But to focus on the advantages of Vietnam’s geographical location would be to downplay the commitment of the ruling Communist Party’s investment in its own people, with the backing of international development organizations. Since the 1990s the country has borrowed more than $14 billion to revolutionize its national infrastructure, creating the conditions for rapid and sustained growth. This has included rural electrification schemes ensuring that more than 97 percent of households in the countryside have access to mains power – up from less than 50 percent in 1998 – and the extension of the nation’s road transport network. These innovations have supported the huge expansion of the country’s industrial base, powered by workers who have benefited hugely from the government’s investment in education. In standardized math and science testing, Vietnam’s youth now outperform those in the United States and United Kingdom.

The remaining major factor underlying wealth and poverty is the state of the natural environment. All human populations depend to varying degrees on renewable natural resources—especially on forests, water, soils, and seafood. It’s tricky to manage such resources sustainably. Countries that excessively deplete their resources—whether inadvertently or intentionally—tend to impoverish themselves, although the difficulty of estimating accurately the costs of resource destruction causes economists to ignore it. It helps explain why notoriously deforested countries—such as Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Madagascar, and Nepal—tend to be notoriously poor and politically unstable.

Thus, geographical latitude acting independently of institutions is an important geographic factor affecting power, prosperity, and poverty. The other important geographic factor is whether an area is accessible to ocean-going ships because it lies either on the sea coast or on a navigable river. It costs roughly seven times more to ship a ton of cargo by land than by sea. That puts landlocked countries at an economic disadvantage, and helps explain why landlocked Bolivia and semilandlocked Paraguay are the poorest countries of South America. It also helps explain why Africa, with no river navigable to the sea for hundreds of miles except the Nile, and with fifteen landlocked nations, is the poorest continent. Eleven of those fifteen landlocked African nations have average incomes of $600 or less; only two countries outside Africa (Afghanistan and Nepal, both also landlocked) are as poor.

Two major factors contribute to the poverty of tropical countries compared to temperate countries: diseases and agricultural productivity. The tropics are notoriously unhealthy. Tropical diseases differ on average from temperate diseases, in several respects. First, there are far more parasitic diseases (such as elephantiasis and schistosomiasis) in tropical areas, because cold temperate winters kill parasite stages outside our bodies, but tropical parasites can thrive outside our bodies all year long. Second, disease vectors, such as mosquitoes and ticks, are far more diverse in tropical than in temperate areas.

The remaining factor contributing to good institutions, of which Acemoglu and Robinson mention some examples, involves another paradox, termed “the curse of natural resources.” One might naively expect countries generously endowed with natural resources (such as minerals, oil, and tropical hardwoods) to be richer than countries poorer in natural resources. In fact, the trend is opposite, the result of the many ways in which national dependence on certain types of natural resources (like diamonds and oil) tends to promote bad institutions, such as corruption, civil wars, inflation, and neglect of education.

An additional factor behind the origin of the good institutions that I discussed above is termed “the reversal of fortune,” and is the subject of Chapter 9 of Why Nations Fail. Among non-European countries colonized by Europeans during the last five hundred years, those that were initially richer and more advanced tend paradoxically to be poorer today. That’s because, in formerly rich countries with dense native populations, such as Peru, Indonesia, and India, Europeans introduced corrupt “extractive” economic institutions, such as forced labor and confiscation of produce, to drain wealth and labor from the natives. (By extractive economic institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson mean practices and policies “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset [the governing elite].”)

The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. For example, Europe began to acquire highly productive agriculture 9,000 years ago and state government by at least 4,000 years ago, but subequatorial Africa acquired less productive agriculture only between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago and state government even more recently. Those historical differences prove to have huge effects on the modern distribution of wealth. Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs showed that, on average, nations in which agriculture arose many millennia ago—e.g., European nations—tend to be richer today than nations with a shorter history of agriculture (e.g., subequatorial African nations), and that this factor explains about half of all the modern national variation in wealth. Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman showed further that, if one compares countries that were equally poor fifty years ago (e.g., South Korea and Ghana), the countries with a long history of state government (e.g., South Korea) have on the average been getting rich faster than those with a short history (e.g., Ghana).

There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? The most important factor behind their emergence is the historical duration of centralized government. Until the rise of the world’s first states, beginning around 3400 BC, all human societies were bands or tribes or chiefdoms, without any of the complex economic institutions of governments. A long history of government doesn’t guarantee good institutions but at least permits them; a short history makes them very unlikely. One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.That cruel reality underlies the tragedy of modern nations, such as Papua New Guinea, whose societies were until recently tribal. Oil and mining companies there pay royalties intended for local landowners through village leaders, but the leaders often keep the royalties for themselves. That’s because they have internalized their society’s practice by which clan leaders pursue their personal interests and their own clan’s interests, rather than representing everyone’s interests.

So the logical response to Trumpism is to counter him with someone who can truly challenge the economic status quo, rather than being a mere avatar for such hopes.

Trump is the product not just of a fluke election or a racist and sexist backlash, but the culmination of late capitalism

The waves that carried a ridiculous TV celebrity to the presidency are being propelled by a deeper current of globalization: the triumph of the unreality industries, the move of manufacturing jobs out of the developed world, and the proliferation of technologies that saturate us with media.

encanaillement

the collapse of old bourgeois norms among the rich and powerful, even as class hierarchy remained strong (if not more entrenched than ever)

teaching the president* the secret to talking to the portraits in the hall

income

His appearance, however, was not unpleasing, in spite of his being in the opinion of Marianne and Margaret an absolute old bachelor, for he was on the wrong side of five-and-thirty;

hardly forty.

was merely a cottage

moiety

economic planning regions

He has only two thousand pounds of his own

consuming use

fifty guineas

When Alan Greenspan testified before Con gress, he typically did not recount data alone. Rather, he told a story, and it was the story, not the data by themselves, that propagated through the news media because it encapsu lated in easily comprehensible form the mean ing exposed by data collection and analysis

drove about town in very knowing gigs

limited the number of their servants to three

the prospects of a Russian nuclear submarine baseoflE Cienfuegos was not a "crisis" because President Nixon chosenot to employ rhetoric to create one.^

Overall, department stores employ a third fewer people now than they did in 2001. That’s half a million traditional jobs gone — about eighteen times as many jobs as were lost in coal mining over the same period.

Discussions contained in the Bitnet list PACS-L @UHUPVM 1 suggest that there is some interest in recognizing the Internet as a publica- tion, albeit an amorphous one, that might never- theless be subject to cataloging.

Nonetheless, the costs of disseminating one’s best work on an SDG are considerable.Academic success demands that scholars make contributions to the body of knowledge intheir research area. However, electronic outlets like SDGs provide little basis upon which tovalidate this success. SDGs have not been in existence long enough to instill confidence intheir institutional permanence. This is further complicated by ambiguous copyright law andcitation conventions, making the establishment of one’s claim to original ideas unclear.Unlike electronic journals, it is still unclear how institutional rewards will be distributed forthe kind of collaborative electronic scholarship takes place in ListServ-based communities.Unless lists gain more of a scholarly legitimacy, it is likely that little of traditional academicvalue, or that which can compete with the more traditional forms of scholarly production

economic religion of our time

When Berger refers to the "economic religion of our time" he is talking about the problem of consumption that we have. Most of the industrial revolution was driven on the back of the need for consumption. This incessant need for better and newer goods causes countless problems in today's world from  economic collapses to environmental destruction. It is this need for consumption and expansion that caused many of the issues in the Arctic. Oil and gas companies looking for new places to drill caused massive environmental destruction in the region. Not to say that the Inuit people do not enjoy the luxury of modern goods, but it has been seen, like in many indigenous people, that they do not have the same need for these items. In the Inuit culture they believe that living off the land and avoiding modern day luxuries is an important part of self-growth. They believe that "living off the land creates intelligent and moral persons. Individuals develop isuma (reason, capacity to think) through facing the elements of sea, snow, ice, and wind." This philosophy can be seen throughout many indigenous people all around the world. This Inuit in particular believe that excess consumption leads to people being soft and further removed from the historic Inuit culture. This is definitely a legitimate position for them because so many problems have been caused in their societies from the need for consumption of "white people".  The economic religion of our time is one with dramatic consequences and tremendous benefits as well. No one can deny that this need for consumption has driven our society to many great discoveries and inventions that have made life better. But it has definitely come at the cost of certain populations.  

The system that delivers fresh salad greens like clockwork to the nation's grocery stores is breaking down slightly.

geographical mobility in America has been on the decline for three decades

His Senior year at CCNY, Arrow took the advanced course on relational logic taught by Alfred Tarski, where the eminent philosopher took pains to reintroduce the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest yet most neglected American philosopher.

Maybe the boss has one hundred employees. Each of these employees only has one job. If the boss decides she dislikes an employee, she can drive her to quit and still be 99% as productive while she looks for a replacement; once the replacement is found, the company will go on exactly as smoothly as before.

"Polite" classical education continued, needless to say, in schools for the upper classes and in the traditional universities.

where they were able to live comfortably on their inherited income,

In recent years, federal regulators shopping undercover have found about 1 in 4 funeral homes break the rule and fail to disclose price information.

"And she said that she had spent pretty much all day on the phone and on the Internet, simply trying to price funeral services, and she couldn't do it. She actually just couldn't get a straight answer about what products and services were being offered and how much they cost."

consumers spend an extra $1,900, on average when they buy a package, versus an "a la carte" funeral.

The Houston-based firm claims 16 percent of the $19 billion North American death care market, which includes the U.S. and Canada. Company documents say it has 24,000 employees and is the largest owner of funeral homes and cemeteries in the world.

In a months-long investigation into pricing and marketing in the funeral business, also known as the death care industry, NPR spoke with funeral directors, consumers and regulators. We collected price information from around the country and visited providers. We found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress.

where’s the positive evidence of what they’re claiming

Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. 

Uber is synonymous with its “surge pricing” policy—when cars are scarce and rides in high demand, users are warned that the cost of a ride may be much higher than normal. It’s then up to them whether to pay the premium or find another way to get where they’re going.

Instead they would be dismissed as being a waste of a colleague's time, or as beside the point, or as uninformed, or simply as unprofessional. This last judgment would not be a casual one; to be unprofessional is not simply to have violated some external rule or piece of decorum. It is to have ig- nored (and by ignoring flouted) the process by which the institution determines the conditions under which its rewards will be given or withheld. These conditions are nowhere written down, but they are understood by everyone who works in the field and, indeed, any understanding one might have of the field is inseparable from (because it will have been produced by) an awareness, often tacit, of these con- ditions

ow, for instance, should a promotion andtenure committee view the contribution of the 99th listedauthor on a particle physics paper or the 36th author on agenome sequencing study? What may seem to constitute aminiscule portion of a single journal article may, in fact,have consumed a significant amount of that individual’sprofessional time and energy. T

Under the standard model, the rights and responsibilitiesof authorship are clearly apprehended by all parties: authors,editors, referees, and readers. In appending my name to thisarticle I am nailing my colors to mast; if the article attractscritical approval, is discussed, quoted, and, in due course,cited in the scholarly literature, I shall be happy to bank thesymbolic capital which accrues to me as author and origi-nator. If the paper is challenged because of exiguity oftheoretical, historical, or empirical heft, I shall simply haveto face the music: there are no coauthors to help deflectcriticism. Likewise, if I am challenged for drawing toosparingly, selectively, or generously on the ideas and workof others, I understand the possible consequences. However,I have chosen not to hide behind the cloak of anonymity, orbypass the rigors of peer review by posting a version of thispaper on my Web site; rather, I want to publicize my ideasamong my peers, and the best way to do that, and signify mytrustworthiness, is to pursue publication in an accreditedforum. As a serial author, I am fully cognizant of the rightsand responsibilities of authorship. I understand the norms ofscholarly publishing, and I am aware of the sanctions thatmay be invoked if infractions occur. Should the argumentsin this paper prove flawed, no one but myself is to blame,and that includes those whom I have named in the acknowl-edgments section. If the paper attracts attention, I shall behappy to bask in the glow.

According to federal rules, temporary visas known as H-1Bs are for foreigners with “a body of specialized knowledge” not readily available in the labor market. The visas should be granted only when they will not undercut the wages or “adversely affect the working conditions” of Americans.But in the past five years, through loopholes in the rules, tens of thousands of American workers have been replaced by foreigners on H-1B and other temporary visas, according to Prof. Hal Salzman, a labor force expert at Rutgers University.

d. A stu-dent’s grade is a signal to future employers about thestudents’ ability, therefore, students want to maximize thegrade that they receive in a class. The goal of the pro-fessor/administrator, hereafter called the professor, is toassign grades that maximize the informational learning ofthe students. Students generally want to put in the leastamount of effort to earn a given grade—the measure ofthe knowledge that the student has mastered in the class.8The professor wants to maximize the signal that the gradegives to future employers, i.e. to have the student earn thehighest grade, but does not want to lower the amount ofknowledge that the students are required to lear

Nowhere are there as many bullshit jobs, however, as in Silicon Valley. A survey of 5,000 software developers and engineers last year found that, in the words of The Economist, “many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated.” Only 19% of tech employees say they are satisfied with their jobs. A mere 17% feel valued. Or, as a former math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

At a universal basic income forum in Taiwan's capital on May 19, Deaton encouraged governments to consider lifting the financial burden on low-income citizens with basic income grants, the Taipei Times reports.

Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.

The Finnish government is currently drawing up plans to introduce a national basic income. A final proposal won’t be presented until November 2016, but if all goes to schedule, Finland will scrap all existing benefits and instead hand out €800 ($870) per month—to everyone.

The paper with the ambitious title Optimal Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound Bullard has co-authored with Costas Azariadis, Aarti Singh and Jacek Suda.

In short, there are many people (the oversupply factor) competing for prestigious,desirable and scarce rewards and resources (the funding factor), in a struggle thatbestows those rewards disproportionately on those of marginally greater achieve-ment (the tournament factor). This situation is supported to the detriment of that‘‘legion of the discontented’’ and to the benefit of senior investigators, because it‘‘generates good research by employing idealistic young graduate students andpostdoctoral fellows at low cost’’ [26]. In other words, the benefits accrue to fundingand employing institutions. This paper explores some of the costs that accompanythese benefits

Richard B. Freeman and colleagues [28] havecharacterized the problem as follows: ‘‘Research in the biosciences fits a tournamenteconomic structure. A tournament offers participants the chance of winning a bigprize—an independent research career, tenure, a named chair, scientific renown,awards—through competition.... It fosters intense competition by amplifying smalldifferences in productivity into large differences in recognition and reward. Well-structured tournaments stimulate competition. Because the differences in rewardsexceed the differences in output, there is a disproportionate incentive to ‘win’’’(p.2293). Research environments in which only small numbers of scientists have theopportunity to gain significant attention increase the competitive stakes: playing thegame may be a gamble, but the payoff for winning is significant [28,36]

This website offers policy advice and economic analysis from a group of professional economists, legal scholars, and financial market practitioners . We started this blog in order to weigh in on the serious challenges facing the global economy following the financial meltdown in 2007. We aim to provide an accurate description of the cause(s) of the current meltdown as well as some fresh ideas about how policymakers — here and abroad — should address to the continued weakness in their economies.

Stupid models are extremely useful. They are usefulbecause humans are boundedly rational and because language is imprecise. It is often only by formalizing a complex system that we can make progress in understanding it. Formal models should be a necessary component of the behavioral scientist’s toolkit. Models are stupid, and we need more of them.

Microeconomic models based on rational choice theory are useful for developing intuition, and may even approximate reality in a fewspecial cases, but the history of behavioral economics shows that standard economic theory has also provided a smorgasbord of null hypotheses to be struck down by empirical observation.

Where differences between conditions are indicated, avoid the mistake of running statistical analyses as if you were sampling from a larger population.

A model’s strength stemsfromits precision.

However, I want to be careful not to elevate modelers above those scientists who employ other methods.

Table 1.Twelve functions served by false models. Adapted with permissionfrom Wimsatt

To paraphrase Gunawardena (2014), a model is a logical engine for turning assumptions into conclusions.

the stupidity of a model is often its strength. By focusing on some key aspects of a real-world system(i.e., those aspectsinstantiated in the model), we can investigate how such a system would work if, in principle, we really couldignore everything we are ignoring. This only sounds absurd until one recognizes that, in our theorizing about the nature of reality –both as scientists and as quotidianhumans hopelessly entangled in myriad webs of connection and conflict –weignore thingsall the time.

The generalized linear model, the work horse ofthe social sciences, models data as being randomly drawn from a distribution whose mean varies according to some parameter. The linear model is so obviously wrong yet so useful that the mathematical anthropologist Richard McElreathhas dubbed it “the geocentric model of applied statistics,”in reference to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system that erroneously placed the earth rather than the sun at the center but nevertheless produced accurate predictions of planetary motion as they appeared in the night sky(McElreath 2015).

Unfortunately, my own experience working with complex systems and working among complexity scientistssuggests that we are hardly immune to such stupidity. Consider the case of Marilyn Vos Savantand the Monty Hall problem.

Mitch Resnick, in his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, details his experiences teaching gifted high school students about the dynamics of complex systems using artificial life models (Resnick 1994). He showed them how organized behavior could emerge when individualsresponded only to local stimuli using simple rules, without the need for a central coordinating authority. Resnick reports that even after weeks spent demonstrating the principles of emergence,using computer simulations that the students programmed themselves, many students still refused to believe that what they were seeing could really work without central leadership.

This research shows there are low- and high-trust regions of the United States. Nevada is a very low-trust region. (Nobody seems to be very surprised by that.) Minnesota is a very high-trust region. The Deep South is a very low-trust region. We see similar disparities internationally. In Brazil, two percent of people say they trust other people. In Norway, 65 percent say they trust other people. So what are the characteristics of low-trust regions? Few people vote, parents and schools are less active. There’s less philanthropy in low-trust regions, greater crime of all kinds, lower longevity, worse health, lower academic achievement in schools.

Conventional economic theory maintains that people will always behave in a purely self-interested manner. According to this worldview, it makes no sense to trust, whether in a trust game or in real life, as any trust will be exploited. The trustee will always keep her entire windfall for herself, so the investor would be better off not transferring any money in the first place. And yet when researchers like Joyce Berg and others have had people play the trust game with real monetary stakes, they have repeatedly found that the average investor will transfer half of her initial endowment and receive similar amounts in return. Through the trust game, researchers have also discovered a number of factors that seem to drive levels of trust. Familiarity breeds trust—players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior, or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum. RP.21 Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

Bullard's co-authors are Costas Azariadis of Washington University and the St. Louis Fed, Aarti Singh of the University of Sydney and Jacek Suda of the Narodowy Bank Polski.

Euro zone leaders at a summit in Brussels were reviewing a draft proposal from their finance ministers on Sunday that sets out conditions for Greece to open negotiations on a bailout. The following is the draft of the paper, seen by Reuters. Phrases contained within square brackets were not yet agreed by all 19 states

text of the final conclusions

For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

The naive economist who truly believes in the equal bargaining position of labor and capital would find all of these things very puzzling.

Free marketeers are claiming that if we build enough luxury housing it will eventually trickle down and turn into housing for the poor and middle class. This is the failed policy of Reaganomics at its worst.

Yet policymakers all too often fail to fit remedies to the circumstances. Rust Belt cities require set-asides just like San Francisco, while Bay Area institutions such as Stanford hand out generous housing subsidies to new faculty, a measure that only serves to drive housing prices up, instead of searching for ways to increase supply.

Funny how Corporate America loves the term “free market” except when they are under threat.

If the community source model proves viable, it will do so because it is an economically efficient coordinating mechanism for software investments in higher education as an industry. An analysis of any historical software system—online card catalogs, Web-based registration, course management systems—over a five-year period will reveal that individual institutions separately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in home-grown or commercial software. Can that flow of higher education resources be harnessed to create better economics and shared innovation outcomes for everyone?

As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.

If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.