are paid more partly because the numbers that can enter them are restricted.


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

How judiciously and flexibly the government selects and integrates immigrants will shape Singapore’ status as a forward‐looking and inclusive city (Bin, 2013; Chan, 2014). Singapore continues to take steps to adapt its education system to the knowledge economy, but it is unclear what role the government can play to ensure a strong supply of middle‐income jobs for those with mid‐tier skills. A two‐tier model of highly paid and low‐skilled jobs that resembles other world cities has begun to raise questions about the future spectrum of employment. The capacity of local businesses to grow by reducing overhead and land costs will be one factor that shapes Singapore’s ability to grow middle‐income jobs in the future (Centre for Liveable Cities and Civil Service College Singapore, 2014).


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

High school’s payoff remains healthy even in bleak scenarios. While school is less fruitful for confirmed bachelors, Poor Students, and people who hate sitting in class, a male Poor Student who rules out marriage and hates school has a Degree Return of 4%. There are only two main groups who should skip high school in favor of low-skilled jobs. The first group: Poor Students who don’t plan to work full time after graduation. The second group: students who are worse than Poor. If you’re in the bottom 10–15% of the academic pecking order, your graduation odds are so slim that you should quit school and start work. Whatever you do, don’t bother with a GED.

Leading papers include Farber and Gibbons 1996, Belman and Heywood 1997, Altonji and Pierret 2001, Altonji 2005, Lange 2007, and Arcidiacono et al. 2010. 35. See Altonji 2005, p. 112: “The implication is that the market may be slow to learn that a worker is highly skilled if the worker’s best early job opportunity given the information available to employers is a low-skill-level job that reveals little about the worker’s talent.” 36. Hayes 1995 tantalizingly claims to teach “strategies for competent people without college degrees,” but his advice is underwhelming (Caplan 2011f). 37. See, e.g., Sweet 1989, Granholm 1991, Cox and Kramer 1995, Klaas and Dell’Omo 1997, Folger and Skarlicki 1998, and Segalla et al. 2001.


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

It is true that a small proportion of jobs benefit from scientific and technical education, but that is not what is driving the massive expansion of education. It is implausible that in the future most persons will be scientists or skilled technicians. Indeed, the biggest area of job growth in rich countries has been low-skilled service jobs, where it is cheaper to hire human labor than to automate [Autor and Dorn 2013]. In the current US economy, one of the biggest growth sectors is tattoo parlors [Halnon and Cohen 2006]: a non-credentialed occupation, small-scale business, low-paying and thus far immune from corporate control—and selling emblems of alienation from mainstream culture.

The bottom line remains: technological displacement of the middle class will bring the downfall of capitalism, in places where it is now dominant, before the 21st century is over. Whether these transitions will be peaceful or horrific remains to be seen. REFERENCES Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1994. Autor, David, and David Dorn. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labour Market.” American Economic Review 103 (2013): 1553–97. http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/1474 Brown, David K., and David B. Bills, eds. “Special Issue: New Directions in Educational Credentialism.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 29 (2011): 1–138.


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

The professional woman, unknowingly basking in her high status, projects an aura of confidence which in turn makes social encounters easier. You can almost imagine her taking him to task like a problem child: ‘I’m nothing to be scared of! I’m as ordinary as you are. Honestly.’ We are no longer an industrial society in which most people are working-class, doing low-skilled jobs. We are increasingly a knowledge-based society in which pay and social esteem are gained chiefly from doing technical and professional jobs for which you need qualifications. No matter that society would cease to function if every manual and service worker simultaneously took the day off: it is easier to pretend that such people and the jobs they do are dispensable, because surely any old chimp could do them.


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

Forty-one percent of Etsy sellers who focus on their business full-time get their health care through a spouse or partner, and 39 percent are on Medicare or Medicaid or another state-sponsored program. It’s possible that some workers in towns with dying retail stores could find menial jobs on their computers as telemarketers, phone sex operators, English tutors to Chinese kids, or image classifiers to help train AI. That’s not exactly an appealing future though—and long-distance low-skilled jobs are the ones most subject to automation and a race to the lowest-cost provider. Most retail workers at least had the gratification of leaving home, conversation with colleagues and customers, getting a store discount, and generally being a member of society. The reason that even well-meaning commentators suggest increasingly unlikely and tenuous ways for people to make a living is that they are trapped in the conventional thinking that people must trade their time, energy, and labor for money as the only way to survive.


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

This does not increase GDP transactions and will instead inflate asset prices (see discussion in section 5.6). A further example is when private investors fund private equity vehicles that take over productive manufacturers, fire local staff and outsource production to foreign low-wage countries. This reduces the number of low-skilled jobs available in the UK and contributes to unemployment. Finally, when private sector economic confidence is low, as during recessions, investors will tend to be risk averse and seek existing financial assets, including property, in which to store wealth in preference to providing funding for new commercial ventures.


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

Suppose that Germany is very productive and can produce goods at low prices, while Greece is not very productive and its prices remain high. German exports will rise relative to Greek exports. This will dampen the Greek economy and boost the German economy, as it should. A similar effect can happen, as the world grows more integrated. Much competition for low-skilled jobs comes from developing countries, and that makes Greek goods relatively uncompetitive in the world’s markets. Figure 18.1 shows Greece’s real exchange rate versus those of Germany, France, and Italy.8 The real exchange rate contains three elements: the average price of a country’s goods, the average price of foreign goods, and the average exchange rate of a currency converting into the other countries' currencies.

Poor people’s incomes have grown by just 29%. Wall Street and Washington didn’t create this inequality. A variety of factors are at work. More-educated workers have reaped the rewards of technological progress to a greater degree than have less-educated workers. Opening world trade has meant fierce competition for low-skill jobs. The fairy-tale decade misled us into thinking the economy was better than it was. Everyone is to blame. Our next problem is already in the making. The U.S. government is taking on a huge amount of debt, which higher taxes will eventually have to repay. As of 2011, the total national debt is 93% of GDP, while debt held by the public is 62% of GDP.13 As of May 2011, every one of the 311 million U.S. citizens would need to pay $31,000 to eliminate U.S. government debt.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

In early 2013, the vehicle to do so took shape in what became known as the “Gang of Eight” bill, a bipartisan reform measure led by eight senators that would provide a path to citizenship for the now 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States, while enlarging guest-worker programs for low-skilled jobs in industries such as agriculture. In what seemed a positive omen, the Gang of Eight bill had the added designation of being a vehicle for the presidential ambitions of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the telegenic young Cuban American then considered to be the GOP’s brightest rising star. With Rubio, the darling of Fox News, leading the charge, the bill appeared to have unstoppable momentum.


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

The final piece of this strange trick is that Germans are willing and able to pay high prices in restaurants and bars because they themselves earn a lot. The Implicit Welfare Payments behind “Overpriced” Services If you think hard about what is going on here, it is easy to see that this is some sort of tax-and-redistribute scheme that is working though low-skill jobs in sheltered sectors. In essence, the high restaurant prices and wages are one way that Germans who are globally competitive are paying a “tax” which is then distributed directly to boost the earnings of those who are not. This sharing-and-caring mechanism—which operates across many service sectors—is not exactly Robin Hood robbing from the rich to give to the poor.


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


pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In much of the democratic world there has been an accelerating increase in service-sector employment, both in low-skilled customer-service work and in high-skilled knowledge occupations, and a corresponding drop in manufacturing employment. This has contributed to a polarization of the workforce in many countries, with more high-skilled and low-skilled jobs, but fewer requiring mid-level skills. At the same time, young people are finding it increasingly hard to get a foothold in the labour market, and the proportion of the workforce employed on full-time permanent contracts has shrunk. Labour markets have been fundamentally transformed as digital technology has destroyed a wide range of routine jobs, while creating new employment opportunities for highly skilled workers.


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

In regions hard hit by imports from China, wages have remained depressed and unemployment levels elevated for more than a decade. In industries that came under Chinese competition, employment has fallen, which was expected. But there have been no offsetting employment gains in other industries, which is a surprise. Trade advocates have long maintained that deindustrialization and loss of low-skill jobs in advanced economies have little to do with trade and are the product of new technologies rather than growing international trade. In the debate on TPP, many prominent proponents still clung to this line. In light of the new empirical findings, such nonchalance toward trade has become untenable.7 Incidentally, the Petri-Plummer model does indicate that TPP will accelerate the movement of jobs from manufacturing to services, a result that the pact’s advocates do not trumpet.


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

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.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

As employers leave, citing lack of qualified employees, community trust collapses, and with it a hopeful sense of the future. Against this cultural gravity, it’s hard for anyone to summon the effort to work and invest for the long term. Anger and defiance take over, so that a community may consider even showing up for work at a low-skill job to be a “sellout.” But even successful communities—including those in high-expectation, high-performance cities and suburbs—leave indelible imprints on us, not all of them good. In some ways, high-performance cultures can be a special kind of trap, pushing kids to a breaking point. They’re raised to be ambitious and driven, verbally and mathematically quick, to get into elite schools and launch high-paying careers.


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

A country which has not built structures to facilitate integration will also find it more difficult to absorb a large inflow of immigrants at that time of need. Since aging affects the entire workforce regardless of skills, a country that decides to open up more to immigration to offset aging (rather than just to attract the best global talent) will draw immigrants from a broader set than just the most capable. Indeed, since low-skilled jobs like caring for the elderly are low-paid and physically taxing, they are likely to draw young poor immigrants. When immigrants fill jobs across the spectrum, there is less likely to be a concern among the native born that immigrants have privileged access to good jobs. THE COSTS OF GREATER POPULATION DIVERSITY Immigration, and more broadly, population diversity, is not always a blessing for the host country.

Liz Alderman, “In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears,” The New York Times, December 26, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/international/in-sweden-a-cash-free-future-nears.html. 4. James Bessen, “Toil and Technology,” Finance & Development 52, no. 1 (March 2015). 5. Luis Garicano, “Hierarchies and the Organization of Knowledge in Production,” Journal of Political Economy 108, no. 5 (2000): 874–904. 6. David H. Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market,” rev. ed., NBER Working Paper No. 15150, May 2012. 7. Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons, “Job Polarization in Europe,” American Economic Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 58–63. 8. Daniel M. Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli, and Richard Kneller, “Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade,” Journal of International Economics 98 (January 2016): 36–50. 9.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

I would guess that we’ve been traveling for about four hours, which could put me anywhere from Italy to the outskirts of Hungary. That’s unless I got aboard the fast train, in which case I could be in Georgia or Kazakhstan. Yikes! Wish you were here? Best wishes Seanie trends that will transform work 5 Globalization and connectivity Globalization cuts both ways. On the one hand, millions of low-skill jobs will be lost to low-cost areas such as China, India and Africa, while at the same time geography will become irrelevant as highly skilled workers become more mobile. This means that companies will hire globally and workers will move internationally to follow opportunities. It also means that jobs can exist in one location while the worker is in another.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

. – Interactive Schools.” 8 Feb. 2018, toreset.me/35. [36] Fortnite phenomenon: “How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds | The New Yorker.” 21 May. 2018, toreset.me/36. [37] management consulting firm McKinsey: “Skill shift: Automation and the future of the workforce | McKinsey...” toreset.me/37. [38] automation and robotics: “50% of low-skilled jobs will be replaced by AI and automation, report...” 21 Jul. 2017, toreset.me/38. [39] “in terms of both quality and speed”: “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal...” 5 Jan. 2016, toreset.me/39, p. 29. [40] one of those lucky 13%: “Only 13 per cent of people worldwide actually like going to work – The...” 10 Oct. 2013, toreset.me/40


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“On any given Monday, we’ve got 1,700 job openings directly related to the oil industry,” Ness continued. “And we’ve shown that if you have jobs, people will repopulate these areas.” The average wage in the North Dakota oil and gas extraction industry was more than $90,000. The boom has created demand for truckers, accountants, cooks, and HR managers, in addition to roughnecks. Even low-skilled jobs can command high wages. In tiny Williston, population 14,716, gas stations, convenience stores, and McDonald’s are offering $12.50 to $15 an hour for entry-level jobs. “Man camps”—temporary housing structures carted in from out of state—were seeking to hire cooks and cleaners making $1,500 and $1,000 per week, respectively.


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 so, it found that all workers in manual jobs could see their wages reduced because an employer could easily replace them with a foreign worker willing to accept less. The same was true for workers who were 'marginal to the labour market', those 'most likely to drop out or become discouraged workers', those 'who work in part-time, low-skilled jobs (such as single mothers and young people)', and those who faced barriers to finding work, such as an inability to travel. Clearly, then, attitudes towards immigration are liable to depend on the class of the person who holds them. Indeed, prospective employers stand to gain from cheaper foreign workers.


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

“Evidence across a number of key industries in the United States indicates that excessive market power is a serious problem.”7 Some monopolies pay very well for the lucky few. Pay tends to increase with size of the firm. Professor Holger M. Mueller of New York University and his colleagues found that wage differences between high and low-skill jobs increase with firm size. They also demonstrated that there is a strong relation between the change in firm size and rising wage inequality for most developed countries. They note that what many interpret as a broad move toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in employment by the largest firms in the economy.8 At monopolies like Google, the caste system is immediately visible.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

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

“Top Incomes in the Long Run of History.” Journal of Economic Literature 49:1 (2011). pp. 3–71. Autor, David. “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market.” Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project. April 2010. Autor, David, and David Dorn. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” MIT working paper. April 2012. Autor, David, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States.” MIT working paper. August 2011. Bajpai, Nirupam, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Ashutosh Varshney (eds.).


pages: 408 words: 108,985

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

The true problem in many places in Europe today is the lack of jobs, which means that there will be insufficient employment regardless of whether the workforce is better trained. For long periods of time, the labor supply has exceeded demand virtually without regard to qualification, and the situation is particularly stark for those with low qualifications. Matters may well get worse. Recent estimates suggest that between 2015 and 2025, low-skilled jobs in Europe will decline by more than seven million.10 An insufficient demand for labor also affects those with higher qualifications, which can have ripple effects throughout the economy as workers take jobs below their qualifications or skill levels. Europe must tackle this jobs deficit by focusing efforts on creating jobs by stimulating demand for goods and services, as was discussed in earlier chapters.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

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

Just over a century later, thanks to mechanisation only 2% of US workers are employed in agriculture, and the horses have all but gone.72 But economic analysts worry that today’s robot replacements are cutting across so many industrial and service sectors so fast that job creation in other fields simply cannot keep up. Millions of mid-skill jobs lost in the recession of 2007–09 have not come back because they have been replaced by software. Meanwhile, the jobs that have returned post-recession are typically menial, creating an hourglass economy that offers a few high-skill and many low-skill jobs with little in between. Analysts predict that five million jobs across 15 major economies could well be lost to automation by 2020.73 And it is a worldwide trend, with the fastest-growing market for robots in China. There, the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, which employs around a million workers, plans to create a ‘million robot army’ and has already replaced 60,000 workers with robots in one factory alone.74 So how could distributive design help to prevent the economic segregation that technology appears to be driving?


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers and soldiers in history.14 The problem with all such new jobs, however, is that they will probably demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed unskilled labourers. Creating new human jobs might prove easier than retraining humans to actually fill these jobs. During previous waves of automation, people could usually switch from one routine low-skill job to another. In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanisation of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket. Such occupational changes were feasible, because the move from the farm to the factory and from the factory to the supermarket required only limited retraining.


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

Like all other Americans confronted with this “problem,” I could see that some fifty years after the civil rights movement black people could still be found at the bottom of virtually every socioeconomic metric of note. I subscribed, like most, to the theories of the sociologist William Julius Wilson: that the decline of the kind of industrial high-paying low-skill jobs that built America’s white middle class had left large numbers of young black men unemployed, and the government made no real effort to ameliorate this shift. An array of unfortunate consequences issued from this shift—family poverty, violent streets, poor schools. This way of thinking appealed to me because it directly matched events I had seen in my own life.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As legal scholar john a. powell once commented, only half in jest, “It’s actually better to be exploited than marginalized, in some respects, because if you’re exploited presumably you’re still needed.”78 Viewed in this light, the frantic accusations of genocide by poor blacks in the early years of the War on Drugs seem less paranoid. The intuition of those residing in ghetto communities that they had suddenly become disposable was rooted in real changes in the economy—changes that have been devastating to poor black communities as factories have closed, low-skill jobs have disappeared, and all those who had the means to flee the ghetto did. The sense among those left behind that society no longer has use for them, and that the government now aims simply to get rid of them, reflects a reality that many of us who claim to care prefer to avoid simply by changing channels. 6 The Fire This Time Shortly after sunrise on September 20, 2007, more than ten thousand protestors had already descended on Jena, Louisiana, a small town of about three thousand people.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

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

Just below the hyperproductives will be a narrow stratum of service providers—everyone from masseurs and trainers to decorators and personal assistants to tutors, artisans, and entertainers —who will cater, often quite lucratively, to the hyperproductives. Below them, however, things get tricky. In a job market that has been systematically and efficiently stripped of any task that can be automated or offshored, many of the remaining workers will have extremely slim pickings—mainly low-skill service-sector jobs such as food service, security, janitorial, lawn and garden, beauty shop, and home health care. On the plus side, such jobs are probably safe from offshoring or automation “because they often involve hands-on contact,” explains David Autor, a job market expert at MIT, whose research informs Cowen’s book.


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

They are accustomed to having things handed out to them by white people. And that’s the way they look at relief. Why work, if they can get support from the Government?51 Another part of the answer for why blacks in the South received less than those in the North may be because they retained their near monopoly on unskilled and low-skilled jobs, causing whites there to be in greater relative need and to have had fewer resources.52 Regardless, African Americans continued to depend upon their own institutions of self-help. During the Depression, reports historian Joe William Trotter Jr.:African-American families took in boarders, cared for each other’s children, and creatively manipulated their resources.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

24 Perhaps most telling of all, why is the oil money still being pocketed by governments or ruling families? Many European Muslims are also doing badly. Millions of them live in inner cities and impoverished suburbs. Most of the original immigrants were poorly educated people who were imported to do low-skilled jobs that Europeans no longer wanted to do. And the combination of Europe’s overgenerous welfare state and its tradition of protecting insiders has hampered integration. Two-thirds of British Muslims live in low-income households. In Holland, the country with the largest proportion of Muslims, as many as 60 percent of Moroccans and Turks above the age of forty are unemployed.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The city's former comptroller, Elizabeth Holtzman, painted the employment picture in stark contrasts. "What we may be moving towards here," she said, "is a tale of two cities: growth in higher paying jobs and a shrinking in lower-paying jobs." Holtzman warned that unless new 144 THE DECLINE OF THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE low-skilled jobs can be found to fill the vacuum created by the new displacement technologies, the city will face "turmoil-more social dislocation, more crime, more poverty."8 The economic problems facing New York City are occurring throughout the country and in every developed nation with an advanced service sector.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

While in earlier years most new immigrants clustered in a few large cities, such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, the 1990s witnessed a spread to the Midwest, New England, and the mid- and South Atlantic regions. In some parts of the country, almost the entire labor-force growth between 1996 and 2000 was due to immigration.22 New immigrants commonly fill low-skill, blue-collar jobs, since a large number have less than a high school education. About 33% of immigrants have not finished high school, compared with 13% of natives. Not only do immigrants possess fewer educational skills than native workers, but also many of their skills don’t translate into the American workplace.23 Between 2000 and 2002, about 3.3 million illegal immigrants entered in the United States.

For example, the growth of the alternative financial sector is a sign of serious structural economic and labor market problems, which include stagnant wages coupled with the rising prices of necessities (such as housing, health care, pharmaceuticals, and energy); a labor market increasingly marked by little employment security; a rising number of jobs that pay hourly wages without benefits; and the rapid creation of low-skilled and temporary jobs. The fringe economy is also tied to the increasing disparity of wealth in the United States. In 2004 the top 29,000 Americans had as much income as the bottom 96 million. In 1970 the bottom third of all Americans had more than ten times the income of the top 1/100 of 1%, or the top 29,000.


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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

A free trade agreement quickly made America Jordan’s largest trading partner, and Jordan has been made an example of positive economic collaboration with Israel through Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs). The reality, however, is that few Jordanian companies have the manufacturing wherewithal to exploit the QIZs, and the Jordanians who work for them hold low-skill jobs that provide for sustenance, not wealth. The real beneficiaries have been Israeli and Chinese companies, which register their textile firms in Jordan and buy up the largest QIZ shares (the same globalization loophole China exploits in North Africa to gain advantageous export access to the EU).


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

I will put my parents here. I need to be back in a big city like Shenzhen or Beijing or Shanghai. Qingyuan is countryside. Second tier. They just learn ‘exam English.’ They don’t have big dreams here.” As the years passed, I sensed that other young strivers like Michael were growing frustrated as well. Low-skilled jobs weren’t the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren’t enough white-collar jobs to employ each year’s crop of more than six million new college graduates. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant workers had grown by nearly 80 percent, but for college graduates, starting wages were flat.


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

Even earlier in the 1990s, the conservative Charles Murray, of all people, published an essay in the conservative National Review, of all places, about the specter of inequality haunting America. It was clear-eyed and prescient. “The numbers of the rich will grow more rapidly in the coming years,” Murray wrote. Real wages for low-skilled jobs will increase more slowly, if at all….I fear the potential for producing something like a caste society, with the implication of utter social separation….All the forces which I can discern will push American conservatism toward the Latin American model….The Left has been complaining for years that the rich have too much power.


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

In the case of the automotive parts industry, the effects of globalization included a decline in median wages from $18.35 in 2003 to $15.83 per hour in 2013.12 Immigration accounted for more than half of total labor force growth in the United States over the decade between 1995 and 2005.13 A complementary measure is that the share of foreign-born workers in the labor force steadily grew from 5.3 percent in 1970 to 14.7 percent in 2005.14 Economic research supports the view that immigrants reduce the wages of domestic workers by a small amount and that the effect is greatest on domestic workers lacking a high school degree. Many low-skilled immigrants disproportionately take jobs and enter occupations already staffed by foreign-born workers—for example, restaurant workers and landscape services—and thus their main effect is to drive down wages of foreign-born workers, not domestic workers. The previous literature has noted the fact that among high school dropouts, wages of domestic and foreign-born workers were almost identical up to 1980, but by 2004, foreign-born workers earned 15–20 percent less.15 Downward pressure on wages in the bottom 90 percent would have occurred even if there had been no erosion of unionization nor a growth of imports or immigration.

Middle-level jobs such as those held by assembly-line manufacturing workers, bookkeepers, receptionists, and clerks have been called “routine” occupations, whereas those at the bottom have been called “manual” jobs. One result of the loss of middle-skilled routine jobs is that middle-skilled workers are forced to compete for low-skilled manual jobs, thus raising the supply relative to the demand for manual workers. The result has been a decline in wages for those with relatively low skills, high school graduates and high school dropouts, as shown below in figure 18–3. The overall level of wages is reduced as the composition of employment shifts from relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs to the wide range of typically low-paid jobs in retail, food services, cleaning, and groundskeeping.

This is 12 percent less than the average value of the minimum wage in the 1960s, expressed in 2014 prices.4 Over the same 50 years, real compensation per hour rose by 115 percent, an indicator of how inadequate was the legislated real value of the minimum wage in keeping up with overall compensation.5 Standard economic theory implies that an increase in the minimum wage would raise the unemployment rate of the low-wage workers. However, a substantial body of economic research indicates little or no employment effect. The current economic situation of 2015–16 is a particularly appropriate time to raise the minimum wage, as the U.S. labor market currently has a record number of job openings and is creating low-skill jobs at a relatively rapid rate. Earned Income Tax Credit The EITC rewards low-income parents for working and has had a large positive effect on net income for its beneficiaries. It has also achieved dramatic improvements in the well-being of children in those families, including a reduction in the incidence of low birth weight, an increase in math and reading scores, and a boost in college enrollment rates for the children who benefited.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

If it is the job title rather than you the individual that defines the output of your work, then the curtain is falling. Here’s a test: Whether your work is high skill or low skill, if another human cog can be slid in to the organisation to replace you and cause no interruption to business-as-usual, then for you the wind of change is rising. For hundreds of millions of low and high skill jobs the lights are going out. Few occupations will be safe. Whether you’re a smooth-talking sales person, an information-age maven, a slick internal politician or a head-down doer, the robocalypse is headed your way at ramming speed. “I see your point,” you may think, “but not me – I have a certain je ne sais quoi.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

First it was the West, then East Asia, and now it’s shifting to other countries.”8 To be clear, an enormous number of jobs are at stake. If Africa becomes China’s successor as the next Factory of the World, it could completely eliminate unemployment. According to Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist of the World Bank, “Having itself been a ‘follower goose,’ China is on the verge of graduating from low-skilled manufacturing jobs and becoming a ‘leading dragon.’ That will free up nearly 100 million labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, enough to more than double manufacturing employment in low-income countries.”9 To put that further into perspective, when the United States reached its peak in manufacturing employment, in 1978, only 20 million Americans were working in factories.10 Now five times that number are about to come out of a single country: China.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

Robert Reich calls the kind ofimmaterial labor involved in computer and communication work ‘‘symbolic-analytical ser- vices’’—tasks that involve ‘‘problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering activities.’’19 This type oflabor claims the highest value, and thus Reich identifies it as the key to competition in the new global economy. He recognizes, however, that the growth ofthese knowledge-based jobs ofcreative symbolic manipu- 292 P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N lation implies a corresponding growth oflow-value and low-skill jobs ofroutine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word processing. Here begins to emerge a fundamental division of labor within the realm ofimmaterial production. We should note that one consequence ofthe informatization ofproduction and the emergence ofimmaterial labor has been a real homogenization oflaboring processes.


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


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

It is not, for instance, just a period of temporary layoffs of manufacturing workers, who will be picked up again as the economy recovers. This is a moment of significant creative destruction; older manufacturing firms, jobs, and industries are being destroyed, and new industries, occupations, and firms are being created. In this kind of situation, it’s much harder for workers, particularly low-skilled ones, to find jobs where they live. In today’s economy and the economy of the future, geographic mobility is required to match workers and their skills to appropriate jobs. We cannot escape the reality of the conflict of two great dreams: the dream of unlimited economic opportunity and the dream of owning a single-family home.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

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

That is a further reason why a new income distribution system must be constructed, with a basic income as an anchor, an argument to which Chapter 12 will return. The disruptive character of what has been dubbed the ‘fourth technological revolution’ also appears to be more generalized than in preceding seismic changes, which predominantly hit low-skill manual jobs.19 All levels of job and occupation are being affected. The resultant economic uncertainty is creating widespread insecurity; this supports calls for a basic income as the only feasible way of restoring economic security, to keep that uncertainty under some form of social control. The Economist has argued that, while a basic income might be the answer if there were mass technological unemployment, there was no need for it yet.


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

Chapter Seven The Way Forward 1 This account draws on: Piketty (2013); Hudson, P. and Tribe, K. (2017) The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, London: Agenda; Harvey, D. (2014) “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital”, http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/; Mandel (1976; 1981); Harvey (2018). 2 This account draws on: Marx (1894); Mandel (1981) 3 See, e.g., Autor, D. and Dord, D. (2012) “The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarisation of the US Labour Market”, MIT Department of Economics. 4 This account draws on: Mazzucato, M. (2011) The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, London: Anthem; Mazzucato, M. (2015) “The Market Creating State”, RSA Journal, vol. 2. 5 Srnicek N. and Williams A. (2016) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London: Verso. 6 Eagleton, O. (2017) “Criminalising Anti-Austerity in Ireland”, Jacobin, 21 April. 7 This account draws on: Baker, A. (2013) “The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift”, New Political Economy, vol. 18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2012.662952; Galati, G. and Moessner, R. (2011) “Macroprudential Policy — A Literature Review”, BIS Working Paper 337; Blanchard, O., Rajan, R., Rogoff and Summers (2016); Bank of England (2009) “The Role of Macroprudential Policy: A Discussion Paper” http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/other/financialstability/roleofmacroprudentialpolicy091121.pdf; Kregel, J. (2014) “Minsky and Dynamic Macroprudential Regulation”, Levy Economics Institute Public Policy Brief No. 131. 8 This account draws on: Blakeley (2018a) 9 Haldane, A. (2012) “The Dog and the Frisbee”, speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 36th economic policy symposium, 31 August. 10 IPPR (2018) 11 See, e.g., Stirling, A. (2018) “Just About Managing Demand: Reforming the UK’s Macroeconomic Policy Framework”, IPPR. 12 See, e.g., Roberts, C. and Lawrence, M. (2018) “Our Common Wealth: A Citizens’ Wealth Fund for the UK”, IPPR. 13 See, e.g., Murphy, R. (2017) Dirty Secrets: How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy, London: Verso ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a book is hard.


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

Cities,” CityLab, March 7, 2012, www.citylab.com/work/2012/03/inequality-puzzle-us-cities/858. 14. David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney, The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2006), http://economics.mit.edu/files/584; David Autor and David Dorn, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market,” American Economic Review 103, no. 5 (2013): 1553–1597; David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Alan B. Krueger, “Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no. 4 (1998): 1169–1213; David H.


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

“RegData: A Numerical Database on Industry-Specific Regulations for All United States Industries and Federal Regulations, 1997–2012.” Regulation & Governance 11 (1): 109–23. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/rego.12107. Autor, D. H. 2013. “The Task Approach to Labor Markets: An Overview.” Journal for Labour Market Research 46 (3): 185–99. Autor, D. H., and D. Dorn. 2013. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market.” American Economic Review 103 (5): 1553–97. Autor, D. H., D. Dorn, and G. H. Hanson. 2013. “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103 (6): 2121–68. Autor, D. H., D.


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

In crucial areas they were indispensable. The National Health Service could scarcely operate without migrant labour; almost a fifth of those it employed were from outside Britain. The predominantly young and frequently well-educated migrants, drawn to work far from home, filled labour shortages, often in low-skilled jobs, and made relatively few demands on welfare support. However, complaints soon arose – and did not subside – about downward pressure on wages and difficulties in housing and social services in areas with high concentrations of migrants. Perceptions were frequently not in accord with realities.


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

Data on the impact of income inequality on health and segregation are drawn from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); and Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” NBER Working Paper, July 2006. 125-127 The Vanishing Middle: The discussion of the impact of education on income growth draws from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); David Autor and David Dorn, “Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States,” NBER working paper, November 2008; Congressional Budget Office, “Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007,” October 2009; Francine Blau, Marianne Ferber, and Anne Winkler, The Economics of Women, Men and Work, 5th edition (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t05.htm, accessed 08/08/2010); Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 2008 (www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf, accessed 08/09/2010); Bureau of Labor Statistics, “100 Years of U.S.


Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration by Unknown

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, trade route

The village seemed quarantined from any contact with the United States. Nobody in Xocotla knew anyone in the United States. Mexico City, though, was near. The road connected the men to the capital, just as the city was growing like mad with the people streaming in from Mexico’s agonized countryside. Low-skilled construction jobs were plentiful. A crew of Xocotla’s men traveled to Mexico City for the first time in  to work as construction helpers. For three months they helped build the Colegio de México, one of the country’s premier private universities. Then they returned home to harvest their corn and potatoes.


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

This will place the workers of China and Brazil on the same overall trajectory as the rich-world workforce, which is to become service-dominated, split into a skilled core and a precariat, with both layers seeing work partially de-linked from wages. In addition, as the Oxford Martin School suggests, it is the low-skilled service jobs that stand the highest risk of total automation over the next two decades. The global working class is not destined to remain for ever divided into factory drones in China and games designers in the USA. However, the struggle in the workplace is no longer the only, or most important, drama.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Humphrey gave the managers time to study manuals describing their tasks. While they were studying them, the experimenter showed the clerks the mailboxes, filing system, and so on. The newly constructed office team then went about their business for two hours. The clerks were assigned to work on a variety of low-skilled, repetitive jobs and had little autonomy. The managers, as in a real office, performed reasonably high-skill-level tasks and directed the clerks’ activities. At the end of the work period, managers and clerks rated themselves and each other on a variety of role-related traits. These included leadership, intelligence, motivation for hard work, assertiveness, and supportiveness.


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

Many of the jobs that will be most in demand in the year 2050 do not even exist yet. Gone are the days when a single set of skills in a single trade could reliably sustain a worker through her entire career. Instead of fighting to maintain the status quo, unions must position their members to embrace the change. As low-skill industrial jobs went overseas, unions missed the first wave of opportunities to retrain their members for the high-skill, technology-driven jobs that remain firmly planted in the United States. But they can still reorient to provide such services. Many workers would not even need to switch industries—by 2028, researchers estimate, there will be 2.4 million manufacturing jobs in the US that companies cannot fill due to a skills shortage within the workforce.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

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

Most companies opted for the smart machine over smart people, producing a well-documented pattern that favors substituting machines and their algorithms for human contributors in a wide range of jobs. By now, these include many occupations far from the factory floor.13 This results in what economists call “job polarization,” which features some high-skill jobs and other low-skill jobs, with automation displacing most of the jobs that were once “in the middle.”14 And although some business leaders, economists, and technologists describe these developments as necessary and inevitable consequences of computer-based technologies, research shows that the division of learning in the economic domain reflects the strength of neoliberal ideology, politics, culture, and institutional patterns.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

I learn later that the supervisor specifically chose Joury to work the very same overnight grocery shifts that he, the supervisor, first worked ten years ago when he began at Whole Foods, when he also spoke almost no English. And despite the banality of our training, despite the hours of Whole Foods hype, I flush with the magic and possibility of these low-wage, low-skill grocery jobs—jobs laboring to create a myth of abundance for all the high-wage people with high opinions who populate WFs on the Bowery by day—and how there might actually be a path to this abundance, how Andy’s cheer and rage might be the very mechanism of the American Dream in action after all. Soon thereafter, my brain buzzing on this notion, day 1 dead-ends into a thick packet of forms we are told to fill out while a video in the PowerPoint plays, featuring all sorts of eager faces who climbed the ranks to become management.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

‘You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.’ But it was in fact around this time that employers were starting to realise that programming was not the low-skilled clerical job they had once thought. It wasn’t like typing or feeling. It required advanced problem-solving skills. And, brilliance bias being more powerful than objective reality (given women were already doing the programming, they clearly had these skills) industry leaders started training men. And then they developed hiring tools that seemed objective, but were actually covertly biased against women.


Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit, Susan Schwartzenberg

blue-collar work, Brownian motion, dematerialisation, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Loma Prieta earthquake, low skilled workers, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, pets.com, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave

ning Department's own studies show that not protecting industrial areas auto will cost the City 13,000-27,000 jobs in: production, distribution, garment manufacturing, delivery repair, services, printing and moving companies. These jobs must stay in the City to support industries finance, multimedia, real estate, low-skill, and tourism. The jobs like at stake are stable, high-wage jobs essential to a thriving economy."^^ Several hun- dred jobs already lost can be traced directly to the replacement of workplaces by live/ work condos; many other small businesses have been forced to relocate or close because the hood new neighbors just wanted their neighbor- to look industrial, not he industrial.


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

It is more difficult for poor Americans to change income category than for Swedes and Danes due to more compressed wages in Scandinavian countries. A few hundred dollars in wage increase is enough to climb to a higher quintile in the Nordic countries, while it requires thousands of dollars in the United States.) The fact that wages are not much higher for a low-skilled entry-level job today than forty years ago can, in this perspective, be seen as an opportunity for new groups of young people and immigrants to be allowed to enter Schumpeter’s hotels, after which most of them can move to higher floors. If they could only enter at a higher wage level, many would not be allowed to check in at all.


pages: 356 words: 97,794

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, low skilled workers, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

Quite a few aspects of the punitive action were still hidden from the public eye in the early 1990s. They would become an integral part of the reality in the years to come. To those already mentioned can be added the prevention of work inside Israel. In 1992 a third of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, mostly in low-skilled, manual labour jobs in construction, agriculture and government services. This contributed 25 per cent of the territories’ GNP. The denial of the right to work became part of the punitive action. The fact that even in the days of the open prison, up until 1987, Palestinian exports to Israel constituted only 1 per cent of the aggregate Israeli market, and the workers formed only 7 per cent of the Israeli labour market, this showed that economically you could impose a mega-prison without integrating the two economies.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Presenters obsessed with the debt and deficit, determined to cut the healthcare of the poor, the pensions of the elderly, the farm payments of the Oklahoma ranchers, and the minimum wage. If you’re up early in a motel, you meet the people who earn the minimum wage. They are nearly always women. And these jobs are not full-shift jobs. They are low-skill, part-time jobs for people who, in the era of globalization, cannot find anything better than microwaving burgers and cleaning greying bedsheets for $7.50 an hour. One motel blends into another. There’s a whiteboard in the reception: Welcome Brad and Stacey, ‘thanks for choseing us’ and a bunch of other misspelt words announce a party for the newly graduated Brad.


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

Now technology is empowering talented individuals as never before and opening up yawning gaps between the earnings of the skilled and the unskilled, capital-owners and labour. . . . [I]t is creating a large pool of underemployed labour.”58 A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the majority of new job growth of the past decade has come from low-skill, nonroutine manual jobs, those that “require few skills and little problem solving.” Although some of the new errand jobs may feature high pay—Instacart can pay thirty dollars a hour—no grocery run takes eight hours.59 Thirty dollars an hour is a decent income if you can get eight hours of work; it’s lousy pay if that’s all you earn in a day.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Alongside the Imperial Typewriters strike, people were laying down tools in Woolf’s rubber factory in Southall, Courtaulds’ Red Scar Mill in Preston and Mansfield Hosiery Mills in Derbyshire. Part of the reasons for these worker-led strikes was that with an unofficial colour bar in operation, people of colour were concentrated in low-skilled, insecure and dangerous jobs in sectors where there were labour shortages and unsociable working hours. By the mid-1970s black and Asian male workers remained disproportionately represented in semi- or unskilled roles compared to white male workers.101 One Indian man who settled in Birmingham in the late 1950s remarked years later, ‘I didn’t know any schoolteachers at that time, I didn’t know anybody working in bank or office jobs, even those people who have graduated who worked as teachers back home, they were working in the factories or foundries.’102 As well as protesting against and resisting racist murders on the country’s streets, racism in the workplace and flourishing far-right politics, working-class people of colour set up initiatives to support each other when they were racially harassed, making sure everyone understood their rights.


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pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

The factory was typically located in a village that had low wages to start with, and in those villages, the growth of factory employment did much more for wage growth than agricultural productivity growth resulting from the famed Green Revolution. Furthermore, the poor gained disproportionately from industrial growth, because higher-paid employment became available even to those with low skills. Once such a job does materialize, it can make a tremendous difference in the lives of the people who get it. The middle class spends much more on health and education than the poor. Of course, in principle, it may be that patient, industrious people, inclined to invest in the future of their children, are better able to hang on to good jobs.


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


pages: 350 words: 109,521

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America by Howard G. Buffett

airport security, clean water, collective bargaining, defense in depth, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, immigration reform, linked data, low skilled workers, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

In 1994 a recalibration of the peso threw the economy into a tailspin, and GDP growth did not resume until 1997.6 There was political turmoil surrounding NAFTA, and in the long run it hurt people in rural areas where poor farmers were left to compete with ever-increasing imports from U.S. farmers. Low-skilled, uneducated farmworkers had limited job options, and many crossed into the United States illegally in order to work in agriculture and other jobs in the United States that paid more. Bribes Drug trafficking was a major problem in Mexico then as well—as was related corruption. Ironically, I’m certain NAFTA indirectly led to more drugs smuggled into the United States thanks to increased trade, which meant more commercial vehicle traffic back and forth to Mexico, with more opportunities for smuggling.


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