working-age population

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pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

As for how fast the working-age population needs to grow to raise the likelihood of an economic boom, it turns out 2 percent is a good benchmark. In three out of four of the miracle economies, the working-age population grew at an average pace of at least 2 percent a year during the full duration of a decade-long boom. A country is thus unlikely to experience a decade-long growth boom if its working-age population is growing at a rate less than 2 percent. And one striking change in the post-crisis world is that there are now very few countries with a population growing that fast. As recently as the 1980s, seventeen of the twenty largest emerging economies had a working-age population growth rate above 2 percent, but that number has fallen steadily from seventeen to only two in the 2010s, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

This does not bode well for the emerging world, where more and more countries face the prospect of weak or even negative population growth. Over the course of the 2010s, all the major emerging economies are projected to have working-age population growth rates below the 2 percent mark, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Thailand. Already the working-age population is actively contracting in three large emerging countries: Poland, Russia, and most important, China. There the working-age population growth rate hovered under 2 percent as recently as 2003, then dropped steadily until it turned negative for the first time in 2015. Population decline is now high on the list of reasons, alongside its heavy debts and excessive investments, to doubt that China can sustain rapid GDP growth.

The first part of the rule for finding the answer is to look at the projected growth of the working-age population over the next five years, because workers (more than retirees or schoolchildren) are the drivers of growth. The second part of the rule is to look at what nations are doing to counteract slower population growth. One way is to try to inspire women to have more babies, an approach with a spotty record at best. The other is to attract adults—including retirees, women, and economic migrants—to enter or reenter the active labor force. The big winners will come from among those countries that are blessed with strong growth in the working-age population or are doing the best job of bringing fresh talent into the labor force.


pages: 205 words: 55,435

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

Having said that, I think most would agree that, in these digital times, GDP is a terrible measure of living standards whatever way it is calculated. * * * 82 Defined by the UN as the ratio of female to male proportion of a country’s working-age population that engages in the labour market, either by working or actively looking for work, expressed as a percentage of the working-age population. 83 Source: United Nations (2016). 84 The Danish government is pushing ahead with plans to change the mandatory retirement age and have run into massive resistance. 85 Source: The MacroStrategy Partnership LLP (2017,4). 86 Source: IEA (2016). 87 BofAML (2015). 88 Source: The MacroStrategy Partnership LLP (2017,5).

This would obviously be a rather dramatic U-turn on his declared policy on immigration, but low or no immigration would most likely be massively damaging to economic growth. Exhibit 11.1: Change in US working age population (those aged 25–64) in % 1965–74 1975–84 1985–94 1995–04 2005–14 2015–24 2025–35 Immigrants 1.0 3.8 6.9 10.8 6.1 3.5 1.2 U.S. born with immigrant parents −2.5 −3.1 −1.8 0.3 2.4 5.7 7.9 U.S. born with U.S. born parents 13.3 20.0 15.1 10.6 4.8 −4.3 −3.8 Source: Pew Research Center (2017). Pew Research Center’s projections suggest that 17.6 million new immigrants will be added to the US working-age population by 2035. Without them, the number of working-age immigrants would decline by 2035, and the total US working-age population would drop by almost 8 million (or more than 4%) from 2015 levels.

Moody’s (2017) www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-Passive-investing-to-overtake-active-in-just-four-to--PR_361541 OECD (2015) The Labour Share in G20 Economies, OECD Publishing. OECD (2016) OECD Pensions Outlook 2016, OECD Publishing. Pew Research Center (2017) Immigration Projected to Drive Growth in U.S. Working-Age Population Through at Least 2035, Pew Research Center, Washington DC (Mach 2017), © 2017. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/ PhaseCapital (2015) The Case for Dynamic Diversification. Preqin (2017) Does Fund Size Affect Hedge Fund Performance? Research Affiliates (2013) Mind the (Expectations) Gap.


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

12 A Switch from Debt to Equity Finance? 13 Future Policy Problems: Old Age and Taxes, and the Monetary-Fiscal Clash 14 Swimming Against the (Main)Stream Postscript: Future Imperfect After Coronavirus References Index List of Diagrams Diagram 1.1 An ageing world: working age population (Mil) is falling; working age population growth (yearly increase) is slowing Diagram 1.2 Trade union density has been falling for decades now Diagram 1.3 Advanced economies inflation: Durable goods and services (year on year = %Y, averaged over 3 years = 3Yr Ave) Diagram 1.4 Advanced economies public debt (% of Gross Domestic Product) is going to rise even further Diagram 1.5 Long-term government bond yields: 10-year maturity Diagram 1.6 The number of people with dementia (per 1000 population, all ages) will rise sharply across the advanced economies Diagram 1.7 Labour share of income in advanced economies Diagram 1.8 US federal debt held by the public was projected to rise sharply even before the pandemic Diagram 1.9 Projections of UK public sector net debt Diagram 2.1 Reforms and exports have led to sustained surges in growth Diagram 2.2 “The surprisingly swift decline in US manufacturing employment” Diagram 2.3 China credit growth surged in the early 90s and after the Great Financial Crisis Diagram 2.4 Capital inflows were offset at the border, leading to huge foreign exchange reserves Diagram 2.5 China’s working age population is shrinking; Urban population is now 60% of the total Diagram 2.6 Like Japan, China will see a mathematical rebalancing Diagram 3.1 Fertility (children per woman) is falling sharply in the EMEs, having already fallen in the AEs Diagram 3.2 Life expectancy at birth (years) is rising globally Diagram 3.3 Dependency ratios rising in the AEs, mixed among the EMEs (per 100) Diagram 3.4 Life expectancy (in years) and the geographical distribution of the demographic dividend Diagram 3.5 Dependency ratio (per 100) in the different demographic cycles, % of world population Diagram 3.6 Gross domestic product contributions (% of global) in the different demographic cycles Diagram 3.7 Participation rate (% of population) has already risen sharply in the 55–64 year cohort in the AEs Diagram 3.8 Pension repayment rate and the participation rate are inversely correlated Diagram 3.9 Effective retirement age (years) has risen by less than life expectancy Diagram 4.1 As people live longer, the burden of dementia is bound to increase Diagram 4.2 Public spending on long-term care varies among rich nations Diagram 4.3 UK: Average age of parents at the birth of their child Diagram 4.4 Mean Age of Women at the Birth of their First Child (Age) Diagram 5.1 The household savings rate falls as the dependency ratio worsens Diagram 5.2 Proportion of population aged over 65 Diagram 5.3 Older people less likely to move in the United States Diagram 5.4 And in the United Kingdom, too Diagram 5.5 UK: average age of parents at the birth of their child (age) Diagram 5.6 Mean age of women at the birth of first child (age) has risen across the AEs Diagram 5.7 The profit share of gross domestic product has been rising, particularly after the GFC Diagram 5.8 Gross fixed capital formation (as a % of gross domestic product) has been stagnant in the AEs, but not in China Diagram 5.9 Corporate sector net saving (% of gross domestic product) will move further into deficit Diagram 5.10 General government budget balances (shown here as a % of GDP) have been in deficit persistently Diagram 6.1 Consumption rises over the life cycle Diagram 6.2 Health expenditure rising globally, mostly due to high income economies Diagram 6.3 Public expenditures on pensions will continue to rise Diagram 6.4 Life expectancy less effective retirement age is rising across the AEs Diagram 6.5 Wedge (spread) between yields on corporate AAA bonds and on BBB bonds Diagram 7.1 Gini coefficient of disposable household income across the OECD Diagram 7.2 Fiscal redistributive impact is still large but declining in some OECD countries Diagram 7.3 Cumulative change in real weekly earnings of working age adults aged 18–64, 1963–2017 Diagram 7.4 Changes in occupational employment shares among working age adults, 1980–2016 Diagram 7.5 Ratio of remuneration between CEOs and average workers in world in 2014, by country Diagram 7.6 Median cash incentive payments for FTSE 100 lead executives 1996–2013 Diagram 8.1 Keynesian reverse-L supply curve Diagram 8.2 Achieving the political optimum on the Phillips curve Diagram 8.3 Stagflation in advanced economies Diagram 8.4 Trade union density has been falling since around 1980 Diagram 8.5 The horizontal Phillips curve, 2006–2018 Diagram 8.6 Working days lost to strikes (Mil.); Work stoppage workers involved (Mil.)

The integration of China into the global manufacturing complex by itself more than doubled the available labour supply for the production of tradeable products among the advanced economies (AEs). So we start the rest of this book with a Chapter on China, Chapter 2. The increase in the working age population (WAP, aged 15–64) in China outstripped the combined increase in Europe and the USA from 1990 to 2017 over fourfold—China saw an increase of over 240 million while in the latter two WAP increased by less than 60 million and mostly in the USA. The participation of the working age population also tilted the scales heavily in China’s favour. On the one hand, workers migrated aggressively from rural to urban China—the latter’s share of total population increased by over 23 percentage points (pp hereafter), or 370 million between 2000 and 2017.

At the same time, a number of social and economic developments raised the proportion of women working in the labour force (Table 1.2, USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan).Table 1.1Percentage of young and retirees in the population USA UK Germany Japan China Young 1970 28 24 23 24 40 2010 20 17 14 13 19 Change 1970–2010: −8 −7 −9 −11 −21 2010 20 17 14 13 19 2019 19 18 14 13 18 Change 2010–2019: −1 1 0 0 −1 Retiree 1970 10 13 24 7 4 2010 13 17 21 22 8 Change 1970–2010: 3 4 3 15 4 2010 13 17 21 22 8 2019 16 19 22 28 11 Change 2010–2019: 3 2 1 6 3 Source UN Population Statistics Table 1.2Participation of women in the labour force USA UK Germany France Japan 1990 56.2 52.0 45.2 46.3 50.1 2010 57.5 55.5 52.8 50.9 48.7 2019 55.8 57.1 55.3 50.2 51.4 Change: 1990–2019 −0.4 5.1 10.0 3.9 1.3 Source World Bank Combining these two factors, the rise of China, globalisation and the reincorporation of Eastern Europe into the world trading system, together with the demographic forces, the arrival of the baby boomers into the labour force and the improvement in the dependency ratio, together with greater women’s employment, produced the largest ever, massive positive labour supply shock. The effective labour supply force for the world’s advanced economy trading system more than doubled over these 27 years, from 1991 to 2018 (Diagram 1.1). Diagram 1.1An ageing world: working age population (Mil) is falling; working age population growth (yearly increase) is slowing (Source UN Population Statistics) 1.1.4 The Economic Effects Have Been Dramatic The last 30 odd years from the beginning of the 1990s to the present have been extraordinary for the global economy (Chapter 3). When such a positive supply shock to labour occurs, the inevitable result is a weakening in the bargaining power of the labour force.


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

Without migration, its working-age population is set to fall by nearly ten million people – 18 percent – between 2020 and 2040. If it admitted half a million young migrant workers a year for the next twenty years, the working-age population would remain stable at 54 million. This would make it much easier to support the increase in the retirement-age population from 18 million to 24 million. Or consider the UK. Without migration, its working-age population is set to fall by 2.3 million by 2040. If it admitted 200,000 young migrant workers a year over the next two decades, the working-age population would edge up by 1.7 million to 41 million.

As a result, shrinking working-age populations have increasing numbers of pensioners to support. Migrants offset that; four-fifths of those in OECD countries are of working age.37 Without migration, the working-age population would already be falling in both Europe and North America. Without further migration, that decline would accelerate in coming decades. The EU’s population aged fifteen to sixty-four would fall by 45 million people between 2020 and 2040 – a 14 percent decline.38 The UK’s would decline by 5.5 percent over the same period, the US’s by 4 percent.39 While the working-age population is set to shrink, the population aged sixty-five and older is swelling.

They found that an influx of low-skilled refugees, who mostly did not speak Danish and filled elementary and manual labour positions, caused unskilled and low-skilled locals to shift towards more complex, higher-skilled, non-manual work, thereby boosting their wages, employment and occupational mobility.33 Peri and Foged argue that an influx of low-skilled newcomers ought to have a similarly positive impact in other economies with a flexible labour market, such as the US and the UK. Flexible labour markets can adjust rapidly to even very large inflows of people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 710,000 Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, increasing its working-age population by over 15 percent in seven years. While they weren’t strictly speaking refugees, they were admitted for political reasons – because Jews everywhere have an automatic right to settle in Israel – not economic ones. While many were skilled, they had no experience of a capitalist economy and most spoke no Hebrew.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

So, too, the structural reforms imposed on Greece and Spain and the other crisis countries were supposed to increase productivity. Because working-age populations (ages 15 to 64) in different countries have grown at different rates—Japan’s working-age population has been shrinking at the rate of around 1 percent a year while the United States’ has been increasing at 0.7 percent a year, and Germany’s has been decreasing at 0.3 percent a year12—it is perhaps more meaningful to compare real (inflation-adjusted) growth per person of working-age GDP than just GDP. One expects Japan’s growth to be lower than that of the United States’, simply because there are fewer workers. If Japan’s growth per working-age population is higher, it tells us something important: it is either finding more jobs for those of working age or it is increasing their productivity.

This likely changed, of course, as Greece became the main recipient of refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the last couple of years, though this is a different kind of migration altogether—refugees choose Greece as a gateway to Europe and not because it is the most attractive destination for settlement. 10 Greece’s working-age population as percentage of total population fell from 66.7 percent in 2007 to 64.6 percent in 2015. Thus, the share of the declining population that was of working-age population decreased by more than 2 percentage points. Even if the unemployment rate had been unchanged and even if productivity had remained the same, GDP on this account alone would have fallen by more than 4 percent, reducing the country’s ability to pay back its debts. 11 Government expenditure converted to real terms using GDP deflator using IMF data. 12 World Bank data. 13 Eurostat data. 14 And well below that of the much maligned Japan, whose real GDP per working age population exceeds by a considerable amount both Europe and the United States.

The eurozone has not been doing well when viewed from this perspective—for the eurozone as a whole, GDP per working-age person has increased by just 0.6 percent during 2007–2015, while for non-eurozone European countries, there has been a 3.9 percent increase.13 The comparison with the United States looks even more unfavorable: while by 2011, US growth in GDP per working-age population had largely returned to precrisis levels, the eurozone area’s number was markedly below—in fact, well below not only that of the United States but of the world and high-income countries.14 In the crisis countries, performance has predictably been even worse. If there has been any increase in productivity, that effect has been overwhelmed by the increase in unemployment.


pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

The article contains statements like this one: “As workers born during the baby boom of 1945–1965 are retiring they are not being replaced by a new cohort of citizens of prime working age (15–59 years old). Industrialized countries are experiencing a drop in their working age populations.” Or this assertion, “By 2050, in other words, the entire working-age population will barely exceed the 60-andolder population.” To be fair, Goldstone goes on to suggest that policy makers take advantage of the longevity bonus and make it easier for individuals to work beyond sixty. Still, the notion that the “prime working years” are fifteen to fifty-nine and that sixty and beyond are no longer the “working years” leads to great distortions.

One sees these kinds of predictions littered throughout the popular press and the pundit ranks where the “aging of the boomers,” the “retirement of the boomers,” and various predictions of population bombs, silver tsunamis, gray quakes, and other longevity- and demography-born disasters are repeated as fact because at one time in history sixty-year-olds were a prime market for walkers. A stock in trade of this thinking is the dependency ratio, built on anachronistic ideas like a working-age population that’s fifteen to fifty-nine or sixty-five and notions of “retirement age” that simply no longer apply. Demographers likewise talk in grave tones about the “elder share,” the segment of a nation’s population over sixty, using this share as a marker of how decrepit the population is. It’s no surprise that these books and essays are usually overcome with lament for America’s lost youth, including much mourning about how the future will be far worse than our past, as we head over the hill as a nation.

When Social Security was enacted, Americans moving beyond sixty-five were considered “beyond the productive period,” based on mortality risk. Just as we’d never consider equating 1935 dollars with 2010 dollars, should we expect 1935 ages to mean the same thing as those same indicators three-quarters of a century later? We need to longevity-adjust the meaning of ideas like the working-age population, just as we inflation-adjust currencies, in Shoven’s compelling perspective. Shoven’s Stanford colleague, Center on Longevity founder Laura Carstensen, registers a companion point: All those years that have been added to life spans haven’t simply been tacked onto the end. They have been contributed to the middle—mostly to the second half of life where health and capacity after fifty are being dramatically stretched.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

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

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

Household savings rose from about 5 per cent of disposable income in the late 1970s to about 38 per cent in 2016, or just over 25 per cent of GDP. Savings by companies are also elevated, amounting to about 17 per cent of GDP in 2016. High household savings reflect China’s demographics, the rise in the working-age population, and the continuing weaknesses in the social security system. An inadequate level of social welfare is a problem specifically for China’s 150 million or so internal migrants without ‘hukou’, or urban registration. They are denied access to a wide range of public housing, education and social services and benefits.

Support for the consumer sector could be strengthened by creating new jobs in services and building up the social security and healthcare coverage safety nets. Such policies would most likely help to lower household savings, accelerating a change that will probably happen anyway over time as China ages. The working-age population is now in decline, and the old-age dependency ratio is predicted to double between 2017 and 2030. Social benefits should rise and be extended to all working people and their families. The growth in services should be actively encouraged, both in megacities such as Beijing or Shanghai, which are already well -served, but also and importantly in other cities, especially those inland, which are not.28 Modern service industries, which remain relatively closed, could be deregulated and opened up, for example in a wide range of communication, professional, business, entertainment and information services.

In fact, while rising life expectancy is self-evidently something we do both celebrate and worry about when it comes to care, it isn’t actually the core issue in ageing. Rather, it is low fertility. Low fertility means we don’t produce enough children to become workers to fully replace those reaching retirement. As a result, the size and the growth rate of the working-age population (WAP), typically defined as those aged fifteen to sixty-four, are going to stagnate or decline. Low or falling fertility is pretty much a global issue. In Denmark, France, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Spain, cash or other incentives have been tried to get women to have more children.


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

Singapore has only slowly moved in a fully democratic direction, but its commitment to education and open trade has been unwavering; it is in fact the only advanced country that is (still) not fully democratic. FIGURE 1.2. Number of patents per one million people (logged) in the working-age population, 2015 vs. 1976. The data are from the US Patent and Trademark Office and show the total number of patents granted as a share of working-age population in millions, by the country of residence of the inventor. Countries all the way to the left received zero patents in 1976 and have been assigned an arbitrarily low value (since numbers are logged). Source: OECD.Stat.

Since Switzerland has a collective executive that is not the result of coalition bargaining, we exclude it from the analysis. It has no effect on the substantive results. Chapter 3: Appendix 1. These controls are only relevant for total spending because unemployment and ALMPs only apply to the working-age population. 2. Automatic unemployment disbursement is defined as the first difference in unemployment as a percent of the working-age population times the net replacement rate in the previous year, which is the ratio of net unemployment insurance benefits to net income for an unmarried single person earning the average production worker’s wage. Chapter 4: Knowledge Economies and Their Political Construction 1.

Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation (Numbers Are Eigenvalues) 254 A5.2. Individual Level Regression Results 255 A5.3. The Determinants of Populist Voting in Six Countries with Significant Populist Parties 256 Figures 1.1 Measures of Distribution of Income, 2010 vs. 1985 24 1.2 Number of Patents per One Million People in the Working Age Population 27 1.3 The Distribution of Income in Advanced Democracies Compared to Nonadvanced Countries 36 2.1 Protocorporatist States and Industrial Relations Structuring 70 3.1 Average Union Density Rates and Wage Coordination in 18 Advanced Democracies 106 3.2 Average Density and Collective Bargaining Coordination in Four Advanced Democracies 107 3.3 The Vote Shares of Social Democratic and Center Parties 116 3.4 Male Wage Inequality 118 3.5 Average Industrial Employment as a Share of Total Civilian Employment in 18 Advanced Democracies 119 3.6 Central Bank Independence in 18 OECD Countries 122 3.7 The Responsiveness of Governments to Adverse Shocks in Different Political Systems 126 3.8 Voter Support for Populist Parties 130 4.1 Percent with Tertiary Degrees, by Age Group 147 4.2 Capital Market Openness and the Stock of FDI in Advanced Democracies 148 4.3 Financialization of Advanced Economies 150 4.4 Inflation Rates before and after Adoption of Inflation Targeting 153 4.5 The Strengthening of Product Market Competition Policies in ACDs 154 4.6 Number and Depth of Trade Agreements 155 4.7 A Strategic Complementarities Game of Reforms 162 4.8 Support for Government Intervention in Economy, by Policy Area 166 4.9 Summary of Causal Linkages in Big-City Agglomerations 200 5.1 The Great Gatsby Curve 221 5.2 The Link between the Transition to the Knowledge Economy and Populism 227 5.3 The Difference in Populist Values between the Old and New Middle Class 240 5.4 Educational Opportunity and Populist Values 242 5.5 The Rise of Populist Voting 245 5.6 The Difference in Populist Vote between the Old and New Middle Class 247 6.1 The Symbiotic Relationship 259 PREFACE This book started from our discussions of a paradox.


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

It may still be too early to judge the full implications of this growing phenomenon, but higher educational attainment and the availability of employment prospects overseas give this population of university-educated young adults a greater propensity for migration. Many developing countries will be experiencing a “youth bulge” in the coming decades, and the growth in working-age populations will contribute to greater migration pressure. Growing Working-Age populations in Developing countries In forecasting future population trends, the concept of the “demographic transition” can explain why the age distribution within nations and regions changes over time. The demographic transition is the movement of a country—over several decades—from a pattern of high mortality and high fertility to one of low mortality and low fertility.

Comparing the educational attainment of migrant fathers and their children in Canada, by source region, 2008 Figure 7.1. Falling tariffs in three regions, 1950-2000 Figure 7.2. Gini coefficient: Unweighted intercountry inequality, 1950-1998 Figure 7.3. Percentage of regional and world populations living in cities, 1950-2050 Figure 7.4. Long-term trend in size of the working-age population in sub-Saharan Africa by level of educational attainment, 1970-2050 Figure 7.5. Population aged 15-64, medium variant projections, 1950-2050 Figure 7.6. Population growth and age distribution in South Africa and Nigeria Figure 7.7. Total fertility rates (average number of children per woman), medium variant projections, 1950-2050 Figure 7.8.

We highlight six interrelated factors that can be expected to foster a growing supply of potential migrants: persistent intercountry inequality and wage disparities; economic growth in the poorest countries; rural displacement and urbanization; rising education standards in developing countries; growing working-age populations in developing countries; and environmental stress. These factors, in themselves, will not launch people over borders to seek their fortune in distant lands, primarily because migration is still heavily influenced by national regulatory regimes. Given the opportunity, however, more and more people will be prepared to assume the risks and costs of migration.


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

In 1995, 1.5 million individuals were incarcerated in US prisons, compared with 500,000 in 1980; it is estimated that 2.4 million will be incarcerated in 2000 (Freeman, 1996). This aspect of underemployment, entirely neglected in official unemployment statistics, is not a minor matter, since these 1.5 million prisoners represented 1.5 percent of the US working age population in 1995. In France, by comparison, the prison population was just 60,000, or 0.3 percent of the working age population. It would of course be simplistic to suggest that the growth of crime in the United States since 1970 can be explained entirely by the evolution of wage inequality. Clearly, however, it was more difficult to be a model proletarian in the United States in 1995 than it was in 1970, given that the wage of the tenth centile fell by nearly 50 percent compared with that of the ninetieth centile.

Official figures might seem to support this view: the 1996 unemployment rate was 5.6 percent in the United States and 7.5 percent (and rapidly declining) in the United Kingdom, compared with 10.3 percent in Germany, 12.1 percent in Italy, and 12.2 percent in France (where 3 million people were unemployed in a working-age population of around 25 million [OECD, 1996, A24]). High growth in the late 1990s significantly reduced unemployment everywhere but left the geographical variation intact: in 2000, the unemployment rate was 4 percent in the United States and 10 percent in France (OECD, 2000). The problem with this type of comparison, however, is that the notion of unemployment is not an adequate measure of the phenomenon of underemployment.

It is therefore tempting to conclude that underemployment is in fact as high in the United States as in the European countries where unemployment is high. This is misleading, however, since the phenomenon of hidden underemployment is unfortunately not limited to the United States. It takes other forms in Europe, less visible perhaps but no less significant. Consider, for example, the fact that only 67 percent of the working age population is classified as belonging to the active population in France in 1996, compared with 77 percent in the United States, 75 percent in the United Kingdom, and only 68 percent in Germany and 60 percent in Italy (OECD, 1996, A22). This indicator, known as the labor market participation rate, is highly imperfect because it mixes together a wide range of phenomena, such as the female participation rate and the percentage of early retirees, but it nevertheless points to a real problem.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

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

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

There are some people who are too young or too old to work. So we consider only the working-age population when we calculate unemployment. All countries exclude children from the working-age population, but the definition of children differs across countries; fifteen is the most frequently used threshold, but it could be as low as five (India and Nepal).10 Some countries also exclude old people from the working-age population; the most frequently used threshold ages are sixty-four and seventy-four, but it could be as low as sixty-three or as high as seventy-nine. Even among those who belong to the working-age population, not everyone who is not working is counted as unemployed.

Some of them, such as students or those who are engaged in unpaid household work or care work for their family or friends, may not want a paid job. In order to be classified as unemployed, the person should have been ‘actively seeking work’, which is defined as having applied for paid jobs in the recent past – usually in the preceding four weeks. When you subtract those who are not actively seeking work from your working-age population, you get the economically active population. Only those who are economically active (that is, actively seeking paid jobs) but are not working are counted as unemployed. This definition of unemployment, known as the ILO definition, is used by all countries (with minor modifications), but is not without serious problems.

Their employment is often not recognized in the official employment/unemployment statistics. 11. In order to deal with the difficulties created by discouraged workers, economists sometimes look at the labour force participation rate, which is the share of the economically active population (the employed and the officially unemployed) in the working-age population. A sudden fall in that rate is likely to indicate that there has been an increase in the number of discouraged workers, who are not counted as unemployed any more. CHAPTER 11: LEVIATHAN OR THE PHILOSOPHER KING?: THE ROLE OF THE STATE 1. Some economists, including myself, go even further and argue that, in industries that require large capital investments for productivity growth (e.g., steel, automobile), ‘anti-competitive’ arrangements among oligopolistic firms – such as cartels – can be socially useful.


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

The solid line near the top of the graph shows the number of kids, age 0–20, as a percentage of the total number of working-age people, age 20–64. The effect of the baby boom is visible around 1960, as the number of kids exploded to equal almost 80% of the working-age population. At the same time, the old-age dependency ratio, which is the number of people 65 and older as a percentage of the working-age population, was less than 20%. From 1960 to almost 2010, as fertility declined so did the youth dependency ratio. It is now around 45%, almost half its peak in 1960. And for much of that same period, the old-age dependency ratio also stayed constant at around 20%.

This means that the proportion of workers to total population, which had already begun to drop because of the rise in the old-age dependency ratio in the early 2000s, will continue to fall. Figure 5.3. Dependency ratios over time Note: Data is from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development population statistics database. Youth dependency is the ratio of people age 0–20 to the working-age population, 20–64. Old-age dependency is the ratio of those age 65 and older to the working-age population, 20–64. I attributed this all to a decline in fertility, but of course changes to mortality rates have played a role as well. In 1960, life expectancy in the United States was roughly age 70, but by 2015 it had reached age 79. Life expectancy works a lot like total fertility rate, in that it captures a snapshot of the mortality rates acting on people of different ages in a given year.

After that, it rose again, reaching just over 43 in 2010, and it will probably increase a little further by 2020. These do not look like monumental changes, but we can see something a little more dramatic if we consider the distribution of workers by age in more detail. In 1960, about 36% of the working-age population was between 20 and 34 years of age. By 1980, that share rose to 46%, but by 2010 it was back down to 34%. For several decades in the late twentieth century, the US economy had a relatively young and inexperienced workforce, compared to both the twenty-first century and the period not long after World War II.


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

In the case of the Midwest, on average, half the population of these suburbs was non-Hispanic black in 1980, increasing to almost 70 percent by 2000. Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs / 75 TABLE 6.3 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS FOR HIGH-POVERTY INNER-RING SUBURBS Average percentage Population that was in poverty, 1980 Population that was in poverty, 2000 Working-age population that was not in the labor force, 1980 Working-age population that was not in the labor force, 2000 Working-age population that was unemployed, 1980 Working-age population that was unemployed, 2000 Northeast Midwest South West 20 26 22 31 18 27 20 27 47 44 38 39 46 45 43 45 11 19 9 17 10 15 11 12 Workers who were in manufacturing, 1980 Workers who were in manufacturing, 2000 34 15 30 17 15 11 33 21 Population that was white, 1980 Population that was white, 2000 71 49 41 25 55 25 34 14 Population that was black, 1980 Population that was black, 2000 19 31 57 69 32 47 20 14 Population that was other, 1980 Population that was other, 2000 1 4 1 3 1 3 4 7 Population that was Hispanic, 1980 Population that was Hispanic, 2000 8 17 2 3 12 25 42 66 Population that was immigrant, 1980 Population that was immigrant, 2000 10 14 3 3 12 25 25 39 The Northeast’s high-poverty suburbs experienced widespread social change over the two decades.


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

(Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace, 2017), 33, 50, 60; “Winning: No Country For Old Men Or New Mothers,” Strategy Page, November 13, 2018, https://strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20181113.aspx. 20 Joe Myers, “China’s working-age population will fall 23% by 2050,” World Economic Forum, July 25, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/china-working-ageing-population/. 21 U.S. House of Representatives, “Genocide: China’s Missing Girls,” Hearing Before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 114th Congress, February 3, 2016 (U.S. Government Publishing Office), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg99772/html/CHRG-114hhrg99772.htm. 22 John Dale Gover, “Xi’s China Dreams Will Not Age Well,” Real Clear World, November 9, 2017, https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2017/11/09/xis_china_dreams_will_not_age_well_112625.html. 23 Robinson Meyer, “A Terrifying Sea-Level Prediction Now Looks Far Less Likely,” Atlantic, January 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sea-level-rise-may-not-become-catastrophic-until-after-2100/579478/; Roger Pielke, Jr., “Some Good News—About Natural Disasters, of All Things,” Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-good-newsabout-natural-disasters-of-all-things-1533331596; Nicholas Fondacaro, “NYT Reporter Demands You Become ‘Hysterical’ About Climate Change,” NewsBusters, November 25, 2018, https://www.newsbusters. org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2018/11/25/nyt-reporter-demands-you-become-hysterical-about-climate. 24 Steven E.

In Canada, the number of people in temp jobs has been growing at more than triple the pace of permanent employment, since many workers who lose industrial jobs fail to find another full-time permanent position.12 The same patterns can be seen in traditionally labor-friendly European countries. From 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the EU15 and the United States, or up to 162 million individuals, are doing contract work.13 A similar trend shows up in developing countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.14 Even in Japan, long known as a country of secure long-term employment, the trend is toward part-time, conditional work.

As the employment base shrinks, some countries have raised taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees.18 In certain places, the prospect of an inexorable depopulation looms: in Russia between 1991 and 2011, around 13 million more people died than were born.19 China’s working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years old) peaked in 2011 and is projected to drop 23 percent by 2050.20 This decline will be exacerbated by the effects of the now discarded one-child policy, which led to the aborting of an estimated 37 million Chinese girls since it came into force in 1980.21 These grim statistics have created an imbalance between the sexes that could pose an existential threat to President Xi’s “China dream,” and perhaps to the stability of the Communist state.22 Getting Beyond Dogma Given the likely effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the world’s future climate, it will probably be necessary to change how we live, produce energy, and get around—even if such changes have significant economic costs.


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China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

For decades, China seemed to have an endless supply of workers willing to leave the countryside for better-paying jobs in the city. As long as there were more workers on the way, wages remained low. But that endless supply has come to an end. Traveling around the countryside, even the casual observer can see that many villages are filled with no one but children and their elderly guardians, the working-age population having already moved to the cities. All developing economies, if they develop fast enough and for long enough, eventually get to a point where the flood of new workers looking for urban factory jobs slows to a trickle. That’s clearly happening in China. Where China differs is that, at the same time, the overall pool of workers is shrinking.

Where China differs is that, at the same time, the overall pool of workers is shrinking. Demography As Destiny In 2012, the number of Chinese between the ages of fifteen and fifty-nine started declining, shrinking by more than 3 million people. According to the United Nations Population Division, China’s working-age population (currently about 1 billion people) will fall by 45 million people between 2015 and 2030, and then will lose a further 150 million people by 2050. Usually that kind of reversal is the result of war, disease, or famine. China’s demographic woes, however, are the unintended consequences of government policy.

That’s what makes Lou Jiwei, who until late 2016 was China’s finance minister, so pessimistic about the country’s growth prospects. “In the next five to ten years, the chance of China sliding into the middle-income trap is extremely high. I put the odds at 50–50,” Lou said in a speech to Tsinghua University students in mid-2015. “Why? . . . Because society is aging and the working-age population is shrinking too fast.” The middle-income trap is an idea first conceived by World Bank economists who found that, of the 101 developing economies that, in 1960, could be classified as having been “middle income” (that is, they weren’t stuck in poverty, but they didn’t qualify as developed nations either), only 13—a group that includes Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and Ireland—managed to become rich nations by 2008.


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

Based on current trends and definitions, the annual growth rate of the global labor force is set to weaken from around 1.4 percent annually between 1990 and 2010 to about 1 percent to 2030.31 In 1964, the working-age group (fifteen to sixty-four) accounted for 58 percent of the total population, reaching a peak of 68 percent in 2012.32 In the next fifty years, however, the working-age population is expected to drop to 61 percent, while the share of elderly (sixty-five and up) in the total population could increase to 23 percent, from 9 percent in 2012.33 In China, some 70 percent of the population works today, one of the highest such shares in the world. But in January 2013, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s working-age population actually fell in 2012. And as the country’s population ages, the proportion of Chinese who are working should fall to 67 percent by 2030.

After nearly three decades of declining interest rates, the cost of capital cannot get cheaper, and it could rise over the next twenty years. After a prolonged period of falling and steady prices for natural resources, the cost of everything from grain to steel is becoming more volatile. The demographic surplus the world enjoyed as working-age populations grew and China joined the global trading system is likely to turn into a demographic deficit as population growth grinds to a halt and the world’s labor force ages. Although inequality between countries continues to shrink, in many parts of the world, individuals—particularly those with low job skills—are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.

Across the European Union (EU), the population is expected to increase by 5 percent until 2040 and then start to shrink.16 In Germany (2014 fertility rate: 1.4), which has long stood out for its weak population growth, the European Commission believes the population could shrink by 19 percent by 2060.17 The country’s working-age population is expected to fall from fifty-four million in 2010 to thirty-six million in 2060.18 Proportion of elderly in global population is increasing rapidly NOTE: Old age dependency ratio = Population aged 65+ over population 15-64 SOURCE: McKinsey Global Institute analysis, UN population data Germany has been able to mask its decline by attracting immigrants from Russia, Turkey, Africa, and elsewhere.


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

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

This means that there was much less variation in disposable incomes than there was in the market incomes shown in Figure 3.4. Figure 3.6 shows ‘disposable’ incomes by age. These are after adding in cash (but not in kind) benefits, and after deducting direct taxes (Income Tax and NICs). As can be seen, disposable incomes were lower than market incomes for the working-age population, but higher for those over 60. The combination of taxes and benefits smoothed out a large part of the variation between age groups. The highest disposable incomes – about £28,000 – were still for those in their late forties, but state pensions and other benefits raised average income for the older age groups to above £17,000, nearly two-thirds of the maximum rather than less than one-third.

But only 2 per cent of those aged 18–59 had been receiving the main out-of-work benefits (excluding those on long-term disability benefits) of different kinds for more than three years out of the four years up to 2008 (some of whom will have had periods in work, or at least off benefits). This had jumped to 3.3 per cent by 2012, with the onset of the recession, but again does not bear out a picture of most people on benefits being there permanently.23 If those who are receiving long-term disability and incapacity benefits are included, the proportion of the working-age population receiving out-of-work benefits for most of a four-year period rises to 8 per cent, but that is including many who have effectively already retired for health or disability reasons. Again, the picture reflects substantial turnover. Looking at households (of working age), between 16 and 17 per cent were ‘workless’ for any reason (not just unemployment) at any particular moment between the late 1990s and late 2000s.

The evolution of pensions at the time implied inadequate pensions for many, and an increasingly unequal distribution of pension rights.25 The Commission identified a whole series of problems with the UK system: • The state pension system was – and still is – one of the least generous in the industrialised world,26 and had evolved into one of ‘unique complexity’.27 • While occupational pensions provided more for some workers, only about half of the working-age population were building up an occupational pension, or had a partner who was doing so.28 • The value of the basic state pension, the foundation of the system, had been adjusted only in line with prices, rather than earnings, since the early 1980s, and so had become much less valuable in relation to current incomes.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Everyone who is going to reach the age of fifteen by then has already been born – and they are greatly outnumbered by the baby-boomers who are going to reach sixty-five (or die) over that period.557 That is true even in the UK, which has a better demographic profile than most.558 In the absence of migration, Eurostat projects that the EU’s working-age population will fall by 0.5 per cent a year between 2015 and 2020 and by 0.7 per cent a year between 2020 and 2030. Barring a pandemic or other disaster, the number of Europeans aged sixty-five and over is set to soar as the baby boomers retire and people generally live longer. In the absence of migration, Eurostat projects that their numbers will leap from 87 million in 2010 to 122.7 million in 2030.559 By then, they would account for a quarter of the EU population, up from 17.4 per cent in 2010.560 Since, in the absence of migration, the working-age population is going to shrink while (barring a disaster) the number of over-65s is set to soar, society will change dramatically in all sorts of ways, from attitudes to risk to voting patterns.

People might choose to work less because taxes on labour income are punitive – or more, in order to achieve their desired income. In any case, the lower taxes on working are, the less distorted people’s decisions will be. A bigger issue is that far fewer people work in some European countries than elsewhere. For now, this divergence is not due to demography.93 The main problem is that a smaller share of the working-age population is employed. Some European countries do much better than America. In Iceland and Switzerland, the employment rate was just shy of 80 per cent in 2012, followed by Norway and the Netherlands, where three in four people of working age work. Then comes a cluster of northern European countries – Sweden, Germany and Denmark – in the low 70s.

This should start as soon as possible, so that baby boomers also participate. For example, the official retirement age could rise by three months each year until it reaches the age of seventy. So in Britain, where the retirement age is sixty-five in 2014, this would reach seventy by 2029. In the absence of migration, the working-age population is set to shrink. Without reform, ever fewer workers will have to sustain ever more pensioners. Radical reforms to get more people into work could partly offset these demographic trends, especially in southern European countries where employment rates are low. In northern European countries where employment rates are generally higher, the biggest boost would come from raising people’s actual retirement age (see footnotes for detailed calculations).576 Foreign youth While boosting employment and encouraging people to retire later would make a big difference, migration would also help smooth the adjustment in several ways.


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

Further, by the metric of prime-age male unemployment, the pace of recovery from the “Great Reces sion” looks to have been more rapid and dynamic than many recessions in the postwar era. But the unemployment rate was created in an age when mass withdrawal of working-age men from the workforce was inconceivable. Consequently, it takes no account of the very group that has been growing most rapidly within America’s postwar male working-age population: a group that now vastly outnumbers those formally unemployed. Yes, the unemployment rate still has its uses. Administrators, for example, still need to know how many unemployment insurance checks to mail out each month. But it no longer serves as a reliable predictor for the numbers or proportions of persons who are not working—or, for that matter, for those who are working.

Near Full Employment, Some Slack Remains,” Bloomberg, April 7, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/yellen-says-u-s-close-to-full-employment-some-slack-remains. 9.Note that the workforce is officially defined as the sixteen-plus population (more or less is the age you legally can get out of school); historically it was the fourteen-plus population. In this study, I use three measures working age population: twenty-plus, twenty-to-sixty-four, and the “prime working” ages of twenty-five-to-fifty-four. 10.While the U.S. Great Depression is conventionally dated as lasting from 1929 to 1939, in part to concord with the eruption of World War II that ended any peacetime economic slumps besetting European powers, unemployment data suggest that the effects of the Depression continued on into 1940 and 1941—indeed almost to our entry into that same conflict.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Birth rates are falling below replacement levels in many regions of the world – not only in Europe, where the decline began, but also in most of South America and the Caribbean, much of Asia including China and southern India, and even some countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Lebanon, Morocco and Iran. Ageing is an economic challenge because unless retirement ages are drastically increased so that older members of society can continue to contribute to the workforce (an economic imperative that has many economic benefits), the working-age population falls at the same time as the percentage of dependent elders increases. As the population ages and there are fewer young adults, purchases of big-ticket items such as homes, furniture, cars and appliances decrease. In addition, fewer people are likely to take entrepreneurial risks because ageing workers tend to preserve the assets they need to retire comfortably rather than set up new businesses.

These habits and patterns may change of course, as ageing societies adapt, but the general trend is that an ageing world is destined to grow more slowly unless the technology revolution triggers major growth in productivity, defined simply as the ability to work smarter rather than harder. The fourth industrial revolution provides us with the ability to live longer, healthier and more active lives. As we live in a society where more than a quarter of the children born today in advanced economies are expected to live to 100, we will have to rethink issues such the working age population, retirement and individual life-planning.16 The difficulty that many countries are showing in attempting to discuss these issues is just a further sign of how we are not prepared to adequately and proactively recognize the forces of change. Productivity Over the past decade, productivity around the world (whether measured as labour productivity or total-factor productivity (TFP)) has remained sluggish, despite the exponential growth in technological progress and investments in innovation.17 This most recent incarnation of the productivity paradox – the perceived failure of technological innovation to result in higher levels of productivity – is one of today’s great economic enigmas that predates the onset of the Great Recession, and for which there is no satisfactory explanation.


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

These increases present major challenges – China, famously, will be the first country to grow old before it grows rich – but they do not alter the underlying fact that the ageing process in the developed world is much more advanced – in fact, thirty years earlier – than in most other countries.5 An alternative approach is to consider the changing supply of workers (aged fifteen to sixty-five) by region over time. In 1950, the population of working age in the developed nations stood at 494 million out of a global total of 1.4 billion, a share of 33.8 per cent. In 2000, the working-age population in the developed nations had increased to 743 million but the global total had increased much more, reaching 3.7 billion, leaving the developed nation share down at 20.3 per cent. By 2050, the UN estimates the working-age population in the developed world will have declined to just 662 million, a share of only 12.4 per cent in a global total which, by then, may be as high as 5.3 billion, a reflection of continued population increases in the emerging world and a rapid population acceleration in the world’s most impoverished nations.

(i) Wills Moody, Helen (i) Wimbledon (i), (ii), (iii) Winder, Robert (i) wine (i), (ii), (iii) WIR see World Investment Report Wolf, Martin (i) women’s vote (i) wool industry (i), (ii) workers see also labour nationalism (i) running out of workers (i) command over limited resources (i) demographic dividends and deficits (i) demographic dynamics (i) infant mortality (i) Japan: an early lesson in ageing (i) not the time to close the borders (i) pensions and healthcare (i) a renewed look at migration (i) scarcity (i) working-age population (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) World Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) WorldCom (i) World Development Indicators (i) World Economic Forum (i), (ii) World Economic Outlook (i) World Financial Center, Shanghai (i) World Investment Report (WIR) (i) World Trade Organization (WTO) (i), (ii), (iii) Wright Brothers (i) The Writing on the Wall (Hutton) (i), (ii) WTO see World Trade Organization Wu, Ximing (i), (ii) xenophobia (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Y2K threat (i) yen (i), (ii), (iii) Yom Kippur War (i) Yugoslavia (i) Yu Zhu (i) Zaidi, S.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

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

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

In the first decade of this century, Japan’s economy grew at a measly average annual rate of 0.78 percent from 2000 to 2011, compared with 1.8 percent for the United States. BUT JAPAN’S SLOW growth does not look so bad under close examination. Any serious student of economic performance needs to look not at overall growth, but at growth related to the size of the working-age population. Japan’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64) shrank 5.5 percent from 2001 to 2010, while the number of Americans of that age increased by 9.2 percent—so we should expect to see slower GDP growth. But even before Abenomics, Japan’s real economic output, per member of the labor force, grew at a faster rate over the first decade of the century than that of the United States, Germany, Britain, or Australia.

Meanwhile, its failure to do what it could and should have done to make the financial market work better for ordinary Americans—to ensure competition, to restrict the excessive fees that credit and debit cards charge to merchants that ultimately get paid by consumers, to restore lending to small and medium-size enterprises, to create a mortgage market that serves Americans rather than the interests of the banks—has hurt those in the middle and bottom at the same time that it has enriched the coffers of the banks. Yellen is right, too, to point out (as I have done in this book) the limits to monetary policy. It is hard-pressed to restore the economy to full employment on its own. Indeed, it may be contributing to the jobless recovery that we are experiencing (the percentage of the working-age population that is employed, though it has rebounded slightly since the crisis, is still lower than at any time since 1984). Low interest rates encourage firms, when they invest, to invest in very capital intensive technologies—replacing unskilled workers with machines makes no sense in an era in which so many unskilled workers are striving to find jobs.

Still, “Japan Should Be Alert” points to the dangers of increasing inequality.3 Large changes in Japan’s economy have occurred over the past quarter-century, and Japan has been under pressure to make some of the “market reforms” that contributed to the growth of inequality elsewhere. There are signs of a troubling increase in inequality—and matters could get worse. Nonetheless, on balance, I believe “Japan is a model—not a cautionary tale.” The image of Japan’s lackluster growth is distorted by the decline of its labor force (working-age population). If one takes that into account, in the past decade or so Japan has been toward the top of the league tables—hard as that is for many to believe, given the criticisms that have been leveled at Japan. Even more, as I mentioned earlier, it has so far been able to manage more inclusive growth than America has.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

That drop in population growth beginning thirty-five years ago is affecting the adult workforce composition today. The results are summarized in a recent report produced by the IMF: China is on the eve of a demographic shift that will have profound consequences on its economic and social landscape. Within a few years the working age population will reach a historical peak, and will then begin a precipitous decline. The core of this working age population, those aged 20–39 years, has already begun to shrink. With this, the vast supply of low-cost workers—a core engine of China’s growth model—will dissipate, with potentially far-reaching implications domestically and externally. Importantly, when labor force participation levels off, technology is the only driver of growth.

The Economist, along with many others, has cited adverse demographics as a major hurdle in the way of more robust European growth. Europe does have a rapidly aging society (as do Russia, Japan, China, and other major economies). Over a twenty-year horizon, the demographics of working-age populations are rigid in a closed society, which can be a large determinant of economic outcomes, but this view ignores forms of flexibility even in a closed society. A working-age population is not the same as a workforce. When unemployment is high, as it is in much of Europe, new entrants can come into the workforce at a much higher rate than population growth, assuming jobs are available.


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

Eichengreen, Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 44.Geoffrey Barlow, The Labour Movement in Britain from Thatcher to Blair (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). 45.As an indication of the success of the neoliberal project to crush union power definitively, the proportion of the total working-age population belonging to unions fell in seventeen out of twenty-one OECD nations in the period 1980–2000, and fell again in nineteen out of twenty-one in the period 2000–07. OECD, ‘Trade Union Density’, OECD Stat Extracts, at stats.oecd.org. 46.David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 11–14. 47.Ibid., p. 13. 48.Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), Chapter 1. 49.Tim Jordan, Activism!

In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s population is not employed. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 18. In a similar measure, they estimate that only half the global labour force is in waged or salaried work. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 28.

State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, pdf available at ihrim.org, p. 27. Another study, based on ILO data on the unemployed, vulnerably employed and economically inactive, estimates the surplus population at 61 per cent of the total working-age population (calculated from data by Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population, p. 444). The conclusion to draw from these alternative measures is simple: the global surplus population is massive, and in fact outnumbers the formal working class. 45.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Surprisingly, many Asian countries—with the exception of India—are in demographic situations similar to or even worse than Europe’s. The fertility rates in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and China* are well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per female, and estimates indicate that major East Asian nations will face a sizable reduction in their working-age population over the next half century. The working-age population in Japan has already peaked; in 2010, Japan had three million fewer workers than in 2005. Worker populations in China and Korea are also likely to peak within the next decade. Goldman Sachs predicts that China’s median age will rise from thirty-three in 2005 to forty-five in 2050, a remarkable graying of the population.

First, there is the pension burden—fewer workers supporting more gray-haired elders. Second, as the economist Benjamin Jones has shown, most innovative inventors—and the overwhelming majority of Nobel laureates—do their most important work between the ages of thirty and forty-four. A smaller working-age population, in other words, means fewer technological, scientific, and managerial advances. Third, as workers age, they go from being net savers to being net spenders, with dire ramifications for national saving and investment rates. For advanced industrial countries—which are already comfortable, satisfied, and less prone to work hard—bad demographics are a killer disease.


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

, Harvard University and Centre for Economics Policy Research discussion paper, http://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/who-needs-the-nation-state.pdf 15.Ibid. 16.Barry Eichengreen, ‘Spinning Beyond Brexit’, Prospect, November 2016. 17.Lawrence Summers, ‘Voters deserve responsible nationalism not reflex globalism’, Financial Times, 10 July 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/15598db8–4456–11e6–9b66–0712b3873ae1 18.Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, London: Macmillan, 1998. 19.Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation, London: Allen Lane, 2016. 20.David Owen, Europe Restructured: The Eurozone Crisis and the UK Referendum, London: Methuen, 2012. David Goodhart, ‘The Path Not Taken’, Demos Quarterly, Issue Two April 2014 http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-2/the-path-not-taken/ 21.Multiple sources: a.[EU working age population] b.[UK working-age population born in another EU country] Table 1.2, 2015 data, ‘Dataset: Population of the United Kingdom by Country of Birth and Nationality’, Office for National Statistics, 25 August 2016, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/populationoftheunitedkingdombycountryofbirthandnationality c.

Having absorbed, not without friction, the post-colonial wave in the decades after the 1950s, Britain in the mid-1990s had become a multiracial society with an immigrant and settled minority population of around 4 million, or about 7 per cent. Britain was not at that stage a mass immigration society with persistently large inflows. Today it is. About 18 per cent of today’s working age population was born abroad and in the past generation Britain’s immigrant and minority population (including the white non-British) has trebled to about 12 million, or over 20 per cent (25 per cent in England).15 Some of this is an open society success story—consider the increasingly successful minority middle class.16 But to many people the change is simply too rapid, symbolised by the fact that many of our largest towns, including London, Birmingham and Manchester—where more than half the minority population live—are now at or close to majority–minority status.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

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

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

In some cases, these contract jobs are a godsend because they help workers who only get part-time hours elsewhere to supplement their income, as laborers have done since the beginning of time. We often think of millennials in these jobs, the masters of the art of the “side hustle,” but the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work. A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig, some by choice, but many out of necessity. People who find work through apps like Lyft and TaskRabbit get a lot of attention, but they are the tip of the iceberg. The instability that characterizes their work has spread throughout the economy as the class of low-quality jobs has grown.

See Wartzman, “Populists Want to Bring Back the Blue-Collar Golden Age”; and Oxfam America and Economic Policy Institute, “Few Rewards.” 45 “For workers, the American corporation used to act as a shock absorber”: Wartzman, End of Loyalty, 5. 46 the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work: Baab-Muguira, “Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles.” 46 A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig: Manyika et al., “Independent Work.” 46 the number of people working in contingent jobs balloons to over 40 percent of all American workers: Pofeldt, “Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs.” 46 of all the jobs created between 2005 and 2015, 94 percent of them were contract or temporary: Katz and Krueger, “Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements.” 46 Many of these jobs of the new economy pay poorly: Dews, “Charts of the Week”; Vo and Zumbrun, “Just How Good (or Bad) Are All the Jobs Added?”


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

The size and age profile of a country’s population has a huge impact on its developmental potential. Labour is an input into an economy – a form of ‘capital’ – just like money, and a large working-age population relative to the cohorts of children and retired people increases the possibilities for fast growth. Rapidly declining death rates – particularly for children – and rapidly rising working-age populations have been a big part of the east Asian developmental story since the Second World War. These demographic trends, largely the result of advances in medicine and sanitation, have facilitated unprecedented growth.

After a tipping point, workforces start to shrink quickly, and older people consume their savings, devouring what were previously funds for investment. Japan’s problems since the 1980s have been bound up with acute demographic challenges in an only recently matured industrial economy. In China, the very fast growth of the working-age population that accompanied economic take-off is peaking already, and the country’s demographic headwinds will slowly increase this decade. Demographics are important. However, a certain demographic profile has been part and parcel of the developmental experience of all east Asian states. In this sense the demographic story is a given.

Then Deng Xiaoping and his successors put the brakes on the birth rate, which was already slowing, with an often brutally enforced policy to limit child-bearing. Yet despite the misery induced by these Brave New World-style interventions, China’s developmental performance has been shaped by the same policy choices in agriculture, manufacturing and finance that have made the difference elsewhere. In the end the size of your working-age population is still less important to your developmental progress than what you do with that population. The other influence on development that is given only a background role in this book is education. Here, the reason is that the evidence of a positive correlation between total years of education and GDP growth is much weaker than most people imagine.11 The strongest evidence globally concerns primary schooling, but even with respect to that formative period of education when people learn basic literacy and numeracy skills there are states like South Korea and Taiwan that took off economically with educational capital that was well below average.


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

(Botwinik 1993, pp. 111 and 113) 204 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 204 BEYOND IMPOVERISHED VISIONS OF THE LABOUR MARKET Table 7.1 Comparison between static and dynamic accounts of the labour market, Australia, mid-1990s Static account Category Dynamic account % Unemployment rate (per cent of labour force) Incidence of long-term unemployment (per cent of unemployed) Marginally attached to the labour force (per cent of labour force) 9 33 8 Casualisation rate 25 (per cent of employees) Source: Category % Looking for work during the year (per cent of those in working age population) Job search periods lasting more than a year (per cent of all jobseekers) Period of absence from the labour market (per cent of those in working age population) Working in jobs that were not permanent (per cent of all wage & salary paying jobs) 23 46 27 39 Static from ABS Labour Force Surveys (except for marginally attached which comes from unpublished ABS Survey of Training and Education 1993).

Unlikely to obtain employment anywhere, the migrants in Fitchen’s study were attracted to their rural destinations by cheap rental housing there, left behind by those seeking employment elsewhere. In Australia, Wulff and Bell (1997) have described the migration patterns of low-income groups, especially social security recipients, using unpublished census data, finding these groups contributing greatly to the redistribution of the working-age population around the country. For example, between one-third and a half of the net outflow of population from Sydney and Melbourne between 1986 and 1991 was of households with annual incomes of less than $16 000, and about one-quarter of those 162 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 162 MOVING IN AND OUT OF DISADVANTAGE leaving were unemployed (Wulff and Bell 1997, p. 33).


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

Wang, Ahmed had trouble finding a steady job. Sadly, his experience is common in Africa today. African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world.14 In Nigeria, the official rate is 12.1 percent, but the government recognizes an additional 19.1 percent of the working-age population as underemployed.15 For young people, the situation is much worse: a distressingly high 42.2 percent.16 In addition, continent-wide, 77.4 percent of those lucky enough to be employed have what the International Labour Organization calls “vulnerable jobs”—those without formal working arrangements and likely to lack decent working conditions and job security.17 According to the World Bank, 90 percent of the jobs created in Africa today are in the informal sector—the very ones that lead to vulnerability rather than a stable path to the middle class.18 Add in the demographic bulge that will double Africa’s working-age population, and it’s easy to see that the continent is facing an acute need for formal job creation of the sort that factories bring.

African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world.14 In Nigeria, the official rate is 12.1 percent, but the government recognizes an additional 19.1 percent of the working-age population as underemployed.15 For young people, the situation is much worse: a distressingly high 42.2 percent.16 In addition, continent-wide, 77.4 percent of those lucky enough to be employed have what the International Labour Organization calls “vulnerable jobs”—those without formal working arrangements and likely to lack decent working conditions and job security.17 According to the World Bank, 90 percent of the jobs created in Africa today are in the informal sector—the very ones that lead to vulnerability rather than a stable path to the middle class.18 Add in the demographic bulge that will double Africa’s working-age population, and it’s easy to see that the continent is facing an acute need for formal job creation of the sort that factories bring. Why specifically those jobs? Because manufacturing jobs are unlike other jobs, and they’re more important for Africa than other types of jobs are. Manufacturing forms a significant proportion of what’s called the traded sector (as opposed to the non-traded sector, which includes most local services, such as restaurants, shops, construction, and even highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers).


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

In the north of India, the population is booming due to high fertility rates, but in the south, where most economic development is taking place, fertility is falling rapidly. In a further twist, fertility is highest in poorly educated rural areas and lowest in highly educated urban areas. In total, 25 percent of India’s working-age population has no education whatsoever. In 2030, a sixth of the country’s potential workforce could be totally uneducated. As for Japan, the fertility rate is approximately 35 percent below the necessary replacement level and this has huge implications for productivity and public debt. Western Europe is not quite in this position, but the region is expected to experience population stagnation, with Germany—the region’s economic powerhouse—experiencing population decline.

As for the USA, it is almost unique among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations in having a population that is expected to grow by 20 percent from 2010–2030. Moreover, the USA has a track record of successfully assimilating immigrants. As a result it’s likely to see a rise in the size of its working-age population and to witness strong economic growth over the longer term. Of course, all these estimates could be wildly off the mark. Perhaps another great famine, global pandemic or a world war could kill off billions of people, or maybe people will suddenly start having much larger families for reasons of economic survival or for status.


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

Wealthy populations are, therefore, aging. As the population ages, the labor force shrinks, and fewer and fewer workers support more and more retirees. Forty countries now have shrinking working-age populations, including China, Japan, and Russia.2 Fear naturally sets in as middle-aged citizens wonder who will pay for their retirement. Japan is in the forefront of population aging, with its working-age population falling at 1 percent per year, and nearly four hundred schools shutting every year.3 Thus far, it has adapted in two ways. Its workers are staying in the workforce longer, beyond the normal retirement age, and women are working outside the home at a greater rate.

George Megalogenis, “Powering Australia’s Economic Surge,” The New York Times, November 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/opinion/powering-australias-economic-surge.html. 2. “Gone in Their Prime: Many Countries Suffer from Shrinking Working-age Populations,” The Economist, May 5, 2018, https://www.economist.com/international/2018/05/05/many-countries-suffer-from-shrinking-working-age-populations?frsc=dg%7Ce. 3. “Concentrate!: A Small Japanese City Shrinks with Dignity,” The Economist, January 11, 2018, https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21734405-authorities-are-focusing-keeping-centre-alive-small-japanese-city-shrinks-dignity?


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

Today, most of the new jobs for workers with limited education and experience are in the service sector, which hires relatively more women. One study found that the U.S. created 27 clerical, sales, and service jobs per thousand of working-age population in the 1980s. During the same period, the country lost 16 production, transportation, and laborer jobs per thousand of working-age population. In another study the social scientists Robert Lerman and Martin Rein revealed that from 1989 to 1993, the period covering the economic downturn, social service industries (health, education, and welfare) added almost 3 million jobs, while 1.4 million jobs were lost in all other industries.

The proportion of male workers in the prime of their life (between the ages of 22 and 58) who worked in a given decade full-time, year-round, in at least eight out of ten years declined from 79 percent during the 1970s to 71 percent in the 1980s. While the American economy saw a rapid expansion in high technology and services, especially advanced services, growth in blue-collar factory, transportation, and construction jobs, traditionally held by men, has not kept pace with the rise in the working-age population. These men are working less as a result. The growth of a nonworking class of prime-age males along with a larger number of those who are often unemployed, who work part-time, or who work in temporary jobs is concentrated among the poorly educated, the school dropouts, and minorities. In the 1970s, two-thirds of prime-age male workers with less than a high school education worked full-time, year-round, in eight out of ten years.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

The way the Kremlin is dealing with perhaps the worst aging problem in the emerging world offers another example of how even good news has a way of disappointing in the end. Russia’s working-age population will fall by about 870,000 people per year between 2010 and 2015. That’s a loss of close to 1 percent of the working population each year, double the European average, and the only example of demographic decay among the largest emerging markets. In the same 2010–2015 period the working-age population in India will rise nearly 2 percent per year, and in China 0.5 percent (after which China’s labor force, too, will begin to decline). The one clear solution to the graying-population problem is immigration—letting in more young families from abroad—but it’s a solution Russia resisted for nearly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.

They both have rapidly aging populations, which threaten to undermine the prospects for an Asian century. The fertility rates of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan rank 218th, 219th, and 220th in the world, respectively, all clustered around 1.2 children per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. With working-age populations on the verge of rapidly shrinking, tensions between workers and retirees are bound to increase. South Korea and Taiwan also share an unusual status as the richer part of divided nations, a factor that played no small role in their relentless focus on economic growth. At the end of World War II, South Korea was divided from North Korea, and Taiwan separated from mainland China.


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

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

In Japan, the population share of those at least sixty-five years of age climbed from 13 to 21 percent in the past decade, and United Nations demographers expect it to reach 31 percent by 2030. The Japanese working-age population is already declining and is projected to fall from eighty-four million in 2007 to sixty-nine million by 2030. Europe's working-age population is also anticipated to recede, though less than Japan's. The changes projected for the United States are not as severe, but nonetheless present daunting challenges. Over the next quarter century, the annual growth rate of the working-age population in the United States is anticipated to slow, from 1 percent today to about 0.3 percent by 2030.

This tectonic shift is truly a twenty-first-century problem. Retirement is a relatively new phenomenon in human history; average life expectancy a century ago for much of the developed world was only forty-six years. Relatively few people survived long enough to experience retirement. The ratio of the dependent elderly to the working-age population has been rising in the industrialized world for at least 150 years. The pace of increase slowed markedly with the birth of the baby-boom generation after More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright.

But who assures that the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, nurses, and medical infrastructure generally will be in place to convert a paper promise into valuable future medical services? A simple test for any retirement system is whether it can assure the availability of promised real resources to retirees without overly burdening the working-age population. By that measure, America may be on a collision course with reality. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for Social Security in 2008. By 2030, according to UN projections, people sixty-five years of age and older will account for more than 23 percent of the adult population, compared with 16 percent today.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

The public purse: • Migrants contribute more in taxes and social contributions than they receive in benefits. • Labour migrants have the most positive impact on the public purse. • Employment is the single biggest determinant of migrants’ net fiscal contribution. Economic growth: • Migration boosts the working-age population. • Migrants arrive with skills and contribute to human capital development of receiving countries. • Migrants also contribute to technological progress. These points are true but, as a summary of the impact of migration, they are incomplete to the point of being misleading. In December 2015, Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen of the Bank of England published a working paper that concluded: We find that the immigrant-to-native ratio has a small negative impact on average British wages.

For both of these, there are grounds for optimism. ENSURING THAT SUFFICIENT VALUABLE GOODS AND SERVICES ARE PRODUCED Sufficient valuable goods and services will be produced if there is capacity to produce them (supply) and enough demand for them – and if supply and demand are able to find each other. The world’s working-age population continues to grow, so the supply of labour should not on its own be an obstacle. In any case, new technology, as we saw in Chapter 5, will enable the world to produce everything it produces today with half the workforce so that even in societies with ageing populations, shortage of workers is unlikely to produce supply constraints.


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

(In September 2018, only 3.7 percent of the labor force was without jobs.) These statistics, though, give too rosy a picture: only 70 percent of the working-age population has jobs, far lower than in other countries, such as Switzerland and Iceland, where it is 80 and 86 percent, respectively.23 And many in the United States—some 3 percent—are working part-time involuntarily because they can’t get a full-time job. America’s unemployment rate might be still higher if it were not that so many people were in jail—almost 1 percent of the working-age population, far larger than in any other country.24 A reflection of the weakness in the labor market is that real wages have been increasing slowly—even after years of stagnation during the Great Recession, in 2017 they increased only 1.2 percent for full-time workers over sixteen, and even then, they were still below their 2006 level.25 Fiscal policy Even when monetary policy fails, fiscal policy can stimulate the economy.

Given the stagnation of incomes in the middle and bottom that I have described—compounded by the enormous losses of jobs and homes that marked the Great Recession—none of this should be a surprise.35 A decline in life expectancy of this magnitude unrelated to war or a pandemic (like HIV) had happened only once before in recent memory: among citizens of the former Soviet Union after it broke up, where there was a collapse of the economy and society itself, with GDP falling by almost a third. Obviously, a country where there is such despair, where so many are on drugs or drinking too much alcohol, won’t have a healthy labor force. A good measure of how well society does in creating good jobs and healthy workers is the fraction of working-age population that is participating in the labor force and working. Here, the US does far worse than many other countries. At least some of our poor labor force participation can be directly linked to our poor health statistics. A recent study by Alan Krueger, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, found that nearly half of “prime-age men” not in the labor force suffer from a serious health condition, and two-thirds of those are also taking some prescription pain medication.36 But America’s poor health is not the result of an unhealthy climate, nor is it because sickly people have migrated to these shores.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Japanese authorities made matters worse during much of the 1990s by allowing their banks to continue to operate without adequate capital, which further held back resumption of sustained, healthy growth. In addition to these policy errors, Japan’s aging population reinforced the growth slowdown and deflation. The number of people older than sixty-​five increased, while the working-​age population—​those between twenty and sixty-​five—​stagnated and then slowly declined. The steady shift to an older population reduced consumption and investment demand, which pushed growth and inflation rates further down. Seen from an Italian perspective, Japan’s lost decade was actually an outcome to be envied (figure 8.2).

By using machines and workers more efficiently, Japanese firms partly overcame their demographic and policy impediments. Italy’s crisis ran much deeper than Japan’s. Italy had all the disadvantages that Japan had and more. Although not as rapidly as Japan’s, Italy’s population was also aging; the country’s working-​age population had flattened out. As in Japan, ECB monetary policy had provided little support, causing a 344   e u r o t r a g e d y 120 115 Japan 110 105 100 95 Italy 90 85 1991 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 2008 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Japan (years on top x-axis) 2000 01 02 Italy (years on bottom x-axis) Figure 8.2.

Investment spending had fallen sharply in 2012 and 2013 at the onset of the draconian fiscal austerity drive and since then it had either fallen further or stayed stable . The IMF estimated that Italy’s potential growth had declined to about 0.5 percent a year.197 On top of Italy’s long-​term problems, including a working-​age population that had stopped increasing and near-​zero productivity growth, the intense austerity had further damaged long-​term growth prospects. And if Italian GDP growth remained at around the IMF’s potential growth rate estimate, Italy’s financial vulnerabilities would remain worrisome. The recent descent into low inflation made growth harder to revive and added to the risk that debt burdens would remain elevated.


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

One of the important consequences of these wider labour market trends—the rise of unemployment, the vanishing middle, the earnings squeeze, the spread of low pay and the weakness of the labour market in many parts of Britain—has been a rise in downward occupational and social mobility. The post-war era was a period of improving pay and opportunity for most of the working-age population. As income growth and job opportunities for middle and lower income groups has slowed, that upward mobility has been petering out, a trend that has been fuelled during each of the three recessions of the last thirty years. Britain is riddled with examples of downward job mobility—of former skilled factory workers cleaning cars, joiners working as airport baggage handlers, trained draughtsmen and IT specialists forced into temporary work in retail and customer services or taxi-driving, often with long gaps of unemployment in between.121 Those most vulnerable to such downward mobility are those over 50 and include professionals as well as the skilled working class.

It has also fuelled the geographical concentration of work and unemployment. In some towns such as Hartlepool, Knowsley, Blaenau Gwent and Glasgow, the real level of unemployment stood at more than twice the national average even before the onset of the recession. In May 2008, nine towns, headed by Liverpool and Nottingham, had more than a fifth of the working age population in receipt of benefits.130 Sinking pay has also meant a weakening skill base, a process that risks becoming re-inforcing. A low wage economy dictates the type of jobs that are created. As skills disappear, so do the jobs. One of the consequences has been that while some skilled workers can’t find work, in other areas, Britain now has real skill shortages, often the sort of skills that would once have been held by those in the middle.


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

Then if they failed to find a job they could go home, and they would be no worse off than if they had not saved and not tried, which is what most of them seem to do. Moreover, the evidence suggests they do save for other things, and $11.50 is very much within their range. So why don’t they? One possible reason is they overestimate the risks. A study from Nepal highlights this. Today, more than a fifth of Nepal’s male working-age population has been abroad at least once, mostly for work. Most of them work in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. They typically go for a couple of years, with an employment contract tied to a specific employer. This is a setting where one might imagine the migrants would be very well informed about the potential costs and benefits of migrating, since one needs a job offer to get a visa.

Wages also declined in these areas compared to the rest of the country (and this was a period of stagnant wage growth overall), especially for low-wage workers. Despite the fact that there were neighboring commuting zones essentially unaffected by the shock (and zones that actually benefitted, say, by importing certain components from China), workers did not move. The working-age population did not decline in the adversely affected commuting zones. They had no work. This experience is not unique to the United States. Spain, Norway, and Germany all suffered similarly from the impact of the China shock.48 In each case the sticky economy became a sticky trap. CLUSTERF**K!

What happened instead is enough to make one superstitious. The growth rate crashed in 1980, the year after Vogel’s book came out. And it never really recovered. The Solow model suggests a simple reason. Due to a low fertility rate and the near complete absence of immigration, Japan was (and still is) aging rapidly. The working-age population peaked in the late 1990s and has been declining. This means TFP must grow all the more rapidly to keep fast growth going. Another way to say this is that Japan would have to find some miracle for its existing labor force to become more productive, since we still have no reliable way to boost TFP.


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

The authors estimate that the employment penalty is around a 1percentage-point reduction in the overall employment rate, equivalent to a loss of around 1.8 million workers. Black men suffered a 4.7- to 5.4-percentage-point reduction in their employment rate, while the equivalent for Latino men was 1.4–1.6 percentage points, and for white men it was 1.1–1.3 percentage points. They found that 6–6.7 percent of the male working-age population were former prisoners, while 13.6–15.3 percent were people with felony convictions, which seems incredibly high. Other advanced countries don’t use mass incarceration and don’t prevent ex-prisoners from working after their sentences are completed; they have figured out that rehabilitation works.

They find that for the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth was essentially nonexistent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been remarkably strong. They also show that this stagnation of national income accruing at the bottom is not due to population aging. Quite the contrary. For the bottom half of the working-age population (adults under 65), income has in fact fallen. In the bottom half of the distribution, only the income of the elderly is rising. From 1980 to 2014, they show, none of the growth in per-adult national income went to the bottom 50 percent, while 32 percent went to the middle class (defined as adults between the median and the 90th percentile), 68 percent to the top 10 percent, and 36 percent to the top 1 percent.

While the average rate of drug-overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids increased by 8 percent per year from 1999 to 2013, the average rate increased by 71 percent per year from 2013 to 2017. West Virginia (57.8 deaths per 100,000 people), Ohio (46.3), and Pennsylvania (44.3) had the highest age-adjusted drug-overdose rates. The suicide rate among the U.S. working-age population increased 34 percent during 2000–2016 (Hedegaard, Curtin, and Warner 2018). In 2012 and 2015, suicide rates were highest among males in the “construction and extraction” occupational group (43.6 and 53.2 per 100,000 civilian noninstitutionalized working persons, respectively), who were especially hard hit by the housing crash in the Great Recession.53 The age-adjusted suicide rate for urban counties in 2017 was 16 percent higher than the rate in 1999, whereas in rural counties in 2017 it was 53 percent higher.


pages: 105 words: 25,871

A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic by Nicholas Eberstadt, Nick Eberstadt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, family office, income inequality, informal economy, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, reserve currency, women in the workforce, working-age population

According to Census Bureau estimates, 93 percent of West Virginia’s population was “non-Hispanic white” in 2011.43 In New England, by the same token, all-but-lily-white Maine (where ethnic minorities accounted for less than 6 percent of the population44 in 2011) records a 7.4 percent ratio of working-age disability payees to resident working-age population: more than one out of fourteen. On the other hand, in the District of Columbia, where so-called Anglos or non-Hispanic whites composed just 35 percent of the population in 2011,45 the ratio of working-age disability recipients to working-age resident population was 3.3 percent—less than half of Maine’s, and bit more than a third of West Virginia’s.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Smith, ‘Mapping Patient Data to Consider the Role of Geography in Public Health’, Imperial College London, 2012. 60.S. Clarke, ‘London Stalling’, op. cit. 61.Ibid. 62.‘State of the Nation 2017: Social Mobility in Great Britain’, Social Mobility Commission, 11/17. 63.‘Qualifications of working age population’, London Datastore, 12/19. 64.K. Hecht, D. McArthur, M. Savage & S. Friedman, ‘Elites in the UK: Pulling Away? Social mobility, geographic mobility and elite occupations’, The Sutton Trust, 1/20. 65.Ibid. 66.A repeated theme in Jerry White’s excellent histories of the capital, but particularly in J.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

That is only a fraction of Western governments’ true liabilities, once you factor in pensions and health care. The numbers for many cities are even worse: San Bernardino in California and Detroit in Michigan both filed for bankruptcy because of these off-balance sheet obligations. And who will pay for all this? In “old Europe,” for instance, the working-age population peaked in 2012 at 308 million—and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060. These will have to support ever more old people: The old-age dependency ratio (the number of over-sixty-fives as a proportion of the number of twenty-to-sixty-four-year-olds) will rise from 28 percent to 58 percent—and that is assuming that the EU lets in more than a million young immigrants a year.9 Across the Atlantic, America continues to tax itself like a small-government country and spend like a big-government one while hiding its true liabilities by using tactics that would have made Bernie Madoff blush.

Latin American countries tie people’s benefits to adopting good habits, such as sending their ­children to school or having checkups at health clinics. More rich countries could copy that, tying payouts to people’s willingness to invest in skills and education. The second is the reform of disability. In America enrollment in Social Security’s disability-insurance program has ­increased from 1.7 percent of the working-age population in 1970 to 5.4 percent. Americans have taken to enrolling in disability systems when their unemployment pay runs out, spurred on by doctors who have been broadening the definition of disability. But disability is a terrible trap. America’s disability systems do not devote any effort whatsoever to getting people back to work: They were designed in an era when ill people did not get better.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

Manufacturing amounted to 20 per cent of the economy in 1997 but 12 per cent in 2007, its decline fostered by sterling appreciation during Labour’s first term. Fittingly in Labour’s economy, construction, estate agency and property rose from 12.6 to 16.2 per cent. By 2010 only one in eight of Coventry’s working-age population of 194,000 was in manufacturing, compared with over one in two in the 1970s. Growth was to be the antidote to debt and deficit, Mandelson said at Labour’s spring conference in February 2010, and the future was bioscience, medicine, advanced manufacturing, precision engineering, creative industries and – a new undertaking – ‘this is not going to happen without active government working hand in hand with enterprise’.

‘They saved our maternity unit,’ observed Richard Austin, the Boston council leader. Councils complained that the extra numbers failed to bring extra government grants to cover those services. Some areas were unaffected by migration – Merseyside and the North East, for example. Other areas were transformed – 60 per cent of the working-age population of the London Borough of Brent had been born abroad. The 2001 Census was a distant memory and its estimate that 4.9 million or 8.3 per cent of the total population of the UK were born overseas may never have been accurate anyway. When Boston protested at underestimates, the ONS said it recognized a total population for the area of 62,000, but the council put it nearer 75,000, taking its evidence from increased registration of migrants at GPs’ surgeries and schools.


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

In 2018, the Census Bureau estimated that there were 171 million Americans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four. Of those, 62 percent were white non-Hispanics, and 62 percent of those did not have a four-year college degree; the less educated white Americans who are the group at risk are 38 percent of the working-age population. The economic forces that are harming labor are common to all working-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, but the stories of blacks and whites are markedly different. In the 1970s and 1980s, African Americans working in inner cities experienced events that, in retrospect, share some features with what happened to working-class whites thirty years later.

Black rates, which were more than twice those of whites as late as the early 1990s, fell as white rates rose, closing the distance between them to 20 percent. Since 2013 the opioid epidemic has spread to black communities, but until then, the epidemic of deaths of despair was white. In the chapters that follow, we document the decline of white working-class lives over the last half century. White non-Hispanics are 62 percent of the working-age population, so understanding their mortality is important in and of itself. The story of what happened to African Americans in the seventies and eighties has been extensively researched and debated,10 and we have nothing to add to that literature except to note that there are some parallels with whites today.


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

Installing new machines that saved on labor and used readily available cheap fuel thus made economic sense in Britain, whereas it did not in other countries.86 More important, relative costs can also explain why new technologies will be adopted unevenly around the world in the future. Take Japan, for example: it is no coincidence that progress in nursing robotics has been particularly swift there. They have one of the largest elderly populations in the world—more than 25 percent are over sixty-five, with the working-age population shriveling at 1 percent a year—and a well-known antipathy toward foreign migrants working in their public services. The result is a shortage of nurses and caregivers (a shortfall expected to reach about 380,000 workers by 2025), and a strong incentive for employers to automate what they do.87 That is why robots like Paro, the therapeutic robotic seal mentioned before, as well as Robear, which can lift immobile patients from bath to bed, and Palro, a humanoid that can lead a dance class, are being developed and embraced in Japan, whereas elsewhere they are viewed with detached bemusement and disapproval.88 This story is, in fact, a general one: countries that are aging faster tend to invest more in automation.

If that were to happen, the official unemployment rate would actually fall: since those people were no longer searching for work, they would not count as being unemployed for the purposes of that statistic. It is important, then, to also pay attention to what is known as the “participation rate”: the percentage of people in the entire working-age population (not just those actively in the labor market) who are employed. In the United States today, for instance, the unemployment rate is an impressively low 3.7 percent. At the same time, however, the participation rate has collapsed, falling to its lowest level since 1977. More and more working-age Americans, it appears, are abandoning the world of work altogether—and that should be a cause for alarm.35 Similarly, in the future, we should be cautious about focusing exclusively on the unemployment rate, and keep an eye on the participation rate as well.


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

Before the COVID crisis, they had relatively lower public debt levels of around 50–55 percent,22 with much of it invested in infrastructure (though during the COVID crisis, the debt level increased by about 10 percent). Some of these countries can be considered to have a demographic dividend, meaning a population with an average age in the low twenties, that is, heavily skewed toward younger generations. This type of population pyramid could make repaying debt more feasible if the coming surge in their working-age population is complemented by an equally high surge in available jobs. (The latter, however, has proven problematic in some Arab and African economies. Faced with a job shortage, a demographic dividend can rather turn into a ticking time bomb.23, 24) How some ageing Western countries are supposed to repay their debts in a slowing economy, though, is highly questionable.

Many of them walked for weeks to their home provinces, in the hopes of being better off there during the crisis. But the long journey brought many additional problems, not in the least for their physical health and safety. Yet there are also a few reasons to remain optimistic about India in the longer term. The country will soon have the largest working-age population in the world (25 years old on average), and its government has done away with some of the biggest impediments to growth. The Licence Raj, which effectively rationed supplies and limited competition for many goods before, was abolished, and more steps toward a unified internal market are underway.


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

Before the COVID crisis, they had relatively lower public debt levels of around 50–55 percent,22 with much of it invested in infrastructure (though during the COVID crisis, the debt level increased by about 10 percent). Some of these countries can be considered to have a demographic dividend, meaning a population with an average age in the low twenties, that is, heavily skewed toward younger generations. This type of population pyramid could make repaying debt more feasible if the coming surge in their working-age population is complemented by an equally high surge in available jobs. (The latter, however, has proven problematic in some Arab and African economies. Faced with a job shortage, a demographic dividend can rather turn into a ticking time bomb.23, 24) How some ageing Western countries are supposed to repay their debts in a slowing economy, though, is highly questionable.

Many of them walked for weeks to their home provinces, in the hopes of being better off there during the crisis. But the long journey brought many additional problems, not in the least for their physical health and safety. Yet there are also a few reasons to remain optimistic about India in the longer term. The country will soon have the largest working-age population in the world (25 years old on average), and its government has done away with some of the biggest impediments to growth. The Licence Raj, which effectively rationed supplies and limited competition for many goods before, was abolished, and more steps toward a unified internal market are underway.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

How did Japan get itself into a seemingly permanent recession after the dazzling prosperity of the 1980s? Longman told a San Francisco audience:Japan boomed through the end of the 1980s, so long as declining fertility was still increasing the relative size of its working-age population. . . . Japan’s long recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size. Because Japan welcomes no immigrants, it is facing the world’s worst elder-care crisis. At Global Business Network, we predict that Japan’s standard solution to labor problems will be applied.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

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

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

Technological progress allows the existing inputs of workers and capital to be used more efficiently. An increase in output due to technology is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) in economic growth models. Physical capital as well as human capital – the skills and education of workers – are central to this model. It’s especially pressing for rich countries, where the working-age population is ageing or even shrinking and having better-skilled workers is even more important. How to raise productivity lies at the heart of whether or not we’re doomed to a stagnant future. What would Robert Solow, whose pioneering work has helped us to understand what generates economic growth, make of the prospect of low productivity and a slow-growth future for major economies?

Time is seemingly a luxury for Japan’s leaders, yet it’s the very thing that they need to turn around an economy that’s been struggling for decades, during which Japan has fallen from the world’s second largest economy to its third. The country that overtook it also faces slower growth and an ageing population. For a middle-income country, China has a demographic profile that is similar to rich nations. Its working-age population is shrinking, though it has ended its ‘one child policy’ to counter the ageing demography. Also, if Britain and America as well as Japan are counting on innovation to keep them rich, China needs to get there before its growth slows down, as discussed in previous chapters. For Europe, the focus is also growth, and a lot is hanging on the governments’ ability to deliver.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

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

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

Technological progress allows the existing inputs of workers and capital to be used more efficiently. An increase in output due to technology is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) in economic growth models. Physical capital as well as human capital – the skills and education of workers – are central to this model. It’s especially pressing for rich countries, where the working-age population is ageing or even shrinking and having better-skilled workers is even more important. How to raise productivity lies at the heart of whether or not we’re doomed to a stagnant future. What would Robert Solow, whose pioneering work has helped us to understand what generates economic growth, make of the prospect of low productivity and a slow-growth future for major economies?

Time is seemingly a luxury for Japan’s leaders, yet it’s the very thing that they need to turn around an economy that’s been struggling for decades, during which Japan has fallen from the world’s second largest economy to its third. The country that overtook it also faces slower growth and an ageing population. For a middle-income country, China has a demographic profile that is similar to rich nations. Its working-age population is shrinking, though it has ended its ‘one child policy’ to counter the ageing demography. Also, if Britain and America as well as Japan are counting on innovation to keep them rich, China needs to get there before its growth slows down, as discussed in previous chapters. For Europe, the focus is also growth, and a lot is hanging on the governments’ ability to deliver.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

A key catalyst of instability and social resentment, inequality has surged across Western nations in recent decades, and nowhere more so than in the United States. Between 1980 and 2021 the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has almost doubled and now sits just under 50 percent. Wealth is ever more concentrated in a tiny clique. Government policy, a shrinking working-age population, stalling educational levels, and decelerating long-term growth have all contributed to decisively more unequal societies. Forty million people in the United States live in poverty, and more than five million live in “Third World conditions”—all within the world’s richest economy. These are especially worrying trends when you consider persistent relationships between social immobility, widening inequality, and political violence.

As the ratio of workers to retirees shifts and the labor force dwindles, economies will simply not be able to function at their present levels. In other words, without new technologies it will be impossible to maintain living standards. This is a global problem. Countries including Japan, Germany, Italy, Russia, and South Korea are even now approaching a crisis of working-age population. More surprising perhaps is that by the 2050s countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey will be in a similar position. China is a major part of the story of technology in the coming decades, but by the century’s end the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predicts the country could have only 600 million people, a staggering reversal of nearly a century’s population increases.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

“They are very independent mountain people who will just tell you to go to hell and walk out!” a former manager told me. But after most of the furniture and textile mill jobs moved to Mexico, then to Asia, the largest employers became the schools, the hospitals, and Walmart. By 2019, only 52 percent of the working-age population had jobs at all, a rate 12 percent below the national average and 10 percent below the state’s. In previous years, Surry County pharmacies sold 55 million opioids between 2006 and 2014—enough for every man, woman, and child to annually consume 83 pills, a rate more than double that of the pharmacies located in surrounding counties.

: Beth Macy, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town (New York: Little Brown, and Company), 2014, 138. the largest employers became: Surry County Economic Development Partnership, “Data and Demographics,” (n.d.), https://www.surryedp.com/surry-county-demographics/. 52 percent of the working-age population had jobs and 500 job openings: Mark Willis, author interview, November 14, 2019. 55 million opioids: “Drilling into the DEA’s pain pill database,” Washington Post, updated January 17, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/dea-pain-pill-database/. perniciously entwined: Alan B.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

Rural areas of the country experience their own mix of problems including depopulation and lack of transport infrastructure, in addition to structural unemployment and poverty. Although city-regions have become a major focus of economic development intervention, the ability of regional capitals to create sufficient new jobs to provide the additional employment required for residents outside the city and its suburbs is questionable. In addition, the shift of working-age population from towns and rural areas to cities creates problems of its own as the high-street economy of towns collapses, local transport services are withdrawn through lack of use, and older people see their children and grandchildren forced to relocate hundreds of miles away. Over the last 30 years, economic and social exclusion in the UK has risen significantly.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

The surprising fact is that the social-welfare states have an even higher employment rate (number of workers as a share of the working-age population) than the free-market countries. The free-market countries in turn have a higher employment rate than the mixed economies. The key here is that the social-welfare states have very high rates of female labor-force participation. The social-welfare system ensures day care and schooling for the children, so mothers have the time and means to enter the labor market. The social-welfare states have been successful in maintaining very high employment rates for two other reasons. First, social support for the working-age population has been tied to specific policies that require those receiving benefits to seek employment with the assistance of government programs.


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

Second was the influence of New Deal legislation, both in reducing hours directly and also in empowering labor unions that fought for and achieved the eight-hour workday and forty-hour work week by the end of the 1930s. An unrelated factor was the baby boom of 1947 to 1964, which increased the child population (0–16) relative to the working-age population (16–64) and thus reduced the ratio of hours worked to the total population. The reverse feedback from productivity growth to shrinking hours reflects the standard view in labor economics that as real income rises, individuals choose not to spend all their extra income on market goods and services, but rather consume a portion of it in the form of extra leisure—that is to say, by working fewer hours.

The retirement of the baby boomers will reduce hours per person independently of any other cause over a long transition period extending from 2008 to 2034. There is more to the demographic headwind, however, than the retirement of the baby boomers. The labor force participation rate (L/N) fell from 66.0 percent in 2007 to 62.9 percent for the full year 2014 and further to 62.6 percent in June 2015. Because the working-age population is 250 million, the decline in L/N by 3.4 percentage points (66.0 minus 62.6) implies a loss of 8.5 million jobs, most of them permanently. Economic research has concluded that about half the decline in the participation rate was caused by the retirement of the baby boomers and the rest by a decline in the participation of those younger than 55.

Policy solutions include immigration, to raise the number of tax-paying workers, together with tax reforms that would raise revenue and improve tax equity. A carbon tax, desirable on environmental grounds to reduce carbon emissions, has the side benefit of generating substantial revenue to help alleviate the fiscal headwind. Immigration Reform of immigration can be accomplished in a way that raises the average skill level of the working-age population and that thus contributes to the growth of labor productivity. One avenue for reform would be to end the practice of denying residency to foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities, a “self-imposed brain drain.” A promising tool to promote high-skilled immigration and raise the average quality of the U.S. labor force would be one such as the Canadian point-based immigration system, in which a point calculator is used to rate each immigrant applicant based on his or her level of education, language skills, and previous employment experience, among other criteria.18 The definition of skills could be broad and could include blue-collar skills, many of which are currently in short supply in the U.S.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

When applied to actual GDP data, the results were mildly embarrassing for the theory, because studies revealed that the great majority of postwar GDP growth was “explained” by the “technical progress,” that is, by the one part of the theory that had no economic explanation. Technical progress was treated in this growth model as manna from heaven. Business investment created new capital to use in production. Labor grew by an increasing working-age population and, as the growth models became more refined, the increasing level of education and skill in the workforce. Both contributed to growth, but “technology” explained more. These simple theories seemed to fit what was known about the recent experience of GDP growth around the world. The pattern of growth in the OEEC/OECD economies in the postwar decades clearly showed the dramatic catch-up by the devastated combatant countries and the relative decline in the United Kingdom (although it too grew at a rate that would later come to be regarded as a Golden Age phenomenon).


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

Driven by construction, power generation, and manufacturing (and tourism in Sikkim’s Himalayan region), both states have been growing by 12 percent to 25 percent per year. Goa has also grown by double digits on the back of mining and tourism. India is expanding its tax base from the paltry level of 10 percent—just in time as its working-age population expands (and is not expected to peak until 2030). The combination of the goods and services (GST) tax and demonetization has formalized much of the gray economy and weakened the black market. With a stable currency and inflation in check, India has lowered its current account deficit to just 1 percent of GDP.

South Korea currently leads the world in industrial robotics, with nearly 500 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers compared to 300 in Japan and Germany and just 36 in China. South Korean workers can also wear exoskeleton bodysuits that allow them to perform more difficult tasks for longer periods with less physical stress. As its working-age population shrinks through aging from 1 billion people in 2015 toward 900 million by 2030, China is spending massively on industrial automation to plug its growing labor gap, buying both the machines and the foreign companies that make them. In 2017, the Chinese appliance giant Midea paid $6 billion for more than 85 percent of Germany’s Kuka Robotics, one of the biggest makers of industrial robots in the world.


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

A regional breakdown of attitudes to entrepreneurship in 2005 suggests that the North East and North West are slightly less entrepreneurial than other English regions. Evidence from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey for 2006 suggests that the northern regions have lower proportions of their working-age population engaged in business start-ups than the UK average”. My instinctive assessment of public spending is that it is a very weak rod to encourage business activity, partly because of the reasons set out by the left-wing think tank but also because the spending tends to have political rather than economic objectives (especially in the UK – bizarrely, it seems to work better in some other countries where a degree of corruption seems to generate a higher degree of harmony between political and economic objectives!).


pages: 198 words: 52,089

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

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

A significant minority—about one in seven—adopts the ‘upper middle class’ description. This is quite similar to the estimates of class size generated by most sociologists, who tend to define the upper middle class as one composed of professionals and managers, or around 15–20 percent of the working-age population. These self-definitions are a useful starting point, providing some sense of how people see themselves on the class ladder. But for analytical purposes, we need a more objective, and measurable, yardstick. But which to choose? After all, I’ve been at pains to argue that class is made up of a subtle, shifting blend of economic, social, educational, and attitudinal factors.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

As only 40 per cent of young people attend secondary school, large swathes of the population, often the poorest in society, lack the opportunity to get ahead.84 Yet in spite of all these deficiencies, India’s economy will grow consistently in the coming years.85 Building the Pyramid There are 2.4 million people working in the UK with a science of tech degree. That is a larger proportion of the working-age population than in the US, Germany or Japan.86 Yet the strong results are not translating into a mass movement. There is a column of talent rather than a pyramid. The top performers are a large proportion of the total number of students. For example, last year just over 75,000 students took an A Level in maths, broadly the same as the total number of undergraduates in maths and the physical sciences.87 If this strength was used to its full potential, the country would be able to fulfil all its requirements with thousands of engineers and computer experts.


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

It’s usually warmer at home and less expensive to live, and you are likely to be surrounded by a network of supportive family and friends.” Jacoby is spot-on, according to the economic data used to gauge an immigrant’s intentions. The labor force participation rate, which measures the percent of the working-age population that is employed or seeking employment, is the strongest indication that immigrants come here to work and not to idle. Among foreign nationals generally, labor participation rates are higher than that of natives (69 percent versus 66 percent in 2006) and jobless rates are lower (4.0 percent versus 4.7 percent in 2006).


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Other than clinging to a new narrative, we had an identical—if not greater—capacity for wealth and growth in 2009 as we did in 2007. Yet the economy suffered its worst hit in 80 years. This is different from, say, Germany in 1945, whose manufacturing base had been obliterated. Or Japan in the 2000s, whose working-age population was shrinking. That’s tangible economic damage. In 2009 we inflicted narrative damage on ourselves, and it was vicious. It’s one of the most potent economic forces that exists. When we think about the growth of economies, businesses, investments and careers, we tend to think about tangible things—how much stuff do we have and what are we capable of?


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

An aging labor force will compel changes in this economic model and may make political rule more difficult.”46 Wang Feng further argues, “As the population ages, the momentum of negative growth will eventually predominate.”47 Figure 3.8 China’s Demographic Projections Source: United Nations World Population Prospects (2015). This is not only a future problem; it has arrived. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the working-age population has already begun to shrink—from 941 million in 2011 to 916 million in 2014.48 Between 2016 and 2026 the number of workers aged twenty to twenty-nine will fall by nearly 25 percent from 200 million to 150 million; the drop will be even sharper for those aged twenty to twenty-four.49 By 2050 the labor force is estimated by McKinsey & Company to contract by 11 percent.50 These trends are going to have profound implications for China’s economy.


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (1990): S71–S102. 11. N. G. Mankiw, D. Romer, and D. N. Weil, “A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 2 (1992): 407–437. 12. They used the average percentage of the working-age population in secondary school for the period 1960–1985. 13. A. W. Woolley, C. F. Chabris, A. Pentland, N. Hashmi, and T. W. Malone, “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 29, vol. 330, no. 6004 (2010): 686–688, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/686. 14.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

In Britain, for instance, the number of people economically active in agriculture fell dramatically between 1780 and 1988, and from 50 per cent to 2.2 per cent of all paid employment. At the same time, labour productivity soared by a factor of 68, and there was a huge accompanying consolidation of first the industrial sector and then services, which allowed a growing working-age population to be integrated into the labour market. The history of paid employment in all of the early industrialized countries looks similar right up to the 1970s. In the United States, dramatic technological change in the twentieth century led to a sweeping reduction in the numbers engaged in agriculture, but the total number of jobs in the US economy shot up from approximately 27 million in 1900 to 124.5 million in 1993.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

, according to a 2012 survey by Zipcar.51 The degree to which this is making a virtue of necessity — perhaps Millennials cannot afford cars and fuel as easily as older, more well-situated, generations, and so choose to embrace their relative poverty — is unclear, though demographics, attitudes, and other external factors all play a role.52 53 Changing Nature of Work The workforce in the US has continued its drop as technology-enabled productivity reduces the economic value of older and unskilled workers. While the total size of the workforce is at this writing higher than it was at the depth of the Great Recession, a smaller share of the working age population works today.54 Fewer people are traveling for work, and fewer discretionary trips are made by both workers nervous about spending money and the unemployed who have little or no money to spend. Starting in 2008 in the US, unemployment increased sharply, and though it has since declined, employment participation rates remain much lower as shown in Figure 3.2.55 Demographics are also part of this.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than as employees at the companies for which they provided services.7 And the number of temp workers in the United States was on its way to an all-time high. By 2016, 20% to 30% of the working-age population in the United States and European Union had engaged in freelance work.8 Add part-time work to the mix, and some estimates put the percentage of the US workforce that did not have a full-time job as high as 40%.9 Uber merely took a trend among corporations—employing as few people as possible—and adapted it for the smartphone era.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

By 2013, that average had risen to $700, on a par with Malaysia’s, and more than one-third higher than Mexico’s. Making matters harder, the country’s workforce is shrinking. Through the rest of this decade, the decline will be modest, with China’s working population falling by between 2 and 4 million people annually—barely noticeable in a total working-age population of 900 million. But after 2020, thanks to the country’s one-child family policy introduced in the late 1970s, the numbers will fall precipitously as the workforce falls to 650 million by midcentury. Productivity will have to rise sharply if China is to stay competitive. Rising standards of education, discussed later in this chapter, will help, but so will new ways of organizing workforces, such as the platform-based system that Zhang Ruimin is experimenting with at Haier.


pages: 225 words: 70,590

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Chris Bruntlett, Melissa Bruntlett

15-minute city, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, BIPOC, car-free, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, global pandemic, green new deal, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, Lyft, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, post-work, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, social distancing, streetcar suburb, the built environment, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey

Together they collaborated on a report in 2019, Inequalities in Mobility and Access in the UK Transport System, which surveyed over 8,000 individuals to examine the relationship between transport and social exclusion. Their findings were nothing short of eye-opening. Two-thirds of the elderly (7.8 million people aged 60+) could not reach a hospital by public transport within 30 minutes. One-fifth of the working-age population (6.8 million people) could not reach a single large employment center by public transport within 45 minutes, compared to just 2.7 percent for those who traveled by cars. On average, car users could reach double the number of job centers as public transport users, in the same journey time.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

.”* Card similarly tackled a supply and demand question in his 1990 paper “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market.” What he found was that the impact was, in one sense, profound. The size of the labor force in the Miami metropolitan area increased by 7 or 8 percent within six months. By contrast, the total US working age population has increased by only about 4 percent over the past ten years. And the impact on the low-skill workforce in Miami was even more dramatic than that. Fifty-six percent of the Marielitos had no high school education and a further 9 percent hadn’t completed the twelfth grade. Cuba, in other words, wasn’t sending its best people.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Only then, David says, did people adjust toward lower fertility. “And the children who had unexpectedly survived formed a ‘boom generation.’” This generation created a large number of young, enterprising workers, who themselves had fewer children and therefore few dependants—in fact East Asia’s working-age population at this time grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population. The economies in the region as a result had to spend a lower percentage of their incomes on the social costs of a dependent population. Lower costs meant that this generation could save more—we have seen this in India, where a larger working population has helped push the country’s savings rate as a proportion of GDP to 34 percent in 2008, and it is set to rise even higher to 40 percent by 2015.

China’s birth control policies have thus created an especially fast-paced demographic shift in the country, a steep slope all the way down. A dividend that took a century to complete its arc in other countries has taken less than forty years here, and dependency is now set to explode. After 2010 China’s working-age population will start falling. The country “is becoming gray before it has become rich”—by 2040, the world’s second largest population after India will be Chinese pensioners, more than 400 million people!22 Across the border in India, however, there was a far more languorous shift. India’s politics ensured that its coercive family planning program failed spectacularly, and since the 1970s the demographic curves of these two once similar countries diverged rapidly.


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

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press Before the Welfare State 51 insurance areas – unemployment, health, and pensions – were grossly under-provided. MASs experienced their heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period during which they counted perhaps as much as 50 percent of the working-age population as members. However, by the eve of the democratic revolution in the early twentieth century, when industrialization, urbanization, and longer life expectancy multiplied risks, MASs were in decline. The democratic state soon offered a superior alternative to MASs for a majority of workers by devising state-sponsored and enforced plans.

Nondiscrimination regulation protects those at high risk, but it simultaneously constrains those at low risk, and risks are correlated with politically salient socioeconomic divisions. The Republican Party in the USA, for example, is committed to repealing not only the ACA but also GINA. In general, most current genetic tests identify tail-end risks that the majority need not worry about, at least among the working-age population (and again, many insurers turn away people above a certain age anyway). Freedom to share information is logically compatible with strict laws to protect privacy, and combining the two may prove to be a winning policy mix. If so, segmentation of insurance markets will proceed unabated. the choice between public and private health insurance In the “Innovations in Underwriting Practices” section, we described how the information revolution influences underwriting practices in life insurance.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

This is the distribution problem, which is seen by many as the most severe problem raised by the economic singularity. Tackling it successfully will also solve the problem of economic contraction, so we can move right along. 5.2 – Distribution At the height of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, unemployment reached 25% of the working-age population.[ccxciv] Social security arrangements were primitive then, and developed societies were much poorer than they are today, so that level of joblessness was much harder on people than it is today, when parts of Europe have returned to similar levels overall,[ccxcv] with youth unemployment hitting 50% in some places.


pages: 256 words: 79,075

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

And there were a few positive glimmers amidst the shower of negativity. Overall, though, there were around three times as many one-star reviews as there were five-star reviews. What was certainly true was that the care sector as a whole was desperate for staff. In Britain today, an ageing population co-exists alongside a harried and stressed-out working-age population. The pressure on the latter to make ends meet by toiling away for longer and longer hours makes it increasingly difficult to take the time out to look after parents and grandparents, who are living for longer. Around one in three babies born after 2013 will live to be 100. Meanwhile, British employees work some of the longest hours in Europe.


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

Five hunts – the Atherstone, the Belvoir, the Cottesmore, the Quorn and the Fernie – still go through the motions of chasing foxes within the bounds of the law. In bleaker districts of small post-industrial towns like Coalville and Loughborough, there is poverty, low wages and anomie. Demographically it’s a whiter, older world; its population is growing much more slowly than Leicester’s, and that growth is among the elderly. The working-age population is shrinking. The number of over-eighty-fives is forecast to grow by 187 per cent by the late 2030s. All seven of its MPs are Conservative, among them Nicky Morgan, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee. It voted, narrowly, to leave. If there was to be a transformation in the way Leicestershire’s million people were to be helped to good health, there had to be a plan, and an organisation to carry it out.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Consumer spending in Africa is $860 bil ion, which is expected to grow to $1.4 tril ion by 2020. Approximately 128 mil ion African households wil become wealthy enough to have discretionary income by the same year. By 2030, 50 percent of them wil be living in cities, and by 2040, 1.1 bil ion Africans wil be of working age—the largest working-age population on the planet. Already the discretionary household spending there is larger than it is in India or Russia.6 Despite huge political, human rights, poverty, and health issues that stil roil the continent, in pockets like Rwanda, real progress is being made. More people are safe, more people have access to jobs, and more African countries and companies are getting foreign investment, according to a 2010 McKinsey report that says, “Global business cannot afford to ignore the potential.”7 Structural changes in economies like lowering inflation, trimming debts, privatizing state-owned companies, cutting taxes, and strengthening legal systems have given birth to a nascent private sector where productivity is no longer declining; it is now rising nearly 3 percent annual y since 2000.


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

This is perhaps the crowning achievement of our species – nowhere else in nature do the old outnumber the young. While certainly welcome, such a shift brings with it numerous problems, not least that living longer, while having fewer children, imperils forms of collective insurance which presume a larger ‘working age’ population than dependents. Indeed, those first two conditions have, in many countries, already been met and are presently going global. What remains uncertain is whether public pensions and socialised elderly care will be viable in the future. If not, it would be ironic: capitalist affluence means more of us reach old age, yet many would lack the resources to be cared for.


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

To produce these labor-intensive goods here, we would need to move labor away from its current occupations and toward those industries where we would no longer be importing goods. Figure 3.1: Labor Force Participation is Not Driven Down by Imports Notes: Data show labor force participation relative to the working-age population. Data sources: Federal Reserve Economic Data; World Development Indicators, World Bank. Which industries would shrink as a result, and would that be a good thing? Natural candidates would be export industries, since the very policies that reduced our imports would also reduce our exports.


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

Indeed, a more realistic consensus (at least as regards industry size) appears to be emerging at the time of writing. Several studies using a range of methodologies, from traditional surveys to an analysis of bank accounts to determine where income is derived from, have homed in on a figure of approximately 4 per cent of the working-age population both in the United States and the UK.18 A report by the RSA, a UK think tank, published in spring 2017 simi- larly estimates that there are currently 1.1 million gig workers in the UK and that approximately ‘3 per cent of adults aged 15+ have tried gig work of some form, which equates to as many as 1.6 million adults’.19 From an overall labour-market perspective, these numbers don’t necessarily sound like a major concern—until we consider the fact that most serious attempts at measuring the size of gig work in the broader labour market * * * Understanding the Gig Economy 17 tend to understate its extent.


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

Japan is a harbinger of this trend. Its population has been declining since 2011 and by 2050 may have shrunk by 30 million, almost a quarter. In Japan, as in many other countries with rapid ageing and declining fertility, a growing number of the retired elderly will need to be supported by a shrinking working-age population. Low-skill jobs that are difficult to automate – in areas like home care or hospitality – will become even more difficult to fill, leading to chronic job shortages. Allowing this to occur while billions in the developing world are desperately seeking employment would be absurd. Across rich countries, immigrants have been demonized in recent years for supposedly stealing good jobs, but they are not to blame for the hollowing out of the middle class.


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

Innovation thus becomes something more and more foreign to most American workers, embedded in tech devices but not something that most directly observe and participate in. Furthermore, virtually all analysts expect the percentage of the workforce employed in manufacturing to decline, further insulating American workers from direct experience of significant economic dynamism.16 If we adjust for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents per person than it did in 1999.17 (A triadic patent is one filed in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and tends to be a relatively serious patent in terms of potential scope.) This measured decline comes in an age where an increasing number of trivial, ridiculous, or “trolling” patents are granted by an out-of-control patenting process; one-click shopping, however fun and easy it may be to do, should not be receiving patent protection.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Although Africa is our cradle, the place we all come from, it is also young, with a median age of only nineteen, compared to forty-two for Europe and thirty-five for North America.180 In the coming decades, Africa is expected to be the only region in the world that will significantly increase its working-age population. On this, everyone agrees: between now and mid-century, Africa will grow both its population and its economy. Kenya, which wants to become a regional business hub for international companies chasing opportunities in Africa, is in a race for modernity with its continental competitors. That upgraded airport was all about winning that race.


pages: 220 words: 88,994

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

In 1952 at Stalin’s behest, the East Germans built a fortified fence along the border with West Germany and equipped it with watchtowers, armed guards, dogs and eventually automatically triggered machine guns. But there was still nothing to stop people wandering into the Western sectors of Berlin and not coming back. By 1960 the working-age population of East Germany had dropped from seventy to sixty per cent of the total. Before long it would be empty of all but geriatrics and the disabled. People denied a genuine vote at the ballot box were voting with their feet. On June 15th, 1961 Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party (officially the Socialist Unity Party since a forced merger with the Social Democrats in 1946) gave a speech in which he famously said: ‘Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

But the attitude of conventional economics to this unmarketable, unwaged work is corrosive. Once it drops out of the conventional economic system, it becomes invisible to policy makers, unless it can be sold and commodified. It also leads to a situation where the government believes that ‘full employment’ – or 80 per cent of the working age population in work – is a valuable objective, when their voluntary work or their work as parents might actually be more valuable to the neighbourhood. There are costs – social and economic – of everyone being at work.20 It would mean, for example, that with no one at home except the frail and elderly, there is a gap left among those who socialize our children, look after older people, prevent crime and provide the human face of our neighbourhoods and communities.


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

In fact, the asset price inflation of the pre-crisis period and the large profits generated by the finance sector disguised a long-standing slowdown in other parts of the economy. Some have argued that this can be attributed to a slowdown in technological change.21 Others point to demographic change — falling birth rates and rising life expectancies associated with rising affluence in the global North have led to a fall in the working age population that is depressing long-term growth rates.22 But all those who support the secular stagnation hypothesis converge on one point: without extraordinary interventions from the state such as quantitative easing, many economies in the global North appear to have ground to a halt. Today’s economists have all converged on one burning question: What is going on?


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, friendshoring, 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

After the financial crisis, the economy was sustained through massive government investment, but since it was not supplemented by increased productivity and innovation, ever more money is needed to get any growth out of it. After rising 1.1 per cent annually from 1982 to 2010, growth in total factor productivity (what you can squeeze out of the resources you use) declined by 0.6 per cent during the period 2011–2019.21 In addition, the working-age population is declining and any time now the population as a whole will start declining as well. China can no longer build its economy on rural farmers moving into factories, or its housing boom on more of the population moving into brand-new apartments in cities. Real estate is no longer the engine of the economy but a drain on it.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

In other words, a region with 50 million people and an income of $10,000 per capita emits significantly more carbon than a region with 10 million people and an income of $50,000 per capita, despite the fact that the two regions have precisely the same aggregate income. This implies that economic growth fuelled by a decline in fertility rates – growth arising due to an increase in the relative size of the working-age population (known in the economic discipline as a ‘demographic dividend’) – would permit significant reductions in the projected level of carbon emissions. In fact, the decline in fertility rates since the onset of the Demographic Transition has been reducing the burden of exponential population growth on the environment.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

No matter how you rearrange the financing, whether lower pensions, higher contributions or saving, or a different private-public mix, the underlying demographic equation is unchanged. In economic terms the developed countries will require a shrinking active population to pay for a growing dependent population. Sticking with the economics, the most direct solution would be to in- The Weightless World 162 crease the working-age population: immigration. Some countries have long enjoyed the benefit of immigration. America was built on it. Germany has welcomed gästarbeiter when suffering labour shortages and more than done its duty by refugees. Even the UK, with a tradition of petty hostility to foreigners, has grudgingly permitted some waves of official immigration and is currently turning a blind eye to unofficial immigration from eastern Europe.


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

This of course disguises large regional variations – in more desirable areas such as London and the South East the ratio is up to twenty times (ONS, 2015c). Recent research shows that when housing costs (including mortgage debt and rents) are included in an assessment of changing living standards since 2002, over half of UK households across the working age population have seen falling or flat living standards (Clarke et al., 2016). Figure 5.2 House prices and mortgage debt compared to income in the UK (source: ONS, Nationwide and Bank of England; data de‹ated using 2010 prices) The impact of rising housing costs is not distributed equally across populations of course.


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

By 1940 roughly a quarter of working-age Americans had at least a secondary school education and around 5 per cent had at least a bachelor’s degree; rates were higher for the younger cohorts.8 Those figures rose steadily over the next half-century; now nearly 90 per cent of working-age Americans have at least a secondary education and 41 per cent have a bachelor’s degree or more. Most other rich countries do about as well; about 39 per cent of Britons have a bachelor’s degree or better, as do 26 per cent of Germans and 46 per cent of Japanese (The average among OECD countries is about 30 per cent of the working-age population).9 Humanity spent millennia figuring out ways to augment its physical strength, through wheels and pulleys and animal-power and steam and electricity, but, in the space of just over a century, humanity suddenly mobilized an enormous share of its cognitive strength. * * * Rising skill levels enabled rapid economic growth; the second industrial revolution, built on technologies such as electricity, chemistry and the car, couldn’t have unfolded as it did without a growing pool of skilled labour.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

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

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

It may have been a long way away from Europe and the US but Argentina was able to take full advantage of the Royal Navy's commitment to keep international sea lanes open. New refrigerator technologies – and faster ships – meant its beef could be exported to destinations many thousands of miles away. Its working age population grew rapidly, a reflection of the Belle Époque mass migration from Europe – particularly from southern Europe – that led to equally dramatic demographic changes in the US, Canada and Australia. The growth of international financial markets, meanwhile, led to huge improvements in Argentina's capital stock.


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

Although campaigns and international agencies could do more to rectify them, they will continue. However, most relevant for understanding the shaping of the global precariat are developments in the economy that is rapidly becoming the world’s largest. The Chinese state has shaped a denizen labour force unlike anything else ever created. It has a working-age population of 977 million, which will rise to 993 million by 2015. Some 200 million are rural migrants lured to the new industrial workshops where Chinese and foreign contractors act as intermediaries of household-name multinational corporations from all over the world. These migrants are the engine of the global precariat, denizens in their own country.


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

The resort’s problems were endemic and paradoxical. The more the economy sank, the cheaper accommodation became – holiday bed-and-breakfasts became bedsits – and the more unemployed, sick and disabled people were attracted to (or pushed into) moving there. Thirteen per cent of Blackpool’s working-age population became dependent on welfare benefits, and prescriptions for antidepressants soared. Place Is Fate Increasingly, where you were from determined your chances in life. ‘Students in Ipswich schools, especially those from disadvantaged families, are not achieving the same school exam results as they would if they lived somewhere else.’


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

Germany alone would need to bring in at least 500,000 migrants each year just to offset that. Population growth in the UK, too, is entirely down to international immigration, according to the Office of National Statistics – the national fertility rate is just 1.7.11 The rosiest forecasts for the next decades see Europe’s working-age population falling by one-third. Already, almost two dozen countries are getting smaller every year, from Poland to Cuba to Japan, which lost almost 450,000 people in 2018. In these countries, women have fewer than the averaged 2.1 babies that would allow for a population to remain stable. The population decline would be even steeper were it not for steadily increasing life expectancy, but it will catch up.


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

A slowdown in risk-taking in the aftermath of the financial crisis has had a profoundly detrimental impact on employment, median family incomes, and growth. Median family incomes (adjusted for inflation) have fallen 7 percent from 2000 to 2014.35 Workforce participation has fallen from 67 percent to 62 percent of the working-age population, a historic low.36 And productivity growth has fallen to a paltry 0.7 percent a year since 2011, far below its 2.2 percent annual long-term average (see Figure 4-3, “U.S. Productivity Growth”). In the long run, the tax revenues collected on success are small compared with the enormous value of success to the rest of society.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

By 2025, it’s estimated that 30 percent of Japan’s population will be senior citizens.3 As if this weren’t enough, Japan’s dependency ratio is skyrocketing as well. The old-age dependency ratio provides a snapshot of a nation’s population resources and demands and is calculated by dividing the population over the age of sixty-five by the working-age population. In 2010, this ratio was 36.1 percent, or 2.8 workers for each senior. By 2022 this ratio is expected to jump to 50.2 percent, or two workers supporting every senior. (Compare this to the United States in 2015 with a ratio of 22 percent, or 4.5 workers per senior.) Current projections suggest that by 2060 Japan will reach a ratio of 78.4 percent—only 1.3 Japanese workers for every senior resident.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Its study shows that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.” But this progress ended with the initiation of capitalist reforms thirty years ago, and the death rate has since increased. Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound impact on development.… Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the major factors driving China’s economic miracle, will no longer be available.”11 Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead. And for India, the problems are even more severe.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

CNPC press release, “CNPC and Cupet sign expanded oil cooperative framework agreement,” 8 June 2011. 11. Rosen, Daniel H. & Hanemann, Thilo, “An American Open Door? Maximising the Benefits of Chinese Direct Investment,” Asia Society and Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, May 2011. CHAPTER 12 Japan after the Deluge When one looks at GDP growth to working age population (defined as population aged 20–60), one gets a surprising result: Japan has actually done better than the U.S. or most European countries over the last decade. —Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, January 6, 2011 Japan may be softly receding into nonimportance in the eyes of the more strident backers of Chinese or Indian twenty-first-century economic supremacy, but its global influence remains significant.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

In 1999, the Germans worked on average just over 1,500 hours per year against the Americans’ nearly 2,000.74 Almost three-quarters of the population of working age in the United States was employed, compared with less than two-thirds of the Germans and French.75 (The British were once again in between, with just over 1,700 hours worked on average per year and more than 70 percent of the working-age population in employment.) However, those Europeans lucky enough to have a job are generally guaranteed a higher minimum wage and more job security. This is what we call “social” Europe—and it’s a choice. Especially in the Mediterranean societies, it leaves more time for the other good things of life: family, friends, food, recreation, la dolce vita.


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

A higher proportion of the population lives in absolute poverty than in many European countries and in Canada – absolute poverty being defined for all countries as 40 percent of the median income of a US citizen (Smeeding 2005). The prisoner to population ratio in the US is five to ten times as high as it is in Europe. A staggering 2.3 percent of the male working age population was in jail in 2004 (Schmitt and Zipperer 2006). Until 2008, the numbers kept going up (PEW Center on the States 2008). Due to the lack of prominence given to that sort of statistics, which stand deep in the shadow of GDP, modern conventional economists on both sides of the Atlantic can sell the US as the great example to be emulated, despite its shortcomings.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

But up north our neighbors were experiencing the “Great Canadian Slump,” as it was named by the distinguished Canadian economist Pierre Fortin.17 In 1996 Fortin compared this slump to that seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. His measure of the two recessions was the cumulative decline from peak of the employed fraction of the working-age population. As of 1996 the Canadian economy had already suffered 30% of the cumulative decline seen in the Great Depression.18 The Depression was not all that much worse, said Fortin in 1996. It had been deeper, and it had lasted longer. He could not have known then that it would take four more years for the economy to recover.


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

But this fails to take into account the fact that the British population is actually growing very slowly. There are problems with the figures available, not least because some foreign-born workers will now be British citizens, but they do give us a general picture. The British-born population of working age has only gone up by 348,000 since 1997, while the non-British born working-age population has risen by 2.4 million. Nearly a million Britons have left the country since then, and there are a staggering 5.6 million Britons living abroad: it is often for- gotten that migration is a two-way process. The bottom line is that the number of jobs going to British-born workers has gone up more than the British-born working population has increased.


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

Under Labour, Britain lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs. But this was social democracy. There had to be a palliative. The scale and persistence of poverty in Britain prompted Labour to extend the benefit system into the lives of those at work, in the form of tax credits. As a result, by 2010, 9.2 million adults out of a working-age population of 37 million were receiving state tax credits, while 5.4 million people were dependent on out-of-work benefits.13 By the end of the Labour government, former Labour minister Alan Milburn would admit: ‘We still live in a country where, invariably, if you’re born poor, you die poor, just as if you go to a low-achieving school, you tend to end up in a low-achieving job.’14 Redistribution through welfare was never overtly sold as compensation for the destruction of the ‘old’ working-class lifestyle, but that’s how it was widely understood.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

The editors and press barons, the pundits and establishment politicians, still have their power. But increasingly they look like yesterday’s men. The result was a sharp increase in turnout in certain demographics, especially among the young and poor, who went heavily for Labour. The party won among the working-age population, only losing badly among retirees who went heavily for the Conservatives. Labour’s increased turnout of its support more or less drowned the expected ‘UKIP effect’, which in part would have been a result of a long-term decline in the Labour turnout in core seats. A fifth of UKIP voters – made an offer addressing their immediate interests rather than pandering on immigration – defected to Labour.


pages: 365 words: 102,306

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics by Michael Gillard

Boris Johnson, business intelligence, centre right, Crossrail, forensic accounting, Jeremy Corbyn, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), upwardly mobile, working-age population, young professional

Two years later, Wales became the UK’s first directly elected mayor, and politically benefitted from a £3.7 billion regeneration package for Canning Town, the ward he once represented, claiming the central government funds would raise residents out of poor health, low education and poverty through work opportunities. There was certainly much work to be done. ‘Deprivation is high with much of the area falling within the 2 per cent most deprived areas within England and Wales,’ a planning document revealed. ‘In recent surveys, 17 per cent of the local working-age population have a limiting long-term illness, 17.5 per cent claim income support and 49.7 per cent of 16-74 year olds were identified as having no formal qualifications,’ it continued, without the pathos of Dickens. The original regeneration plans were modified in 2005 after London won the right to host the Olympics, most of which was going to take place in Newham.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

GPIF’s first order of business was thus to try to persuade its asset managers to push the companies they owned to improve their governance structures so as to give more power to investors—to ask them to disclose more information about their businesses, to talk to their shareholders about long-term strategy, and to vote their shares with governance in mind. Focusing on social issues, or on the “S” in ESG, also seemed likely to yield substantial dividends. Japan’s birth rate had dipped below replacement levels in the mid-1970s, and Japan’s working-age population was declining faster than any other on the planet.41 Given Japan’s closed immigration policies, persuading more women to stay in the labor force was critically important to long-term economic growth. But making this happen required dealing with some deep-rooted structural problems. Many Japanese companies have a two-track employment system.


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, friendshoring, 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

It also asked, but did not answer, the pivotal question of how to pay for expanded services. Across developed nations, statistics expose a treacherous imbalance. Instead of going to young workers, an increasing share of the national income must preserve standards of living for retirees. The skewing gets worse every year as payrolls and working-age populations shrink and old-age liabilities balloon. If young workers do not yet resent surrendering their futures in order to bankroll retirees, they eventually will. Watch for headlines declaring generational conflict between young and old.9 Instead of moving forward, we have slipped backward. In 1960, there were five active workers for every retired and disabled worker in the United States.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

It still wasn’t very healthy to live in space long-term, even in the opulence of stations like Alto Firenze, not until centrifugal gravity was perfected and made perfectly comfortable. Back on Earth, President Sun poured money into China’s health, social security, and pensions systems. Almost a quarter of the population was over sixty-five, and the working-age population had been steadily declining for a quarter of a century. While the one child policy had been repealed over two decades previously, the fertility rate was far below the level required to maintain a constant population, especially with negligible immigration. In the end, the basic maximum income policy only provided a small proportion of the funding required.


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

On the other hand, the higher income that people would get, as compared with no income at all or social assistance at much lower levels, might predispose them to consume more leisure, that is to work less. It is possible that on balance the effect of UBI on work would be small; but it is also possible that society might become very polarized, with, say, some 20 percent of the working-age population choosing not to work at all. To those who would choose not to work because they found UBI sufficient we should add those who might not need to work because of the high capital incomes they inherited (as discussed in Section 2.4). This would give us a tripartite society where those at the bottom and many of those at the top would not work at all, while the middle class would.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

Some of the most important fundamentals to look for include: ● Low Per Capita GDP: Countries with low per capita GDP have room to grow, but the best combination to look for is a country with low per capita GDP where both institutions and the workforce are undergoing a transformation. ● High Population Growth: This leads to an ample working-age population, which can give a powerful boost to GDP under the right conditions. One look at a world age chart will tell you everything you need to know. The West is getting older while emerging and frontier markets have population projections that almost perfectly mirror their varying degrees of emerging status


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Sean Dennison, “64% of Americans Aren’t Prepared for Retirement—and 48% Don’t Care,” Yahoo Finance, September 23, 2019, finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-finds-42-americans-retire-100701878.html. 14. Emmie Martin, “Here’s How Much More Expensive It Is for You to Go to College Than It Was for Your Parents,” Make It, CNBC, November 2017, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/11/how-many-americans-have-no-retirement-savings.html. 15. FRED, “Working Age Population: Aged 15–64; All Persons for the United States” (chart), Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, updated October 9, 2019, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S. 16. Alessandro Malito, “The Retirement Crisis Is Bad for Everyone—Especially These People,” MarketWatch, August 2019, www.marketwatch.com/story/the-retirement-crisis-is-bad-for-everyone-especially-these-people-2019-04-12. 17.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

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

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

While Giscard described himself as a conservative who liked change, he was wildly enthusiastic about the state’s role in building France’s first high-speed rail line, a fleet of nuclear power plants to reduce dependence, and Minitel, a video-text terminal that was installed in millions of French homes. Such projects reinforced France’s prestige as a leader in advanced technology, but they did almost nothing to boost employment: France’s working-age population grew nearly 1 percent per year between 1974 and 1981, but the number of people with jobs rose hardly at all. With 1.75 million workers unemployed by 1981, the president’s promise of a job or a training slot for every young French worker rang hollow.3 Giscard’s ineffectual performance opened the door for Mitterrand.


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

Several, but certainly not all, of its countries enjoy resource wealth (40 percent of the world’s gold and 90 percent of its platinum are in Africa), which, in the hands of good governments, could be invested in public infrastructure and skills. And good government is better understood: citizens know their rights much better and are holding those in power accountable with ever-rising frequency.98 Africa is also blessed with a looming demographic dividend. Its working-age population will balloon from 500 million people now to over 1.1 billion by 2040.99 If local governments can learn how to foster neighborhoods instead of slums, and if national governments can better integrate their too-small economies and build better institutions, Africans might banish extreme poverty from their midst before mid-century.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

The Guangzhou Hospital is using AI, trained from 300 million records (no wonder the Economist characterized China as “the Saudi Arabia of data”) from patients across the country, for almost every part of its operation—organizing patient records, suggesting diagnoses via a WeChat bot interaction, identifying patients through facial recognition, interpreting CT scans, and operating room workflow.59 Tencent is very active in medical image diagnosis and drug discovery, and has backed the WeDoctor Group, a hospital of the future initiative. VoxelCloud, an eye-imaging interpretation company also supported by Tencent, is deploying diabetic retinopathy AI screening broadly to counter the leading cause of blindness among China’s working age population. The AI company that has gone most intensively into medicine to date is iFlytek, which is a major global player in speech recognition. In 2018, it launched an AI-powered robot called Xiaoyi that has passed China’s medical licensing examination for human physicians (with a score of 456, which was 96 points past the required level).60 With iFlytek’s robot’s ability to ingest and analyze individual patient data, it plans to integrate these capabilities with general practitioners and cancer doctors throughout China.


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

While population projections even in the medium term are a particularly tricky proposition (and the projections change rapidly from year to year), the hope is that the global population will stabilise during this century and peak at no more than 12 billion or so (perhaps as low as 10 billion) by the end of the century and thereafter achieve a steady state of zero growth. Clearly this is an important issue in relation to the dynamics of capital accumulation. In the United States, for example, job creation since 2008 has not kept pace with the expansion of the labour force. The falling unemployment rate reflects a shrinkage in the proportion of the working-age population seeking to participate in the labour force. But whatever happens, it is pretty clear that capital accumulation in the long-term future can rely less and less upon demographic growth to sustain or impel its compound growth and that the dynamics of production, consumption and realisation of capital will have to adjust to these new demographic circumstances.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

So thinking the solution is to get more people into that labor market, that just doesn’t add up.” For sure, the Earned Income Tax Credit could push individuals into employment and help a certain number of individuals navigate their way out of poverty, but what it couldn’t do was raise the overall well-being of the entire working-age population. While EITC recipients—especially single mothers at the bottom of the income pyramid—still benefit, despite the driving down of wages, because of the additional dollars sent their way by the government, individuals not eligible for the tax credit actually end up worse off than they would have been without the program in place.


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

So, while immigration is not a mandatory solution to labor shortages, the combination of cash-starved governments and higher demographic costs will make it the least painful and most voter-friendly solution. According to a 2009 study by the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, the United States will require 35 million more workers than its working-age population can provide by 2030, Japan another 17 million by 2050, the European Union 80 million by 2050. Canada, even if it continues to take in 250,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year, will be short a million workers by the end of this decade.9 Even the high levels of unemployment that struck the West after the 2008 credit crisis only temporarily mitigated this long-term demographic problem.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

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

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

Remember the questions we are trying to answer: why didn’t the typical American family see much increase in income even though productivity rose substantially, and who was reaping the benefits of rising productivity? If you think about it for a minute, you’ll see that using income growth numbers that include sheer growth in working-age population gets us completely away from those questions. Consider, for example, what happened to the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. Average income among these families fell 10 percent over the CBO period but their numbers went up about 25 percent, and their total income therefore rose about 15 percent.


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 numerator is based on white male state and federal prisoners of all ages. The denominator is based on whites ages 18–65. Interpreting the Ratios There is no natural denominator for computing ratios of crime indicators to population. I use whites ages 18–65 as a way to think about the numbers relative to the working-age population. In contrast, the environment in Belmont changed hardly at all. The parallel numbers for Belmont were 13 in the 1974 survey and 27 in the 2004 survey. It is statistically unlikely that someone living in Belmont knew of a family with one of its men in prison even in 2004. Someone living in Fishtown was likely to know of at least one such family, and perhaps several.


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

Aside from the problem of dealing with the complexities of different levels, duration and timing of exposure to a mix of potentially harmful substances, researchers have no ‘control group’ with whom to compare the affected population because virtually everyone is exposed (Davis 2007). Workplace health and safety The world’s working-age population, currently about 2,700 million, experiences about 1.9–2.3 million deaths per year related to occupation, according to estimates of the International Labour Organization. Of these at least 1.6 million are work-related diseases, including 600,000 cancers, which may take years or decades to develop (Takala 2003: 2).


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

The median Chinese citizen remained in his/her twenties throughout the first forty years or so of the People’s Republic, but in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century the median age has risen by seven years.82 This is nearly three times the speed of ageing experienced in the UK and the US, and the trend will continue. Between 1975 and 2050 the number of Chinese over the age of sixty is forecast to rise sevenfold while the number of those under fourteen years will more or less halve. Those aged over sixty as a share of the population will pass the share in the United States in around 2030.83 China’s working-age population has already started to decline in absolute terms, not just as a percentage of the population. The Chinese population will continue to be extremely large at least for the rest of the twenty-first century, but we are already at the stage where one of the motors of Chinese economic growth–population growth feeding into a growing workforce–is close to shutting down.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

Immigrants were 45% of the labour force despite being 36% of population in 2009.29 The city has a bipolar job market, where jobs are concentrated at the high end in finance and business and the low end in the service sector.30 Ethno-racial minorities, particularly immigrants, are represented at all levels, but they are clustered in the shrinking middle. US-born non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks have declining working-age populations, and the looming labour shortfall is being filled by immigrants. Ethnic economies in New York are relatively small and shifting. The Chinese economy is the largest and most enduring. I will discuss it in detail later. Ethnic/immigrant economic niches are more common, but Ethnicity and the Urban Economy 103 they also shift over time.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The offices of Chief Judge and president of the States (the legislature) are combined in the post of the island’s Bailiff, an appointment made by the British Crown, which means no clear distinction exists between the legislature and judiciary. Jersey’s sole newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, was for many years controlled by the island’s most senior politician. There are no universities, research centers, or think tanks. Approximately one quarter of the working-age population is directly employed in the island’s offshore finance center, and most of the other residents depend on its revenues circulating through the local economy. In such conditions there is little scope for sustained critical scrutiny of what the policy makers are up to. This absence of the checks and balances required of a democratic state creates an ideal environment for incompetence and corruption, especially on a small island with a deeply embedded culture of conformism and secrecy.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Others will face similar needs: taken together, Italy, Spain and Portugal will see the number of people aged 65 or over rise by 3.2 million between 2020 and 2030 – since around 20 per cent of this age group currently needs full- or part-time assistance, this suggests 640,000 new care workers will be required. But the working-age population will decline in all these countries – so there simply may not be enough people to provide tailored late-stage care. The question inventors, medics and carers across Japan are asking is whether personalized care really needs to be given by a person – and whether robots might be the answer.


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

As people grow wealthier, they are choosing to have fewer children (see Figure 7.4).37 This has been going on in rich countries for a while. The fertility rate is currently 1.5 children per woman in Germany, 1.4 children per woman in Japan, and 1.7 children per woman in the United States, in China, and in high-income countries on average.38 As a result, the working-age population is now starting to peak and decline in these countries.39 Much the same is true in poorer countries. South America’s fertility rate is now just below 2, while India’s fertility rate is at 2.2.40 Africa is the only major continent expected to still have significant population growth over this century—but as African countries grow richer, their fertility rates are likely to drop, just like everywhere else.41 Figure 7.3.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Britain’s first attempt at social housing was built in north Liverpool in 1869, on the advice of Britain’s first Medical Officer of Health, William Duncan (a role similar to that held by Sir Chris Whitty during the pandemic), who was one of the first people to establish a link between unsanitary housing and poor health. At the time, a third of the area’s working-age population – 86,000 people – was squashed into just over 2,000 crowded and poorly ventilated tenements, with 38,000 more crammed in cellars in crowded courts where there were open drains. It was believed that disease spread by miasma – noxious smells in the air – and not in unclean water or via rats and mice, but, thanks to the work of reformers such as Duncan and Edwin Chadwick, the middle classes became convinced of the need to make the places lived in by the country’s poorest more sanitary.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

They are Herculean. But equally, its advantages are colossal. India never lacks for scale. In spite of the pressures of population density, India’s clearest advantage over China and other developing countries is its demographic profile. From 2010, China’s dependency ratio—the proportion of the working-age population to the rest—will start to deteriorate. In contrast, India’s dependency ratio will continue to improve until the 2040s.34 In the next twenty years, the proportion of dependents to workers will fall from 60 percent of the population to 50 percent. This will give India’s economy a large “demographic dividend.”


pages: 487 words: 139,297

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

Berlin Wall, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, technology bubble, transfer pricing, unemployed young men, working-age population, éminence grise

Under Mobutu, the price of resistance was so great that few ever dared to stand up and be counted for fear of being chopped down. Resistance to dictatorship in other countries has been most successful when it can call on strong, well-organized structures of like-minded supporters, such as labor unions, churches, or student groups. In the Congo, where in any case only 4 percent of the working-age population had jobs in the formal sector, there were few labor unions to speak of. In the early 1990s, fewer than 100,000 students in higher education were dispersed among dozens of universities and training centers across the country. Mobutu had tamed these institutions, consolidating all labor and student unions and forcefully integrating them into his ruling party.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former republics such as Estonia embraced Western-style reforms and thrived. Moldova, however, never managed to shake off Communist influence. After flirtations with democratic reforms in the 1990s, the party was voted back into power in 2001. Over the next decade, the economy imploded, and a quarter of the working age population left in search of work abroad. Twenty years ago Moldova was wealthier than Romania, with which it shares a language and culture. By 2010, when I visited, its per capita GDP was just a quarter of its booming neighbor’s. The previous spring, the country had reached a breaking point. After the Communists narrowly won the April 2009 election in a suspiciously strong showing, outrage turned to violence in the streets.


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 regional figures are equally striking. In the next thirty years the labor force of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean is expected to grow by 52 million, or twice the number of workers as currently exist in Mexico alone. In Africa, 323 million new workers will enter the labor force over the next three decades-a working-age population larger than the current labor force of Europe. 43 Worldwide, more than a billion jobs will have to be created over the next ten years to provide an income for all the new job entrants The Fate of Nations 207 in both developing and developed nations. 44 With new information and telecommunication technologies, robotics, and automation fast eliminating jobs in every industry and sector, the likelihood of finding enough work for the hundreds of millions of new job entrants appears slim.


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

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

Japan now has nearly 70,000 centenarians11 and a population that has been dropping since 2010.12 Twenty-seven percent of its people are now over 65.13 Korea is similarly steadily graying, with a fertility rate of only 1.2 babies per woman (among the lowest on earth).14 And China’s demographic transition is impending, influenced by its longstanding one-child policy, only fully abandoned in 2015.15 By 2050 the number of births in China is projected by the US Census Bureau to be 35 percent less than in 2000, with China’s median population age rising close to 50.16 China’s total population will likely begin declining around 2025, the working-age population will fall more than 100 million workers by 2035, and before 2050 China will likely have more elderly than all the G-7 nations (North America, Europe, and Japan) combined.17 The Socioeconomic Impact of Globalization The incorporation of three billion new active participants in the world economy over the past three decades has had many positive effects, as China, ­India, Russia, and surrounding countries have at last begun interacting systematically with global markets.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

In those years, the city lost about 25 percent of its white middle-income population (1.6 million) and gained an equal number of (mostly) poor blacks and Hispanics. In 1960, just 4 percent of the city’s population—324,000—received public assistance. By 1970, the figure was 14 percent—over 1 million people. The age composition also changed. The city’s working-age population, aged twenty-five to fifty-four, dropped from one half of all residents in 1950 to less than two-fifths. At the same time, senior citizens and youths swelled from one-third to two-fifths of the populace. New York lost its “money-providers,” as Wallace Sayre and Herbert Kaufman dubbed them in their classic Governing New York City, and gained “service demanders.”


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

More than 44 percent of all digital-services jobs were in just ten metro areas. By one count, a mere 1 percent of the country’s job and population growth since 2008 had occurred in counties lacking a city of at least 50,000 people, which described Taylor’s county. Meanwhile, the share of the working-age population with a college degree was now 15 percentage points higher in cities than in rural areas, a gap more than a third as large as it had been in 2000. And there was no sign that these trends would slow or reverse anytime soon. A report by McKinsey Global Institute would soon predict that twenty-five cities and high-growth hubs would generate 60 percent of all job growth through 2030, while fifty-four trailing cities and rural areas, where one-fourth of Americans lived, would have zero growth.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Investigative journalist Bob Woodward dubbed him the “maestro.” One of his myriad biographies was titled The Man Who Knew.[*5] Greenspan’s cult of personality owed in part to the era he oversaw. He had been dealt a winning economic hand by history, presiding at a time of globalization hypercharged by a relatively young working-age population and big advances in computer technology, one in which laissez-faire economics and animal spirits were celebrated as engines of prosperity. Thirty years later, Powell had taken the other side of that shuffle. He had inherited an American economy facing graying demographics and a global backdrop made more tenuous by a destabilizing surge in nationalism, rampant inequality, and obvious financial vulnerabilities.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Growth of output per worker, in turn, depends on a) accumulation of physical capital per worker, b) increase in human capital per worker, and c) improvements in TFP per worker. (An important qualification is that the equivalence between growth of output per head and growth of output per worker does not quite hold in India because the country is due to receive a ‘demographic bonus’: the working-​age population is expected to increase faster than the population as a whole for the next three decades. While this ‘bonus’ lasts, output per head will grow somewhat faster than output per worker.3 So long as this is kept in mind, growth of output per worker can serve as a proxy for growth of output per head.)


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Segalman, a professor of sociology at California State University, Northridge, points out that transgenerational welfare poverty, which twenty years ago was only 5 percent of welfare recipients, now comprises 20 percent, and on the basis of statistics in Los Angeles, he predicts that this element of permanent dependency will reach 40 percent in ten years. 13 This was predicted in Alan Sweezy, “The Challenge of Social Security Financing,” ZPG National Reporter (June–July 1978). Sweezy quotes Census Bureau projections that show the proportion of the population 65 and over rising by nearly 80 percent between 1976 and 2030, while the working-age population proportion declines slightly. 14 “Hispanics Fastest Growing Minority in U.S.,” New York Times, February 18, 1979, p. 16. 15 Tom Bethell, “Against Bilingual Education,” Harper’s, vol. 258, no. 1545 (February 1979), p. 30. 16 Vincent H. Whitney, “Fertility Trends and Child Allowances” in Eveline M.


The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money by John Maynard Keynes

bank run, behavioural economics, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, delayed gratification, full employment, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, marginal employment, means of production, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Obviously that turned out to be wrong. Moreover, worries about “secular stagnation”—about a shortage of investment opportunities leading to persistently low interest rates even during periods of expansion, which in turn makes depression-like episodes highly likely, even the norm—have made a comeback. With a sharp slowdown in working-age population growth in advanced economies, xlii Introduction by Paul Krugman and an apparent slowdown in productivity growth, Keynes’s bleak vision of the future absent consistent government support for demand may be coming true after all. The Economist as Saviour As an intellectual achievement, The General Theory ranks with only a handful of other works in economics—the tiny set of books that transformed our perception of the world, so that once people became aware of what those books had to say they saw everything differently.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

In practice, that means the flows of those Chinese migrant workers from Sichuan and other places to the coastal factories have sustainably increased the capacity of China’s economy. It was these migrant workers who were the principal reason for China’s giant surpluses. China’s increasing wealth really rests on their shoulders, more than on its currency management. But it cannot last: China’s single-child policy means that by 2015 the size of its working-age population will peak. More important than the blame game, perhaps, is what China’s growth can teach the rest of the world. As Justin Lin argues, ‘If you look at the experiences of all the successful countries in economic development – postwar Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the transition nations of China and Vietnam, or even the early development of the UK, German, US and French economies – all have relied on the market mechanism combined with active interventions of government.’


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Of course, it will not all be easy or smooth, but I refuse to be pessimistic about Africa when such an opportunity is available at a few strokes of a pen and when the evidence of entrepreneurial vitality in the extralegal sector is so strong. Besides, as its population growth rates fall, Africa is about to reap a ‘demographic dividend’ when its working-age population is large relative to both the dependent elderly and the dependent young: such a demographic bonanza gave Asia perhaps one third of its miracle of growth. The key policies for Africa are to abolish Europe’s and America’s farm subsidies, quotas and import tariffs, formalise and simplify the laws that govern business, undermine tyrants and above all encourage the growth of free-trading cities.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

What is saved, of course, is not spent. Until 2011, battered consumers held back the recovery. As we have noted several times, the recession took a terrible toll on jobs. Payroll employment did not bottom out until February 2010. When it did, America had 8.8 million fewer jobs than at the January 2008 peak—even though the working-age population had grown in the interim. These massive job losses shattered millions of families’ incomes, not to mention their lives. And on top of this, American taxpayers were asked to bear the costs of bailing out the very financial system that had gotten them into this mess. It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

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

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

In contrast, the dividend had a more muted impact in Latin America (largely due to less effective government policies), and major African economies have yet to see these benefits, as their high fertilities have either kept their total dependency ratios from falling (Nigeria’s ratio has been steady at close to 90) or as the decline has been only from very high to high ratios (Kenya’s rate fell from more than 110 in the early 1980s to less than 80 by 2015). The demographic dividend is inherently time limited but its positive consequences can endure well beyond its end. As the large cohorts of working-age population age and retire, the dividend first recedes and then it disappears, but it can have a longer-term economic effect if the temporary gains were invested in infrastructures, education, health, and technical advances. The dependency ratio then shifts once more, rising with the increasing share of retired people and forcing countries to deal yet again with growing shares of less-productive (part-time employment among elderly) and nonproductive (retired) segments of the population.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The great irony for blacks, however, was that city government by the 1960s would not be a growth industry for much longer, as it had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A declining municipal tax base and growing anti-government sentiment diminished public-sector job opportunities as the black working-age population continued to grow.58 Retail Sales Blacks found very little employment in the postwar era in high-visibility jobs that involved public contact, and remained grossly underrepresented in sales jobs, compared to whites (see Appendix B). Their exclusion from retail trade was not inconsequential.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Overall, the economic pie will grow (that’s right, folks, the ­dessert metaphors are back) but human workers will receive an ever-smaller slice. On an extreme outcome, the vast majority of people of working age could be unemployed. But the effects would be radical if even half or a third of the working-age population was unable to find work. Who Will Be the First to Go? It’s intuitive to assume that lower-educated workers will be hardesthit by technological unemployment. It currently costs about $25 an hour to pay a human welder and about $8 an hour to use a robot.9 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Technological Unemployment 299 Supermarket check-out staff face the prospect of ‘smart’ stores that run without human check-out staff and shelf-stackers.10 Truckers, of whom there are 3.5 million in the United States alone, could be superseded by self-driving vehicles that can trundle for weeks without rest.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

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

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

The combined growth of contract rentierism and platform rentierism has been substantially responsible, at any rate, for the swelling to more than 5 million by mid 2019 of the number of people in the UK who, in Delphine Strauss’s words, were in ‘low paid, insecure forms of work – including short-term work and contracts with unpredictable hours and pay – and were not earning enough to make ends meet’.67 This enlargement of the UK’s precariat is crucial in understanding what Torsten Bell and Laura Gardiner have recently described as the biggest change to the UK economy during the period since the financial crisis: the employment ‘boom’ that has seen the proportion of the working-age population in work grow from 73 to 76 per cent.68 As they explain, the main reason people are working more is that most people are ‘a lot poorer than [they] expected to be’.69 Meanwhile, at the top end of the income spectrum, those largely protected from the pressure on wages that has accompanied rentierization have added to their employment income by themselves becoming rentiers – whether or not they work at rentier institutions.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

Some of them will be slow, but in the scale of, say, 100 years, if something takes an extra 20 years, it’s nothing. There is going to be a problem with AI robots and employment sometime in this century, whether it’s 2030 or 2070. At some point we need to change how we structure our societies because we are going to get to a point where there’s less employment available but still a working-age population. There are counterarguments, like when most agricultural jobs disappeared they were just replaced by industrial jobs, but I don’t find them to be compelling. The main issue we will face is scale and the way that once you have a solution, you can use it everywhere relatively cheaply. Getting the first driverless car algorithm/database system that works might be 50 years of work and cost billions of dollars in research, but once we have them, people are going to roll them out at scale.


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

Medieval Europe is covered more broadly by Pirenne (1937, 1952) and Wickham (2016). Postan (1966) and Barlow (1999) are also informative. In 1100, 2 million rural residents fed 2.2 million people, while in 1300, the respective numbers were 4 million feeding 5 million. If the age composition of rural areas was about the same, with a working age population of about half the total, this suggests the ratio of fed people to active agricultural workers rose from 2.2 to 2.5, a rise of agricultural productivity, crudely measured, of just under 15 percent. The building and operation of monasteries, churches, and cathedrals is from Gimpel (1983), Burton (1994), Swanson (1995), and Tellenbach (1993).


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

For the main components, see 4 fig. 4. 3 European Commission 2007, 2013, and 2015 are key reports on the scale and consequences of aging in Europe. Cf. also briefly United Nations 2015 for global trends. Fertility rates: European Commission 2007: 12 (about 1.5 now, projected to rise to about 1.6 by 2050). Median age and working age population: 13. Dependency ratios: 13 (rise to 53 percent by 2050); European Commission 2013 (rise to 51 percent by 2050) and 2015: 1 (rise to 50.1 percent by 2060). Eighty-year-olds and older: European Commission 2007: 13. Cf. 46 fig. 2.7., 49 fig. 2.9, and Hossmann et al. 2008: 8 on the range of future age pyramids.


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

They form a disproportionate share of entrepreneurs; for example, in 2016, 40 percent of Fortune’s list of the 500 top US firms were owned by immigrants or Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 177 their children.7 Advanced industrialized societies like Germany with an aging population, a shortage of skilled labor, and declining fertility rates, can expand the working-­age population, consumption, and productivity through the successful integration of young migrants.8 In America, many legal immigrants are highly educated scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs; others are young workers with little education who are employed in highly manual-­intensive occupations.9 The willingness of low-­skilled immigrants to do work involving hard physical labor fills important needs in farm-­work, building construction, home services, and food preparation.10 But the rapid influx of large numbers of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers into Europe from poorer societies generates social tensions.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

It could be argued that asking whether immigration restriction is racist or racially self-interested amounts to the same thing. But if the theory that the politics of immigration is about economic interests were true, it should be possible for someone to support immigration as a boost to economic growth or a country’s working-age population without thinking group-motivated restrictionists are racist. Across all countries, the majority say tribally motivated restrictions are not racist, but among pro-immigration respondents views are more evenly split: 51 per cent of pro-immigration people say the statement is racist. Education also counts.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

The same thing happens within different kinds of STEM occupations: In 2015, two of the same authors, Rong Su and James Rounds, conducted another meta-analysis focusing on distinctions within scientific and technical occupations. Again, their database of vocational preferences and a database of actual jobs held by the U.S. working-age population produced almost interchangeable results. In both cases, the biggest sex differences favoring men involved the most Things-oriented jobs; the biggest sex differences favoring women involved the most People-oriented jobs.[46] The degree of consistency of the sex differences in vocational interests and occupations is quite remarkable.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

I’d best live in a place where I can both find out that such precision work is possible and also actually be able to locate someone to do the job. The bigger and more fluid the city or urban cluster, the better.35 To illustrate the power of the metropolis, Figure 13.2 plots the size of the working-age population in contemporary U.S. cities against their annual innovation rates, captured here using the total number of patent applications in 2002. Knowing the population of a city allows us to explain 70 percent of the variation among U.S. cities in innovation. The size of this relationship, which I’ve plotted on log scales, tells us that cities have synergy.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Using panel data from 22 advanced countries between 1970 and 2009, Takats (2010) estimates that both real GDP-per-capita growth and total population growth boost real house prices one for one (a 1% increase in either series raises real house prices by 1%), while aging has a negative impact (a 1% increase in the dependency ratio—the ratio between the old age population and the working age population—reduces real house prices by 0.7%). These factors are not the only drivers of house prices but they partly explain the lagging performance of Japan and Germany. More generally, the study argues that multi-decade tailwinds on housing and other asset prices are now turning into multi-decade headwinds.