Rationality and transparency are the values of classical liberalism. Rationality and transparency are supposed to be what make free markets and democratic elections work. People understand how the system functions, and that allows them to make rational choices.

The National Interest, as the name proclaims, is a realist foreign-policy journal. But Fukuyama’s premise was that nations do share a harmony of interests, and that their convergence on liberal political and economic models was mutually beneficial. Realism imagines nations to be in perpetual competition with one another; Fukuyama was saying that this was no longer going to be the case.

Why We Don't Live in a PPP World PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same. That's not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.  A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can't be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.  A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can't compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers. A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports.

After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency's pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today's PPP.

In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which focuses on environmental justice issues affecting working-class Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant and refugee communities.

Marwick and others have primarily observed intent as a causal condition for microcelebrity and the practice of cultivating it as a set of activities as opposed to the institutional conditions of those activities and microcelebrity’s various effects. Microcelebrity can be a tool to develop a personal brand, to leverage attention to generate income of job prospects, and to distill media and public attention of social movements. I consider microcelebrity’s cause-and-effect from my multiple attenuated status positions. My agency to create, perform or strategically reveal information is circumscribed by my ascribed status positions. As my professional and public-facing identities shift, my social location remains embedded in groups with a “shared histories based on their shared location in relations of power” (Hill Collins 1997: 376). Academic capitalism and microcelebrity promote neoliberal ideas of individualism. But power relations circumscribe the utility and value of cultivating attention in ways we rarely note, much less redress.

Digital texts embody the intersections between history and biography that Mills (1959) thought inherent to understanding social relations. Content from my blog is a ready example. I have access to the entire data set. I can track its macro discursive moments to action, space, and place. And I can consider it as a reflexive sociological practice. In this way, I have used my digital texts as methodologists use autoethnographies: reflexive, critical practices of social relationship.

In other words, the Web as a collection of heterogeneous sites has largely given way to a small number of sites with near-monopolistic control of authentication, search, and content distribution.

Facebook allows users to sign in, authenticate, and identify themselves on a range of Web sites, feeding our data to Facebook as we move across the Web.

The same way many social networks track keystone metrics like time to X followers, they should track the ROI on posts for new users. It's likely a leading metric that governs retention or churn. It’s useful as an investor, or even as a curious onlooker to test a social networks by posting varied content from test accounts to gauge the efficiency and fairness of the distribution algorithm.

Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital, and so its nature bears greater scrutiny. Not only is it good investment or business practice, but analyzing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.

Perhaps old dogs don't learn new tricks because they are closer to death, and the period to earn a positive return on that investment is shorter.

some students told me that they bought all of their books in prior semesters and their instructors did not use them, so in subsequent semesters they either delayed or opted not to buy their books.

depressing the market for used books as they maintain their profits.

A thousand years ago, the world was flat, economically speaking.

In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital. The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a person’s way through the world, providing support and inspiration and opening doors

Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible resource. The crucial question, says the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, is whether the opportunity in these places derives from “rival goods”—institutions, such as schools, with limited capacity—or “non-rival goods,” such as local culture, which are harder to deplete. When new people move in, what happens to opportunity? And even if an influx of families doesn’t disrupt the opportunity magic, people aren’t always eager to pick up and leave their homes. Moving breaks ties with family, friends, schools, churches, and other organizations. “The real conundrum is how to address the larger structural realities of inequality,” says the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, “and not just try to move people around

Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas.

He doesn’t yet know why some places are opportunity bargains, but he considers the discovery of these neighborhoods to be a breakthrough.

His data also suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being invented around them as children.

What interested me were intricate questions about the direction of causation.  Had prices grown higher because the number of pennies had increased?  Or had the supply of pennies grown to accommodate an increasing overall division of labor? To put it slightly differently, in those periods of “industrial revolution” – there had been at least two or three such events – had prices risen because the size of the market and the division of labor had grown, and the quantity of money along with them?  Or was it the other way around?

I still have the feeling that the important changes in the global division of labor have something to do with the behavior of traditional macroeconomic variables.

It turned out the higher the money price, the more prosperous was the craftsman’s lot, at least in the long run, though sometimes after periods of immiseration lasting decades.

That leaves economist Martin Shubik, surely the second most powerful mind among economists to have tackled the complexity problem (John von Neumann was first). Shubik pursued an overarching theory of money all his life, one in which money and financial institutions emerge naturally, instead of being given. In The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy (MIT, 2016), he considered that he and physicist Etic Smith had achieved it. Shubik died last year, at 92.  His ideas about strict definitions of “minimal complexity” will take years to resurface in others’ hands.

Two of the most successful expositors of economic complexity were research partners, as least for a time:  Ricardo Hausmann, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and physicist César Hidalgo, of MIT’s Media Lab. They, too, worked with a gifted mathematician, Albert-László Barabási, of Northeastern University, to produce a highly technical paper; then,  with colleagues, assembled an Atlas of Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity (MIT, 2011), a data-visualization tool that continues to function online. Meanwhile, Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Basic, 2015) remains an especially lucid account of humankind’s escape (so far) from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but there is precious little economics in it. For the economics of international trade, see Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman.

Abneesh Roy, an analyst at Edelweiss Securities, noted that ahead of elections set for early next year, the government could be moving to appease owners of smaller shops that have been hit as customers buy more goods online. “Shopkeepers have been unhappy,” he said. “In an election year, the government will definitely listen more to voters.”

We’ve certainly dabbled in the debate of “what is a tech company” but what we never addressed was why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company.

There is just so much money looking to do so many new, riskier things.  And again, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. Cutting interest rates spurs demand and risk-taking. The changed denominators of a million financial models make every investment idea look more enticing. If an interest rate is the cost of money, ZIRP means capital is now free.

“Deliver with Amazon. Be your own boss. Great earnings. Flexible hours. Make more time for whatever drives you.” Amazon has taken a page from Uber and is leveraging the romanticization of entrepreneurship, the need for flexibility, and the decreasing options of non-degreed workers in rural areas. There are already stories depicting breakneck delivery schedules that obviate luxuries such as bathroom breaks. FedEx drivers get paternity leave and (gasp) health insurance.

You could throw the pack away and deactivate your Facebook account altogether. It will get harder the longer you wait — the more photos you post there, or apps you connect to it.

Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”

For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions.

game theory

Think about fundamental tools for thought such as writing and the number system. Obviously, it’s good that those spread throughout society, unencumbered by IP concerns! More broadly, many tools of thought become more valuable for society as they become more ubiquitous.

Is it possible to avoid the public goods problem altogether?

The net result is that in gaming, clever new interface ideas can be distinguishing features which become a game’s primary advantage in the marketplace.

Put another way, many tools for thought are public goods. They often cost a lot to develop initially, but it’s easy for others to duplicate and improve on them, free riding on the initial investment. While such duplication and improvement is good for our society as a whole, it’s bad for the companies that make that initial investment. And so such tools for thought suffer the fate of many public goods: our society collectively underinvests in them, relative to the benefits they provide

But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (<$1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).

The lessons of Twitter and Facebook, other Internet-scale basic service layers that most of us use, are instructive here. After the honeymoon period is over, and disruptive returns need to be generated to pay off limited partners or satisfy public shareholders, the tensions that these monetization efforts create ultimately seem to separate the motivations of management from those of users and the broader ecosystem. How will Rap Genius–and Marc Andreessen–navigate these questions?

“Change brought about through technical legal doctrine,” Horwitz said, “can more easily disguise underlying political choices [than] Subsidy through the tax system” (101).

So the costs were socialized (in economic terms, externalized) at the same time the benefits were privatized in the form of corporate profits.

As African-American businessman Ishmael Trone said last week, the reform has to go beyond policing in order for there to be equality in this country, including banking reform, mortgage reform and business loan reform.

I’ve alluded to the deeply philosophical nature of this problem; in a sense, it’s politicized within the software communities. Some folks believe that platform developers should shoulder the costs of compatibility, and others believe that platform users (developers themselves) should bear the costs. It’s really that simple. And isn’t politics always about who has to shoulder costs for shared problems?So it’s political. And there will be angry responses to this rant.

Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget.

Working for hi-tech and new media corporations, many members of the 'virtual class' would like to believe that new technology will somehow solve America's social, racial and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.

Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies.

In this version of the Californian Ideology, each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur.

Scottish phi-losopher Adam Smith condemned England’s trade acts f or constrain-ing the “free” market i n his i nstant best seller, The Wealth o f Nations. To this f ounding father of capitalist economics, t he wealth of nations stemmed from a nation’s productive capacity, a productive capacity African nations l acked. “ All t he inland parts of Africa,” he scripted, “seem in all a ges of t he world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state i n which we find them at present.” Meanwhile, Smith praised Americans for “ contriving a new form of government f or an extensive empire, which . . . s eems very likely to become, one of t he greatest and most f ormidable that ever was i n the world.” The found-ing fathers beamed reading Adam Smith’s prediction. J efferson later called Wealth o f Nations “ the best book extant” on political e conomy.

If private-equity firms cannot be socially responsible stewards of capital, then Congress will need to act. One possible reform would involve fully taxing the advisory and other fees that private-equity investors extract from the companies they own. Another potential reform would impose restrictions on dividends paid out in the two years following a buyout. Since the current system allows private-equity firms to reap much of the positive gains from successful acquisitions, they could also be required to bear some of the liability for a company’s debt when the buyout ends in bankruptcy.

If the original price is horizontally farther away on the page from the sale price (Fig 2.8), the customer is more likely to view it as a better deal, even if the dollar amounts do not change. We equate visual distance with fiscal distance (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-19/).

There’s no doubt that the web would not be where it is today without companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and even AOL. Corporations have driven growth, investment, and innovation on the web, and social media networks have made the web a part of everyone’s lives.

As Mariana Mazzucato argues in The Entrepreneurial State, our ‘free market’ economy disincentivizes the investment in Research and Development, instead generating welfare for the wealthy through the “socialization of risk, [and the] privatization of reward.” 

Henrich, who directs Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, is a cultural evolutionary theorist, which means that he gives cultural inheritance the same weight that traditional biologists give to genetic inheritance. Parents bequeath their DNA to their offspring, but they—along with other influential role models—also transmit skills, knowledge, values, tools, habits. Our genius as a species is that we learn and accumulate culture over time. Genes alone don’t determine whether a group survives or disappears. So do practices and beliefs. Human beings are not “the genetically evolved hardware of a computational machine,” he writes. They are conduits of the spirit, habits, and psychological patterns of their civilization, “the ghosts of past institutions.”

Consumer demand is one of four important variables that, when combined, can influence and shape farming practices, according to Festa. The other three are the culture of farming communities, governmental policies, and the economic system that drives farming.

For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

When large amounts of money are created out of thin air and that currency is not spent, when that money eventually is spent, it can lead to larger than normal amounts of inflation that devalue the money you’ve worked hard for.

billionaire investor, George Soros, called the stock market a bubble. “Investors are in a bubble fueled by Fed liquidity,” he says and that’s why he “no longer participates.”

Negative interest ratesNegative interest rates can be bad for you because it means you have to pay to store your money.

Watch what the billionaires do, not what they say.

A new paper by Atif Mian of Princeton University, Ludwig Straub of Harvard University and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago expands on the idea that inequality saps demand from the economy. Just as inequality creates a need for stimulus, they argue, stimulus eventually creates more inequality. This is because it leaves economies more indebted, either because low interest rates encourage households or firms to borrow, or because the government has run deficits. Both public and private indebtedness transfer income to rich investors who own the debt, thereby depressing demand and interest rates still further.

Alfred Mitchell-Innes, writing in 1914, argued that money exists not as a medium of exchange but as a standard of deferred payment, with government money being debt the government may reclaim through taxation.

sectoral break-up of PPP projects, we would find that almost all of the projects have come up in economic infrastructure (power, transport, and telecom) compared to social infrastructure.Social infrastructure (like water supply, solid waste management, health and education) have low cost-recovery and, consequently, face massive resource-crunch.

A large number of emerging economies, especially China and some of its South-East Asian neighbours, got their manufacturing activities integrated with Global Value Chains (GVCs) to achieve efficiencies of scale and reap its benefits. Such an approach to integrate Global Value Chains and become an integral part of the Global Supply Chain significantly helped China to become the ‘factory of the world’ and transform itself into a formidable economic giant.

Self-reliance in state-run heavy industries and strategic sectors in the decades following independence had placed India ahead of most developing countries. In the 1970s and 80s, however, India did not modernise these industries to climb higher up the technological ladder.

Blair Reeves, a friend, and an occasional Margins contributor (on remote teams) wrote a persuasive piece on how companies should people based on what value they add, not pay them differently based on where they want to live. In some ways, I understand. People who live in more expensive neighborhoods in NYC or SF should not get paid more than those who decide to live farther away.

still took years before it paid off handsomely.

The idea behind the app is to allow people to rent something that they would only use once or very rarely. Rather than buying that expensive drill that you will only use for 15 mins, why not rent it from your neighbor?

Most readers will say,“How caninflation possibly move up? It is a depression out there.” As a first-order effect, we mostly agree with that, but there are aspects of this peculiar crisis thatcould produce upside inflation surprises. There are significant disruptions in the global food supply chain, and those disruptions (which could include or produce export controls, labor disputes and outages, border issues preventing labor workers from harvesting crops and other disruptions) could cause significant pockets of high foodprice inflation and limited availability,which in turn could cause social unrest and further disruption. Nobody is prepared for this kind of inflation, and if it develops, financial repression is not going to hold bond prices up at the stupid yields currently prevailing.

While it is near-universally believed that the global, particularly the American, economy was humming on all cylinders before being slugged flat by the virus, we believed that the pre-virusfinancialassets landscape was toward the high end of the riskiness scale. The record-high global leverage, the record-low government-manipulated interest rates, the $20 trillion of purchased bonds and stocks still on the books of the major central banks from the non-stop emergency policies pursued for 10 years after the emergency was over, presented a highly risky and unsound picture. It is on thatterrainthat the virus landed.