Productivity paradox

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pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Shekelle, “Health Information Technology: An Updated Systematic Review with a Focus on Meaningful Use,” Annals of Internal Medicine 160:48–54 (2014). 248 Julia Adler-Milstein, a professor at the University of Michigan Interview of AdlerMilstein by the author, June 27, 2014. 248 Ashish Jha … recalled the cheerleading about efficiency Interview of Jha by the author, July 2, 2014. 248 Spencer Jones and colleagues from RAND considered the IT productivity paradox S. S. Jones, P. S. Heaton, R. S. Rudin, and E. C. Schneider, “Unraveling the IT Productivity Paradox—Lessons for Health Care,” New England Journal of Medicine 366:2243–2245 (2012). 249 Peter Drucker … presciently described P. F. Drucker, “The Coming of the New Organization,” Harvard Business Review, January 1988. 250 “Organizational factors that unlock the value of IT” E. Brynjolfsson and L. M. Hitt, “Beyond the Productivity Paradox: Computers Are the Catalyst for Bigger Changes,” Communications of the ACM 41:49–55 (1998). 250 The business model of “creative destruction” J.

The history of technology tells us that it is these financial, environmental, and organizational factors, rather than the digital wizardry itself, that determine the success and impact of new IT tools. This phenomenon is known as the “productivity paradox” of information technology. 38 The name comes from the fact that Gross and Tecco decided to launch the organization while sitting in Harvard Business School’s Rock Hall. Chapter 26 The Productivity Paradox You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. —Nobel Prize–winning MIT economist Robert Solow, writing in 1987 Between the time David Blumenthal stepped down as national coordinator for health IT and became CEO of the Commonwealth Fund, he returned to Boston from 2011 to 2013 to manage the transition of Partners HealthCare from a homegrown electronic health record to the one made by Epic.

McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 244 In a seminal 1993 article E. Brynjolfsson, “The Productivity Paradox of Information Technology,” Communications of the ACM 36:66–77 (1993). 245 after electricity replaced steam engines P. A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 1:355–361 (1990). 246 Robert Wah … told me what happened Interview of Wah by the author, August 4, 2014. 246 In 1995, the consulting group Gartner coined Gartner Hype Cycle, available at http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp. 247 One widely cited 2005 RAND study R.


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

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

The productivity slowdown appears structural and real. 78. Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson, forthcoming, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox,” 25. 79. C. F. Kerry and J. Karsten, 2017, “Gauging Investment in Self-Driving Cars,” Brookings Institution, October 16. https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-self-driving-cars/. 80. Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson, forthcoming, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox,” 25. 81. N. F. Crafts and T. C. Mills, 2017, “Trend TFP Growth in the United States: Forecasts versus Outcomes” (Discussion Paper 12029, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London).

Ibid. 17. V. Smil, 2005, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Oxford University Press), 53. 18. Nye, 1990, Electrifying America, 232. 19. P. A. David, 1990, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80 (2): 355–61. 20. W. D. Devine Jr., 1983, “From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification,” Journal of Economic History 43 (2): 347–72. 21. H. Jerome, 1934, “Mechanization in Industry” (Working Paper 27, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA), 48. 22.

., 2016, “Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation,” preprint, submitted October 8, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.08144.pdf. 12. I. M. Cockburn, R. Henderson, and S. Stern, 2018, “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Innovation (Working Paper 24449, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA). 13. E. Brynjolfsson, D. Rock, and C. Syverson, forthcoming, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics,” in The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda, ed. Ajay K. Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), figure 1. 14. “Germany Starts Facial Recognition Tests at Rail Station,” 2017, New York Post, December 17. 15.


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Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

New York Times, 2 November, sec. A, p. 16. Arrow, Kenneth J. 1984. "Information and Economic Behavior." In Collected Papers, edited by Kenneth J. Arrow, 136 52. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Attewell, Paul. 1994. "Information Technology and the Productivity Paradox." In Organizational Linkages: Understanding the Productivity Paradox, edited by D. Harris, 13 53. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Baker, Nicholson. 1994. "Discards." The New Yorker, 4 April, 65 86. Balzac, Honoré de. 1989. The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau. Translated by Ellen Marriage. New York: Caroll & Graf.

The numbers may seem abstract, but their significance can be directly grasped from average earnings. Had growth continued at the 1948 to 1973 rate, U.S. average income in 1994 would have been $47,600. It was, in fact, $35,300. 32 Economists refer to this surprising decline in productivity growth despite massive investment in computers as the "productivity paradox." Paul David, an economist at Stanford University, has argued, however, that the paradoxical slowdown was not such a paradox at all. Looking to the past, he points out that a slump in productivity followed the appearance of industrial-strength dynamos in the 1880s. Economically beneficial effects of the dynamo, David shows, did not appear in productivity data for another three decades.

Indeed, we can now see that the heart of managing a business is managing its processes: assuring that they are performing up to their potential, looking for opportunities to make them better, and translating these opportunities into realities. MICHAEL HAMMER, Beyond Reengineering 1 By the late 1980s the cumulative effects of the productivity paradox, the dramatic changes fostered by information technology, the general slowdown in the economy, and the rise in global competition were making business life hell.2 It was clear that current organization structures were not producing a "virtuous circle" between investment and production. But few could imagine what the right organization structure might be.3 The pressure to do something, anything, gave birth to innumerable fashions and fads in management.


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

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

However, in 1973 productivity growth slowed down (see figure 7.1). In 1987, Bob Solow himself noted that the slowdown seemed to coincide with the early days of the computer revolution, famously remarking, “We see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”4 In 1993, Erik published an article evaluating the “Productivity Paradox” that noted the computers were still a small share of the economy and that complementary innovations were typically needed before general purpose technologies like IT had their real impact.5 Later work taking into account more detailed data on productivity and IT use among individual firms revealed a strong and significant correlation: the heaviest IT users were dramatically more productive than their competitors.6 By the mid-1990s, these benefits were big enough to become visible in the overall U.S. economy, which experienced a general productivity surge.

While this rise had a number of causes, economists now attribute the lion’s share of those gains to the power of IT.7 The productivity slowdown in the 1970s, and the subsequent speed-up twenty years later, had an interesting precedent. In the late 1890s, electricity was being introduced to American factories. But the “productivity paradox” of that era was that labor productivity growth did not take off for over twenty years. While the technologies involved were very different, many of the underlying dynamics were quite similar. University of Chicago economist Chad Syverson looked closely at the underlying productivity data and showed how eerily close this analogy is.8 As shown in figure 7.2, the slow start and subsequent acceleration of productivity growth in the electricity era matches well with the speed-up that began in the 1990s.

They not only made it possible to increase sales from $1 billion a week in 1993 to $1 billion every thirty-six hours in 2001, but also helped drive dramatic increases in the entire retailing and distribution industries, accounting for much of the additional productivity growth nationwide during this period.11 IT investment soared in the 1990s, peaking with a surge of investment in the latter half of the decade as many companies upgraded their systems to take advantage of the Internet, implement large enterprise systems, and avoid the much-hyped Y2K bug. At the same time, innovation in semiconductors took gigantic leaps, so the surging spending on IT delivered even more rapidly increasing levels of computer power. A decade after the computer productivity paradox was popularized, Harvard’s Dale Jorgenson, working with Kevin Stiroh at the New York Federal Reserve Bank did a careful growth accounting and concluded, “A consensus has emerged that a large portion of the acceleration through 2000 can be traced to the sectors of the economy that produce information technology or use IT equipment and software most intensively.”12 But it’s not just the computer-producing sectors that are doing well.


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Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Solow’s critique became known as the productivity paradox. Brynjolfsson, a technology optimist, has two answers for the skeptics. First, he argues, the official statistics do not fully capture the benefits of digital innovation. And second, he says that in technology, revolutions take time. To explain, Brynjolfsson points to his own work on technology and work practices, and to the research of others including a classic study by Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford. In his 1990 paper, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” David observed that the electric motor was introduced in the early 1880s but did not generate discernible productivity gains until the 1920s.

Gallo’s use of, 123–33 Predix, 136 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 44 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 208 Privacy Act (1974), 185 privacy concerns, 183–206 balancing privacy and data collection, 202–6 big data and personally identifying information, 187–92 cameras and, 183–86 data correlation and, 113 discrimination by statistical inference, 192–95 early computers and, 185–87 marketing and use of data, 195–97 social network data collection and, 197–202 productivity paradox, of computers, 72–75 Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change (Dresner), 76 psycholinguistics, used for studying tweets, 199 Pulleyblank, William, 45–46, 47–48, 49 quantitative-to-qualitative transformation, data and, 7–8 “reality mining,” 206 Reisman, David, 155 Richardson, Tara, 106–7 Riedl, Paul, 156 Rock Health, 16 Rogers, Matt, 144 romantic relationships, social network research and, 87–88 Rometty, Virginia Haydock and, 156 IBM’s big data strategy and, 9, 42–45, 46, 47, 53–56 Rosenn, Itamar, 89–90, 94 Rotenberg, Marc, 204–5 Rothschild, Jeff, 86, 91–92, 98 Rubinsteyn, Alex, 180 Ruh, William, 134, 135–36 Sabre (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), 46 Sage Bionetworks, 101–2, 170–71 SAS Institute, 52 satellite imagery, precision agriculture and, 129–32 Schadt, Eric background, 172–73 at Mount Sinai, 171–72, 173–74, 175 Sage Bionetworks and, 102 Schrage, Michael, 197 Science, 108 scientific management (Taylorism), 207–8 Seay, Mike, 188–89 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 119–20 Shah, Rachana.


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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

The United States, which by that time had become the world’s largest and most advanced economy, wouldn’t reach its apogee until 1915 when over 26 million horses lived and worked alongside humans. Within just a few decades, however, they would disappear from the world of work, substituted in a range of tasks by machines which were more reliable, didn’t get sick and, most importantly, led to far greater productivity. Paradoxical as it might seem, we employed animals like never before at the very moment they were becoming obsolete. This was a theme returned to in 1983 by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief. For Leontief, human labour in the twenty-first century would come to resemble horses at the turn of the twentieth.

Now, some said, it was no longer capable of even measuring economic growth properly. This was most famously expressed by the economist Robert Solow when he claimed in 1987 that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics.’ That conclusion was a response to the ‘productivity paradox’ which so troubled economists at the time – namely, how investment in information technology over the 1980s had a seemingly negligible impact on productivity measures, which actually slowed over the decade. But what if, rather than digital technologies failing to increase productivity, the changes they wrought were so significant as to require a new way of measuring success altogether?

See also resources MinION sequencer, 148 M-Kopa, 109 mode of production, 195 modern welfare state, 213 molecular assembly, 180 Monetary Policy Committee, 229 Moon Express, 124, 125–6, 127, 130 Moore, Gordon, 42–4, 46 Moore’s Law, 41, 44–5, 81, 143, 145 Moravec’s Paradox, 81, 82 Mosa Meats, 172 M-Pesa, 109 municipal protectionism, 207, 212, 213, 216 music industry, 234–5 Musk, Elon, 119–21, 135 MX1, 125 MX9, 125 Myconius, Friedrich, 240 Napster, 154 NASA, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 131, 137 National Energy Investment Banks (NEIBs), 219, 221 National Health Service (NHS), 210, 213 nationalisation, 213 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), 38–9, 130–1 NEAs (near-Earth asteroids), 38–9, 130–1 NEIBs (National Energy Investment Banks), 219, 221 neoliberalism, 26–7, 228 neoliberalism, break with Carillion, 201–3 decarbonisation, 217–23 East Coast Main Line, 203–4 Grenfell Tower, 206–8 Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), 205 Preston Model, 208–11 Universal Basic Services (UBS), 213–17 worker-owned businesses and banks, 211–12 New Labour, 207 Newcomen, Thomas, 33 Newton, Isaac, 32 NHS (National Health Service), 210, 213 nickel, 118 Nigeria, 107–8 Obama, Barack, 2, 9, 21, 128 Off-Grid, 109–10 One Planet Tax, 222 Orwell, George, 19 Osborne, Michael, 87 OSIRIS-REx study, 131 ouroboros, 205 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 127, 136 outsourcing, 202–4, 207, 217 ‘Oxi’ vote, 28 Passivhaus, 114 ‘peak copper’, 118 peak horse, 72–4 peak human, 74–8 PECO engine, 125 Perfect Day Foods, 178 Peter, 5–6 PETMAN, 82–3 petrol vehicles, 105 phenylketonuria (PKU), 147, 147n Philips, 77–8 phosphorus, 118 photography, 402 photosynthesis, 168 photovoltaic (PV) cells, 47, 102–15 PKU (phenylketonuria), 147, 147n Planetary Resources, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136–7 Podemos party, 27–8, 30 political transformation, vehicles for, 194 politics of anti-austerity, 201 of energy transition, 218 green, 188–92 red, 188–92 relationship between technology and, 237 population, 139–40 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 166 populism, 187–8. See also luxury populism Post, Mark, 170–2, 175, 176 post-capitalism information and, 59–60 without communism, 56–9 poverty, 24–5 Preston Model, 208–11, 213 private space industry, 120–1 privatisation, 202–4, 207, 209–10 production, mode of, 195 productivity paradox, 233 productivity revolution, 60–3 progressive procurement, 207 property-owning democracy, 25 prototype politics, 198 PV (photovoltaic) cells, 47, 102–5 radical politics, revival of, 27–8 railway lines, 33–4 realism, capitalist, 17–9 red politics, 188–92 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 206–7 Reformation, 240, 241 regeneration, 207 Reither, Walter, 70–1 Relativity Space, 123, 124 renewable energy about, 104, 108 financing, 219–20 generating and storing, 218–19 green movement and, 238–9 transitioning to, 218–19 renewables, 106 ‘Reopening the American Frontier: Exploring How the Outer Space Treaty Will Impact American Commerce and Settlement in Space’, 129 Resolution Foundation, 58 resources asteroid mining, 119–20 globalism and, 197 post-scarcity in, 117–37 private space industry, 120–1 space, 119–37 Ricardo, David, 69, 233 rice production, 161–2 Richards, Bob, 124 Rifkin, Jeremy, 79 Rio Earth Summit, 98, 197 robots about, 78, 133 Atlas, 82–3, 132 da Vinci surgery robot, 90 information technology and robotics, 76 ‘KIVA’, 89 rise of, 80–2 Rocket Lab, 121, 122, 123 Romer, Paul, 63–5, 199–200 Roosevelt, Franklin, 194 Rutter, Brad, 80 Sanders, Bernie, 29, 30 Saturn V, 120, 122 Saudi Arabia, 220–1 Schumpeter, Joseph, 36 Scottish National Party, 28 Second Disruption, 11, 32–6, 72–4, 79, 94, 96, 106, 134, 139, 141, 163, 188, 190, 192, 198, 201, 208, 217, 232–3, 236, 238, 241 Selden, Mike, 172, 173 self-regulation, consequences of, 206 ‘Sermon on Indulgences and Grace’ (Luther), 241 Silicon Valley, 196 ‘Six Laws of Technology’ (Kranzberg), 237 Skelton, Noel, 25 Smith, Adam, 69, 233 ‘Social Prosperity for the Future’, 214 socialised capital market, 230–2 socialism, 191 society, electoralism and, 194–6 soil fertility, 118 ‘solar home’, 113–14 solar power/energy about, 101–5, 107 Global South and, 106–11 in Saudi Arabia, 220–1 Solow, Robert, 233 Sondergaard, Peter, 87 space asteroid mining, 133–4 falling costs of, 122–4 mineral wealth in, 134–7 Moon Express, 125–6 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), 130–1 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 127 as private industry, 120–1 private sector, 132–3 SPACE Act (2015), 2, 9 Space Launch System, 120 Space Shuttle programme, 122 SpaceX, 119–21, 122, 133–4, 156 speculative economy, repressing the, 229–30 Sputnik, 137, 153 state socialism, 213 steam engine, 93, 95, 149, 164, 201, 238 steam power, 33 Summers, Larry, 64–5, 116, 199–200 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, 24 surplus, food, disruptions and, 159–60 sustenance about, 178–9 cultured meat, 170–5 egg whites, 177–9 food, surplus and disruptions, 159–60 meat from vegetables, 175–7 milk, 177–9 planetary limits, 160–4 post-scarcity in, 159–81 synthetic meat, 168–70 wine, 177–81 synthetic meat, 168–70 Syriza, 28, 30 TALEN (transcription activator-like effector-based nucleases), 150 Taylor, Frederick, 60–3, 85 Taylorism, 60–3 technological unemployment, 86–8 technology Marx on, 237 relationship between politics and, 237 Technology and Unemployment report, 53 Terran 1 rocket, 124 Tesla, 84, 85, 106 Thatcher, Margaret, 206–7 Third Disruption, 11, 37–48, 70, 79, 82, 92, 116, 143–4, 148, 156, 171, 185–8, 192–6, 201, 212–4, 217, 221, 226, 232, 234, 236, 238, 241–3 3-D Magnetic Recording technology, 45–6 3-D printing, 122–4, 127 Tithebarn project, 208 transatlantic telegraph cable, 34 transcription activator-like effector-based nucleases (TALEN), 150 transportation, in UK, 215 travel, exponential, 39–40 Trump, Donald, 21, 24, 29, 30 Trussell Trust, 24 Turnspit dog, 72–3 Uber, 84, 85 UBI (Universal Basic Income), 224–6 UBS (Universal Basic Services), 207–8, 213–17, 224, 226, 236 UK ageing in Britain, 141–4 healthcare in, 215–16 transportation in, 215 UKIP, 28 unemployment, 26 unfreedom, 214 unions, in Britain, 211–12 Universal Basic Income (UBI), 224–6 Universal Basic Services (UBS), 207–8, 213–17, 224, 226, 236 University College London, 90 US Department of Agriculture, 178 US Food and Drug Administration, 153 US National Institute of Health, 147 US National Space Council, 129 US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, 129 utopia, from crisis to, 48–9 V2, 137 Valeti, Uma, 173 vegetables, meat from, 175–7 Verne, Jules Around the World in Eighty Days, 33 von Braun, Wernher, 120, 128 voting, 195 wage-labour, 35 Wagner, Erika, 135 Wales, 114 Watson (computer), 80 Watson, James, 144, 149 Watt, James, 33 Watt’s steam engine, 93, 95, 149, 201, 238 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 69–70 wheat production, 161–2, 165 Whole Foods Market, 88 Wikipedia, 235 wind power/energy, 111–13 windfall tax, 230 wine, cellular agriculture and, 177–81 work, future of, 92–3 worker-owned cooperatives, 209–10 worker-owned economy, 207–8, 211–12, 219 World Bank, 221, 222 Wycliffe, John, 239–41 Xplorer, 132 Yang (factory worker), 1–2 ZFNs (zinc finger nucleases), 150 zinc, 118 zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), 150 Žižek, Slavoj, 17n


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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Bold Type Books. Pethokoukis, James. 2016. “The Productivity Paradox: Why the US Economy Might Be a Lot Stronger Than the Government Is Saying.” AEI Blog, May 20. www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/the-productivity-paradox-us-economy-might-be-a-lot-stronger. Pethokoukis, James. 2017a. “Google Economist Hal Varian Tries to Explain America’s Productivity Paradox, and How Workers Should Deal with Automation,” May 5. www.aei.org/economics/google-economist-hal-varian-tries-to-explain-americas-productivity-paradox-and-how-workers-should-deal-with-automation. Pethokoukis, James. 2017b.

“The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots.” Journal of the European Economic Association 19, no. 6: 3104‒3153. Davenport, Thomas H. 1992. Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. David, Paul A. 1989. “Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror.” www.gwern.net/docs/eco nomics/automation/1989-david.pdf. David, Paul A., and Gavin Wright. 2003. “General Purpose Technologies and Surges in Productivity: Historical Reflections on the Future of the ICT Revolution.” In The Economic Future in Historical Perspective, edited by Paul A.


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

Most other countries likewise account software expenditure in the same way – the difference being that in the UK the FWE sector is larger and the mis-measurement more significant. IT investment as an enabling technology In the 1980s, economic studies seemed not to be able to find much evidence of information technology making much difference to economic growth. This was known at the time as the ‘productivity paradox.’6 Nobel laureate Robert Solow famously quipped “You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”.7 But micro studies since have provided compelling evidence that IT is not only a technology that enhances growth but also one that enables further productivity gains.

But you only have to go back to the 1960s to discover that there really was a Golden Age of Parliamentary debate. 4. ‘Understanding National Accounts’, François Lequiller and Derek Blades, 2016, Paris (www.oecd.org/std/na/38451313.pdf). 5. www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/Pages/iadb/notesiadb/capexp.aspx 6. The productivity paradox of information technology’, Erik Brynjolfsson, Communications of the ACM 36 (12), 1993, pp66–77. 7. ‘We’d better watch out’, Robert Solow, New York Times Book Review, 12 July, 1987, p.36. 8 scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?start=20&q=information+technology+as+an+enabler&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 9.


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The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Since everyone refused the offer, Summers concludes that, adjusted for quality, healthcare has not risen in price. Thus productivity in healthcare has improved far more than the measured gains. See also Bret Swanson, “Moore’s Law and the Productivity Paradox,” AEIdeas (blog), November 25, 2015, https://www.aei.org/publication/moores-law-and-the-productivity-paradox/. 4.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 2014). 5.Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York, NY: Spiegel and Grau, 2015). See also Kyle Smith, “The Hard Untruths of Ta-Nehisi Coates: A Bestselling Polemic Riven with Hatred Thrills the Liberal Elite,” Commentary, October 2015, pp. 20–25. 6.Yuval Levin, “The Mobility Crisis,” Commentary, March 2015, pp. 12–20. 7.Kwasi Kwarteng, War and Gold: A 500-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2014), 219–20. 8.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York, NY: Crown Business, 2014), 5–11 and passim.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

S. (2015). Why is technology not boosting productivity? World Economic Forum [online]. Available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/why-is-technology-not-boosting-productivity 13 Hatzius, J., Phillips, A., Mericle, D., Hill, S., Struyven, D., Choi, D., Taylor, B., and Walker, R. (2019). Productivity paradox v2.0: The price of free goods. New York, NY: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. 14 Automobile history, History.com, 21 August 2018. 15 http://www.tvhistory.tv/1960–2000-TVManufacturers.htm 16 How to tame the tech titans. (2018). The Economist 18th June 2018, Leaders Section. 17 Hammond, R., Kostin, D.

New York, NY: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. Harley, N. F. R., and Harley, C. K. (1992). Output growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A restatement of the Crafts-Harley view. Economic History Review, 45(4), 703–730. Hatzius, J., Phillips, A., Mericle, D., Hill, S., Struyven, D., Choi, D., Taylor, B., and Walker, R. (2019). Productivity paradox v2.0: The price of free goods. New York, NY: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. Hayes, A. (2019, April 25). Dotcom bubble. Investopedia. How quantitative easing affects bond yields: Evidence from Switzerland. (2019). Royal Economic Society [online]. Available at https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/how-quantitative-easing-affects-bond-yields-evidence-from-switzerland.html How to tame the tech titans. (2018).


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

As a UK parliamentary committee noted in 1855: [A] much larger body of persons are committed to and detained in the manufac- ture, through successive generation, than can be adequately supported by it, while the gradual working of the ordinary remedy by the withdrawal of superfluous hands is intercepted and frustrated. (Select Committee on the Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery), Report from the Select Committee on Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery) (HC 421-XIV, 1854–5), iv) 73. Ryan Avent, ‘The productivity paradox’, Medium (16 March 2017), https:// medium.com/@ryanavent_93844/the-productivity-paradox-aaf05e5e4aad, archived at https://perma.cc/TFE8-7X8N 74. Select Committee on the Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery), Report from the Select Committee on Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery) (HC 421-XIV, 1854–5), iv. Duncan Bythell agrees: So long as outwork labour remained plentiful and its price fell ever lower, manu- facturers had little incentive to turn to alternative means of production . . . contem- poraries often believed that the very cheapness of hand-labour actually delayed the adoption of newly invented labour-saving machines.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

It is an example of what economists denote as a general purpose technology (Helpman 1998), which have the following features: They enable radical innovation in products and services and also in processes of production, initially in the innovating sector and gradually across a wider range of activities in the economy; They lead to a major re-organisation of the structure of the economy, because they change relative input costs dramatically; They require significant additional investment in other areas such as other forms of capital, infrastructure, organisation, skills, and so often start out very slowly, before eventually having dramatic economic and societal impacts. Printing, steam, and electricity are obvious examples. Paul David (1990) provided one well-known historical account of these characteristics of a GPT, comparing the spread of computer technology in the 1980s to the electric dynamo in the early twentieth century, by way of explaining the ‘productivity paradox’ Robert Solow (1987, 36) had complained about: ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ While the ultimate impacts were therefore substantial, the impact took a long time to show through in GDP and productivity figures. Although some economists question whether digital technologies are in the same league as these past GPTs in terms of their broad impact (Gordon 2016; Bloom et al. 2020), my view is that digital will be as transformational as earlier GPTs: eventually talking of the digital economy will sound as strange as talking of the electricity economy.

Schweitzer, 2019, ‘Competition Policy for the Digital Era’, European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/publications/reports/kd0419345enn.pdf. Dasgupta, Partha, 2007, ‘Facts and Values in Modern Economics’, in H. Kincaid and D. Ross (eds.), Handbook on the Philosophy of Economic Sciences, Oxford: Oxford University Press. David, P. A., 1990, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review, 80 (2), 355–361. De Waal, F., 2006, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deaton, Angus, 2020, ‘Randomization in the Tropics Revisited: A Theme and Eleven Variations’, Working Paper No. 27600, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.


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Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

8 Erik Voorhees, an early bitcoin pioneer and outspoken critic of the banking system, told us, “It is faster to mail an anvil to China than it is to send money through the banking system to China. That’s crazy! Money is already digital, it’s not like they’re shipping pallets of cash when you do a wire!”9 Why is it so inefficient? According to Paul David, the economist who coined the term productivity paradox, laying new technologies over existing infrastructure is “not unusual during historical transitions from one technological paradigm to the next.”10 For example, manufacturers needed forty years to embrace commercial electrification over steam power, and often the two worked side by side before manufacturers finally switched over for good.

Interview with Vikram Pandit, August 24, 2015. 4. www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/business/mutfund/putting-the-public-back-in-public-finance.html. 5. www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. 6. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6729.html. 7. Interview with Hernando de Soto, November 27, 2015. 8. http://corporate.westernunion.com/About_Us.html. 9. Interview with Erik Voorhees, June 16, 2015. 10. Paul A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” Economic History of Technology 80(2) (May 1990): 355–61. 11. Joseph Stiglitz, “Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis,” revised version of a lecture presented at Seoul National University, October 27, 2009. 12. www.finextra.com/finextra-downloads/newsdocs/The%20Fintech%202%200%20Paper.pdf. 13. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-22/the-blockchain-revolution-gets-endorsement-in-wall-street-survey. 14. www.swift.com/assets/swift_com/documents/about_swift/SIF_201501.pdf. 15. https://lightning.network/. 16.

., 110 Prediction markets, 84–85, 98, 220, 224–25 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), 40 Privacy, 27–28, 41–45, 141 bAirbnb and, 116 Big Brother, 244, 274–75 breakthrough, 42–44 free speech and free press, 243–46 government and, 202, 204, 274–75 implications, 44–45 preserving right of, 48–49, 202 principle of, 41 problem to be solved, 41–42 Privacy and Big Data Institute, 27, 275 Private blockchains, 67–68 Procter & Gamble, 95 Productivity, 93, 108, 110, 155, 162 Productivity paradox, 57 Proof of activity, 32 Proof of asset, 38 Proof of burn, 315n Proof of capacity, 32 Proof of disk, 262 Proof of Existence (PoE), 46 Proof of property, 38 Proof of stake, 32, 40–41, 262 Proof of storage, 32–33 Proof of work (PoW), 31, 32, 35, 41, 46, 241, 259, 262 51 percent attack, 67, 266–67, 269 Property management, in IoTs, 159–60 Property records, 8, 19–20, 51, 188–89, 193–95, 198 Property rights, 19–20, 48–49, 188–90 Prosperity, 4, 17–23, 182–88.


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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

By 1992 virtually every white collar worker in the country had access to $10,000 in information-processing hardware. 4 Despite the large investments, productivity continued to limp along, increasing at about 1 percent a year. Economists began talking about the "productivity paradox." Some, like Harvard's Gary Loveman, spoke openly about the utter failure of the highly touted technological revolution to whom so many had looked for their salvation. "We simply can't find evidence that there has been a substantial productivity increase-and in some cases any productivity increase-from the substantial growth in information technology," Loveman told his colleagues. 5 Just as corporate CEOs began to sour on the new information technologies, the productivity paradox suddenly disappeared. In 1991 output per hour increased by 2.3 percent.

The authors of the study, Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt, found that between 1987 and 1991, return on investment (ROI) for computer capital averaged 54 percent in manufacturing and 68 percent for manufacturing and service combined. Brynjolfsson said that computers not only "added a great deal to productivity," but also contributed markedly to downsizing and the decline in the size of firms. 7 Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach who, along with others on Wall Street, had raised the issue of a productivity paradox, dropped his earlier reservations, proclaiming that "The U.S. economy is now entering its first productivity-driven recovery since the 1960s, courtesy of efficiency gains being realized through the use of information technology." Much of the gain in productivity, says Roach, is coming in white collar areas and in the service industries. 8 It became increasingly apparent to Roach and everyone else concerned that the failure to achieve productivity gains faster lay not with the new laborsaving, timesaving information technologies, but rather with outmoded organizational structures that were not able to accommodate the new technologies.


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The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Overall, the effect of imports from low-wage countries has been highly uneven, with less skilled workers taking most of the job losses. At the same time, these imports cost less, and that saves consumers money. One of the paradoxes of globalization is that the very people who have been hit the hardest in terms of jobs have gained more as consumers. The Productivity Paradox Globalization is only part of the story of the decline of manufacturing jobs. For all its woes, the United States still produces many physical goods. We tend to forget this, because almost everything we pick up in the store says “Made in China.” While this is true of many consumer products, it is not true of many high-end nonconsumer goods, such as airplanes, industrial machines, and advanced medical devices.

See also “Big push” strategy; Cluster building; Great Divergence Powell, Walter, [>] “Power couples,” and thick labor market, [>]–[>] Productivity and dropout rates, [>] in innovation sector, [>], [>] and local investment subsidies, [>] in local services, [>] as location factor, [>] rise in (post-WWII), [>] from skilled colleagues, [>] and threat of Chinese competition, [>] in tradable vs. non-tradable sector, [>]–[>] of unskilled working with better-educated, [>] and wages, [>], [>] Productivity paradox, [>]–[>] Progent, [>] Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), results of, [>]–[>] Programmers, and “offshoring,” [>] Prosper, [>]–[>] Protectionism, [>] Providence, Rhode Island, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Provo, Utah, [>], [>] Public transit, [>], [>] Quality of life and cluster building, [>]–[>] variation in, [>] See also Standard of living Q-Cells, [>] Racial integration, [>], [>] “Radical collaboration,” [>] Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Ralph Lauren, [>] R&D (research and development), [>]–[>] global investment in, [>] green, [>], [>], [>] (see also Solar-panel industry) knowledge spillover from, [>] (see also Knowledge spillovers) in life sciences, [>]–[>], [>] (see also Life sciences research) for Microsoft, [>] and New York City, [>] and outsourcing, [>]–[>] in pharmaceutical sector, [>]–[>] scientific, [>] social return on, [>] subsidizing of, [>], [>] under-investment in (U.S.), [>], [>] vs. variable costs, [>] Real estate prices, [>]–[>], [>], [>] and gentrification, [>]–[>] and rationing of new housing, [>] and Seattle housing policy, [>]–[>] RealNetworks, [>] Recessions, [>]–[>].


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

For the smaller countries of Barbados and the Bahamas, that number exceeds 30%: World Travel & Tourism Council, “Economic Impact Reports,” https://wttc.org/Research/Economic-Impact. 156 boosted their productivity by 33%: Jason Douglas, Jon Sindreu, and Georgi Kantchev, “The Problem with Innovation: The Biggest Companies Are Hogging All the Gains,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2018. 156 Other research shows this trend growing: Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, “The Capex Conundrum and Productivity Paradox,” Global Investment Committee, November 2017, https://advisor.morganstanley.com/sandra-smith-allison-butler/documents/home-office/investing/The-Capex-Conundrum-and-Productivity-Paradox.pdf. 157 Google’s global market share: J. Clement, “Global Market Share of Search Engines 2010–2020,” Statista, June 18, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/. 157 “competition is for losers”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. 157 totaling more than $1 trillion: JP Morgan Chase 2018 Annual Report, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/investor-relations/document/line-of-business-ceo-letters-to-shareholders-2018.pdf. 158 disproportionately to larger and better-connected companies: See an infographic from the Committee for a Responsible Budget, indicating that even though the CARES Act was trumpeted as a lifeline for Main Street, the act would roughly benefit large businesses and the airline industry as much as small businesses (http://www.crfb.org/blogs/visualization-cares-act).


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Akkerman makes a good case that an upright gait didn’t just help to free human hands to fabricate tools, but that human eyesight, situated at the highest available spot, made it possible to navigate via the fixed northern star, and to measure distance by number of steps taken. 98the viewpoint of a pedestrian, a cyclist, or a bus rider: (Gatersleben, 2013). 98the amount of visual information that they receive at fifteen miles per hour: (Dover, 2014). 99“Oxytocin surges when people are shown a sign of trust”: (Zak, 2012). 99more trust, empathy, and compassion in an entire community: (Mikolajczak, 2010). 99reduce threats, increase happiness: (Montgomery, 2014). 99On Appleyard’s “Heavy Street”: (Appleyard, 1981). 100as far afield as Bristol, England: (Hart, 2008). 101“because I can play there when ever I want”: (Appleyard, 2005). 104a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile: (NTSB Bureau of Traffic Statistics, 2014). 104the more mobility is constrained by tolls or congestion, the higher the GDP: (Litman, “The Mobility-Productivity Paradox,” 2014). 105places with a lot of congestion are economically vibrant: (Dumbaugh, 2014). 105a group of anthropologists and systems scientists: (Ortman, 2015). 106“average journey time is at a minimum”: (Wardrop, 1952). 110proximity is ten times more important than speed: (LeVine, 2012).

“A New Transit Safety Narrative.” Journal of Public Transportation 17, no. 4 (December 2014): 114–135. ———. Evaluating Household Chauffeuring Burdens: Understanding Direct and Indirect Costs of Transporting Non-Drivers. 2015 TRB Annual Meeting. Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board, 2014. ———. The Mobility-Productivity Paradox. I-TED/International Transportation Economic Development Conference. Victoria, BC: Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 2014, 1–18. Longhurst, James. “The Sidepath Not Taken: Bicycles, Taxes, and the Rhetoric of the Public Good in the 1890s.” Journal of Policy History 25, no. 4 (October 2013): 557–586.


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Anthony Arundel and Barbara Mintzes, ‘The Benefits of Biopharmaceuticals’, Innogen Working Paper No. 14, Version 2.0 (University of Edinburgh, August 2004); Paul Nightingale and Paul Martin, ‘The Myth of the Biotech Revolution’, TRENDS in Biotechnology, Vol. 22, No. 11, November 2004, pp. 564–8. Conclusion 1. John B. Harms and Tim Knapp, ‘The New Economy: what’s new, what’s not’, Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 35 (2003), pp. 413–36. 2. P. A. David, ‘Computer and Dynamo: the Modern Productivity Paradox in a not-too-distant mirror’, in OECD, Technology and Productivity: the Challenge for Economic Policy (Paris: OECD, 1991). 3. Economist, 17 January 2004. 4. Observer, 8 April 2001. 5. Martin Stopford, Maritime Economics, second edition (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 485–6. Select bibliography Books and articles Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: science, secrecy and the postcolonial state (London: Zed Books, 1998) Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) David Arnold, ‘Europe, Technology and Colonialism in the 20th Century’, History and Technology, vol. 21 (2005) Jonathan Bailey, The First World War and the Birth of the Modern Style of Warfare (Camberley: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, Occasional Paper No. 22, 1996) — Field Artillery and Firepower (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004) George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Z.

Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built (London: Penguin, 1994) Ernest Braun, Futile Progress: Technology’s Empty Promise (London: Earthscan, 1995) Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985) Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod, Gender and Technology in the Making (London: Sage, 1993) Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Caroline Cooper, Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the Contolled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) P. A. David, ‘Computer and Dynamo: the Modern Productivity Paradox in a not-too-distant mirror’, in OECD, Technology and Productivity: the Challenge for Economic Policy (Paris: OECD, 1991) — ‘Heroes, Herds and Hysteresis in Technological History: Thomas Edison and “The Battle of the Systems” Reconsidered’, Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1992) Michael Dennis, ‘Accounting for Research: new histories of corporate laboratories and the social history of American science’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 17 (1987) Development and Planning Unit, Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements, Development and Planning Unit, UCL.


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

EPWP1401, February 2014. 4 Ghada Fayad and Roberto Perrelli, “Growth Surprises and Synchronized Slowdowns in Emerging Markets: An Empirical Investigation,” International Monetary Fund, 2014. 5 Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers, “Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 20573, October 2014. 6 “Goodhart’s Law,” BusinessDictionary.com. 7 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 8 Ned Davis, Ned’s Insights, November 14, 2014. 9 “Picking Apart the Productivity Paradox,” Goldman Sachs Research, October 5, 2015. Chapter 1: People Matter 1 Rick Gladstone, “India Will Be Most Populous Country Sooner Than Thought.” New York Times, July 29, 2015. 2 Charles S. Pearson, On the Cusp: From Population Boom to Bust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 3 Tristin Hopper, “A History of the Baby Bonus: Tories Now Tout Benefits of Program They Once Axed,” National Post, July 13, 2015. 4 Richard F.

New York, Dececember 30, 1974. O’Neill, Jim. “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper no. 66, November 30, 2001. Peters, Heiko, and Stefan Schneider. “Sluggish Global Trade—Cyclical or Structural?” Deutsche Bank Research, November 25, 2014. “Picking Apart the Productivity Paradox,” Goldman Sachs Research, October 5, 2015. Schofield, Mark. “Global Strategy and Macro Group Theme Book.” Citigroup Research, April 2015. Sharma, Ruchir. “Going In for the Big Kill.” Newsweek, October 2, 2006. ——. “Can India Still Be a Breakout Nation.” Economic Times, December 10, 2012. ——.

“The End of Plenty Review.” New York Times, July 24, 2015. Pathiparampil, Bino. “India-Pharma: US Market Remains a Great Opportunity.” IIFL Institutional Equities, 2013. Pearson, Charles. On the Cusp: From Population Boom to Bust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. “Picking Apart the Productivity Paradox.” Goldman Sachs, Global Macro Research, October 5, 2015). “PISA Scores: Why Would You Invest in Greece Instead of Poland?” Renaissance Capital, December 4, 2013. Redenius, Jeremy. “The Challenges to Feeding the World May Not Be So Challenging After All.” Bernstein Research, December 6, 2013.


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

uri=CELEX:32007D0053. 48 “Big Business Is Overcharging You $5,000 a Year,” David Leonhardt, The New York Times, November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html. 49 Ibidem. 50 “The 7 Biggest Fines the EU Have Ever Imposed against Giant Companies,” Ana Zarzalejos, Business Insider, July 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-7-biggest-fines-the-eu-has-ever-imposed-against-giant-corporations-2018-7. 51 Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion for abusive practices in online advertising, European Commission, March 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_1770. 52 Antitrust: Commission fines truck producers € 2.93 billion for participating in a cartel, European Commission, July 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/IP_16_2582. 53 Cartel Statistics, European Commission, Period 2015–2019, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistics.pdf. 54 Merger Statistics, European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/statistics.pdf. 55 “Vestager Warns Big Tech She Will Move beyond Competition Fines,” Javier Espinoza, Financial Times, October 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/dd3df1e8-e9ee-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061. 56 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html. 57 “The Alstom-Siemens Merger and the Need for European Champions,” Konstantinos Efstathiou, Bruegel Institute, March 2019, https://www.bruegel.org/2019/03/the-alstom-siemens-merger-and-the-need-for-european-champions/. 58 The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab, January 2016. 59 “Unpacking the AI-Productivity Paradox,” Eric Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson, MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2018, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/unpacking-the-ai-productivity-paradox/. 60 Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/centre-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution. 61 Interview with Tim Wu by Peter Vanham, New York, October 2019. 62 The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato, Penguin, April 2019, https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/280466/the-value-of-everything/9780141980768.html. 63 “One of the World's Most Influential Economists Is on a Mission to Save Capitalism from Itself,” Eshe Nelson, Quartz, July 2019, https://qz.com/1669346/mariana-mazzucatos-plan-to-use-governments-to-save-capitalism-from-itself/. 7 People and the Planet At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories.


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

uri=CELEX:32007D0053. 48 “Big Business Is Overcharging You $5,000 a Year,” David Leonhardt, The New York Times, November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html. 49 Ibidem. 50 “The 7 Biggest Fines the EU Have Ever Imposed against Giant Companies,” Ana Zarzalejos, Business Insider, July 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-7-biggest-fines-the-eu-has-ever-imposed-against-giant-corporations-2018-7. 51 Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion for abusive practices in online advertising, European Commission, March 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_1770. 52 Antitrust: Commission fines truck producers € 2.93 billion for participating in a cartel, European Commission, July 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/IP_16_2582. 53 Cartel Statistics, European Commission, Period 2015–2019, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistics.pdf. 54 Merger Statistics, European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/statistics.pdf. 55 “Vestager Warns Big Tech She Will Move beyond Competition Fines,” Javier Espinoza, Financial Times, October 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/dd3df1e8-e9ee-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061. 56 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html. 57 “The Alstom-Siemens Merger and the Need for European Champions,” Konstantinos Efstathiou, Bruegel Institute, March 2019, https://www.bruegel.org/2019/03/the-alstom-siemens-merger-and-the-need-for-european-champions/. 58 The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab, January 2016. 59 “Unpacking the AI-Productivity Paradox,” Eric Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson, MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2018, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/unpacking-the-ai-productivity-paradox/. 60 Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/centre-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution. 61 Interview with Tim Wu by Peter Vanham, New York, October 2019. 62 The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato, Penguin, April 2019, https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/280466/the-value-of-everything/9780141980768.html. 63 “One of the World's Most Influential Economists Is on a Mission to Save Capitalism from Itself,” Eshe Nelson, Quartz, July 2019, https://qz.com/1669346/mariana-mazzucatos-plan-to-use-governments-to-save-capitalism-from-itself/. 7 People and the Planet At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories.


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

Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection, 1 September; www.wnyc.org/story/paul-samuelson/ Crafts, Nicholas, 2005, ‘The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 3(2/3), pp. 525–34 David, Paul A., 1990, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review, 80(2), pp. 355–61 De Vecchi, Nicolò, 2006, ‘Hayek and the General Theory ’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 13(2), pp. 233–58 Dworkin, Ronald W., 2015, How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books Ebenstein, Alan, 2001, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, New York: St.

Robert Solow, 1956, ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 70(1), pp. 65–94; Robert Solow, 1957, ‘Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 39(3), pp. 312–20. 6.    Paul A. David, 1990, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review, 80(2), pp. 355–61. 7.    Douglas Clement, 2002, ‘Interview with Robert Solow’, The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 1 September; www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-robert-solow 8.    OECD, 2015, Economic Surveys: United Kingdom, Paris: OECD. 9.    


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

Robert Solow, 1956, ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 70(1), pp. 65–94; Robert Solow, 1957, ‘Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 39(3), pp. 312–20. 6. Paul A. David, 1990, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review, 80(2), pp. 355–61. 7. Douglas Clement, 2002, ‘Interview with Robert Solow’, The Region, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 1 September; www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/interview-with-robert-solow 8. OECD, 2015, Economic Surveys: United Kingdom, Paris: OECD. 9.

Cooper Distinguished Contemporaries Collection, 1 September; www.wnyc.org/story/paul-samuelson/ Crafts, Nicholas, 2005, ‘The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 3(2/3), pp. 525–34 David, Paul A., 1990, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review, 80(2), pp. 355–61 De Vecchi, Nicolò, 2006, ‘Hayek and the General Theory’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 13(2), pp. 233–58 Dworkin, Ronald W., 2015, How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books Ebenstein, Alan, 2001, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, New York: St.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Economic growth began to zoom upward much faster than the growth rate of the population, as it has continued to do through to the present day, the occasional global financial meltdown notwithstanding.27 FIGURE I-2: GLOBAL PER CAPITA GDP, 1000–2010 The explosion of information produced by the printing press had done us a world of good, it turned out. It had just taken 330 years—and millions dead in battlefields around Europe—for those advantages to take hold. The Productivity Paradox We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it. The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime.

In 1971, for instance, it was claimed that we would be able to predict earthquakes within a decade,29 a problem that we are no closer to solving forty years later. Instead, the computer boom of the 1970s and 1980s produced a temporary decline in economic and scientific productivity. Economists termed this the productivity paradox. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” wrote the economist Robert Solow in 1987.30 The United States experienced four distinct recessions between 1969 and 1982.31 The late 1980s were a stronger period for our economy, but less so for countries elsewhere in the world.

., 5, 149 by foxes, see foxes of future returns of stocks, 330–31, 332–33 of global warming, 373–76, 393, 397–99, 401–6, 402, 507 in Google searches, 290–91 by hedgehogs, see hedgehogs human ingenuity and, 292 of Hurricane Katrina, 108–10, 140–41, 388 as hypothesis-testing, 266–67 by IPCC, 373–76, 389, 393, 397–99, 397, 399, 401, 507 in Julius Caesar, 5 lack of demand for accuracy in, 202, 203 long-term progress vs. short-term regress and, 8, 12 Pareto principle of, 312–13, 314 perception and, 453–54, 453 in poker, 297–99, 311–15 probability and, 243 quantifying uncertainty of, 73 results-oriented thinking and, 326–28 scientific progress and, 243 self-canceling, 219–20, 228 self-fulfilling, 216–19, 353 as solutions to problems, 14–16 as thought experiments, 488 as type of information-processing, 266 of weather, see weather forecasting prediction, failures of: in baseball, 75, 101–5 of CDO defaults, 20–21, 22 context ignored in, 43 of earthquakes, 7, 11, 143, 147–49, 158–61, 168–71, 174, 249, 346, 389 in economics, 11, 14, 40–42, 41, 45, 53, 162, 179–84, 182, 198, 200–201, 249, 388, 477, 479 financial crisis as, 11, 16, 20, 30–36, 39–42 of floods, 177–79 of flu, 209–31 of global cooling, 399–400 housing bubble as, 22–23, 24, 25–26, 28–29, 32–33, 42, 45 overconfidence and, 179–83, 191, 203, 368, 443 overfitting and, 185 on politics, 11, 14–15, 47–50, 49, 53, 55–59, 64, 67–68, 157, 162, 183, 249, 314 as rational, 197–99, 200 recessions, 11 September 11, 11 in stock market, 337–38, 342, 343–46, 359, 364–66 suicide bombings and, 424 by television pundits, 11, 47–50, 49, 55 Tetlock’s study of, 11, 51, 52–53, 56–57, 64, 157, 183, 443, 452 of weather, 21–22, 114–18 prediction interval, 181-183, 193 see also margin of error prediction markets, 201–3, 332–33 press, free, 5–6 Price, Richard, 241–42, 490 price discovery, 497 Price Is Right, 362 Principles of Forecasting (Armstrong), 380 printing press, 1–4, 6, 13, 17, 250, 447 prior probability, 244, 245, 246, 252, 255, 258–59, 260, 403, 406–7, 433n, 444, 451, 490, 497 probability, 15, 61–64, 63, 180, 180, 181 calibration and, 134–36, 135, 136, 474 conditional, 240, 300; see also Bayes’s theorem frequentism, 252 and orbit of planets, 243 in poker, 289, 291, 297, 302–4, 302, 306, 307, 322–23 posterior, 244 predictions and, 243 prior, 244, 245, 246, 252, 255, 258–59, 260, 403, 406–7, 433n, 444, 451, 490, 498 rationality and, 242 as waypoint between ignorance and knowledge, 243 weather forecasts and, 195 probability distribution, of GDP growth, 201 probability theory, 113n productivity paradox, 7–8 “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” (Shannon), 265–66 progress, forecasting and, 1, 4, 5, 7, 112, 243, 406, 410–11, 447 prospect theory, 64 Protestant Reformation, 4 Protestant work ethic, 5 Protestants, worldliness of, 5 psychology, 183 Public Opinion Quarterly, 334 PURPLE, 413 qualitative information, 100 quantitative information, 72–73, 100 Quantum Fund, 356 quantum mechanics, 113–14 Quebec, 52 R0 (basic reproduction number), 214–15, 215, 224, 225, 486 radar, 413 radon, 143, 145 rain, 134–37, 473, 474 RAND database, 511 random walks, 341 Rapoport, David C., 428 Rasskin-Gutman, Diego, 269 ratings agencies, 463 CDOs misrated by, 20–21, 21, 22, 26–30, 36, 42, 43, 45 housing bubble missed by, 22–23, 24, 25–26, 28–29, 42, 45, 327 models of, 13, 22, 26, 27, 29, 42, 45, 68 profits of, 24–25 see also specific agencies rationality, 183–84 biases as, 197–99, 200 of markets, 356–57 as probabilistic, 242 Reagan, Ronald, 50, 68, 160, 433, 466 RealClimate.org, 390, 409 real disposable income per capita, 67 recessions, 42 double dip, 196 failed predictions of, 177, 187, 194 in Great Moderation, 190 inflation-driven, 191 of 1990, 187, 191 since World War II, 185 of 2000-1, 187, 191 of 2007-9, see Great Recession rec.sport.baseball, 78 Red Cross, 158 Red River of the North, 177–79 regression analysis, 100, 401, 402, 498, 508 regulation, 13, 369 Reinhart, Carmen, 39–40, 43 religion, 13 Industrial Revolution and, 6 religious extremism, 428 religious wars of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 2, 6 Remote Sensing Systems, 394 Reno, Nev., 156–57, 157, 477 reserve clause, 471 resolution, as measure of forecasts, 474 results-oriented thinking, 326–28 revising predictions, see Bayesian reasoning Ricciardi, J.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

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

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. Consider the US, where labour productivity grew on average 2.8 percent between 1947 and 1983, and 2.6 percent between 2000 and 2007, compared with 1.3 percent between 2007 and 2014.18 Much of this drop is due to lower levels of TFP, the measure most commonly associated with the contribution to efficiency stemming from technology and innovation.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

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

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

In the private sector, start-up employment went from 4 to 2 percent. 25.Buchanan, “American Entrepreneurship Is Actually Vanishing.” 26.Simon and Barr, “Endangered Species.” 27.Litan, “Start-up Slowdown.” 28.OECD, “The Future of Productivity.” 29.OECD, “No Country for Young Firms?” 30.Decker et al., “Where Has All the Skewness Gone?” 31.Gordon, “The Demise of US Economic Growth,” figs 9 and 10. 32.Haltiwanger, Hathaway, and Miranda, “Declining Business Dynamism in the US High-Technology Sector,” 9. 33.Hatzius and Dawsey, “Doing the Sums on Productivity Paradox v2.0.” 34.Fernald and Wang, “Why Has the Cyclicality of Productivity Changed?” 35.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 105. 36.Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 105. 37.Fernald, “Productivity and Potential Output.” 38.Fernald and Wang, “The Recent Rise and Fall of Rapid Productivity Growth.” 39.Frey and Osborne, “Technology at Work,” 62. 40.Summers, “Making Sense of the Productivity Slowdown,” 5. 41.Cardarelli and Lusinyan, “US Total Factor Productivity Slowdown.” 42.Syversen, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations.” 43.Syversen, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations.” 44.Copeland, “Seasonality, Consumer Heterogeneity and Price Indexes.” 45.The data reference is from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis’s chained price index for IT software. 46.Nakamura and Soloveichik.

NBER Working Paper 4780. National Bureau of Economic Research, June 1994. At http://www.nber.org/papers/w4780. Hathaway, Ian, and Robert Litan, “The Other Aging of America: The Increasing Dominance of Older Firms.” Economic Studies at Brookings, July 2014. Hatzius, Jan, and Kris Dawsey, “Doing the Sums on Productivity Paradox v2.0.” U.S. Economics Analyst, No. 15/30. Goldman Sachs, 2015. Hayek, Friedrich A., “The Pretence of Knowledge.” Nobel Prize Lecture, Dec. 11, 1974. At http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html. Hayek, Friedrich A., “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”


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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Ike PRoducriviiy P/wdox Taken together, these two major innovations in the nature of global capitalism—in finance and organization—began to boost the productivity of the economy at large. But this did not happen right away, nor was it obvious. In fact, there's still quite a bit of controversy surrounding what is called the productivity paradox. Basically, the investment in new technologies typically translates into higher productivity for the workers who use them. That's why businesses invest in them in the first place. However, by the late 1990s, although businesses had invested an estimated $4 trillion in information technologies, the standard government productivity measurements showed only a slight rise, and that had come only since about 1996.

Right, 73-75 libertarianism, 74-75 moderation of middle class, 231-232 New American Ideology, 74-76 overview, 7-10, 63-64 parties of the people, 94 rale of twos in, 111-114 U.S. economic leadership, 7, 57, 68-71, 294 world leadership, 52 Pollution, 6, 10, 154-155 See also Environment Polymers, 192 Pons, Stanley, 219 Populations, 118-119,154-156 Post-World War II era economic boom, 15, 49-50, 56 Japan, 14, 69-70,119-123, 229 making of the middle class, 229 U.S. and global thinking, 69-71 Private schools, 87 Privatization, 41, 92, 95 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 205 Productivity paradox, 46-48 Progress, 13-15 Project Guttenberg, 89 Project Phoenix, 221 Prosperity, 11, 56, 285 See also Economic growth Protectionism, 259, 261, 292 Ptolemy, 212 Publishing, 58-59 Puerto Rico, 221 Rain forests, 142 RCCola, 112 Reagan, President Ronald, 16, 39, 40, 41, 48, 73, 86, 92, 273 Refining oil, 192 Regulatory restructuring, 50-51, 61-62, 292 Reorganizing business, 42-45 Republicans, 77, 79 Riemannian geometry, 213 Right vs.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Nor do people invariably use the safest systems, or use them with sufficient vigilance. But considering our dependence on electronic hardware, the important thing is not that it fails but that off-the-shelf hardware has become more and more stable. We can rule out system failures as a big component of the productivity paradox. The problem is really in the software—and its use and misuse. Computers tend to replace one category of worker with another. There are two ways to get something done. You can find one group trained to accomplish things the old-fashioned way. Or you can pay another group to set up and maintain machines and systems that will do the same work with fewer employees—of the older category of worker.

Its successor OS/2 Warp 3 needs 65 megabytes. Microsoft Windows 3.1 plus MS-DOS needed 20 megabytes; Windows 95 requires 6o. Rarer, more powerful systems like elegant NextStep 3.2 demand 12o. The inflation of code, also reflected in 25megabyte application programs, illustrates a chronic problem of computing that contributes to the productivity paradox: as swiftly as resources grow, the demands of software tend to expand even faster. Programmers and developers are understandably working for the future, preparing for the next generation of machines. Most users are living in the past because either their budgets or their bosses won't let them upgrade hardware to the current standard.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Electricity was first used in manufacturing in 1883; for discussion of its relatively slow acceptance in manufacturing, see Warren D. Devine, Jr., “From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 347–372. Examples of the debate over computers include Paul A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80 (1990): 355–361; Stephen D. Oliner and Daniel E. Sichel, “The Resurgence of Growth in the Late 1990s: Is Information Technology the Story?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 3–22; and Dale W. Jorgenson and Kevin J. Stiroh, “Information Technology and Growth,” American Economic Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 109–115. 13.

“Social Repercussions of New Cargo Handling Methods in the Port of London.” International Labour Review 105 (1972): 543–568. Cushing, Charles R. “The Development of Cargo Ships in the United States and Canada in the Last Fifty Years.” Manuscript, January 8, 1992. David, Paul A. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80 (1990): 355–361. Davies, J. E. “An Analysis of Cost and Supply Conditions in the Liner Shipping Industry.” Journal of Industrial Economics 31 (1983): 417–436. Dempsey, Paul Stephen. “The Law of Intermodal Transportation: What It Was, What It Is, What It Should Be.”


pages: 585 words: 151,239

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

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

Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1–2. 12. Ibid., 41. 13. Paul David, “Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror,” Center for Economic Policy Research, No. 339, Stanford University, July 1989. See also “The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (May 1990), Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Second Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, 355–61. 14. Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 37–39. 15.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Perkins and Perkins, Internet Bubble, 13; Brenner, Boom and the Bubble, 2. 15. The relationship between information technology and productivity has been in dispute for some time. For a review and analysis of the literature on this issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, see Brynjolfsson, “Productivity Paradox of Information Technology”; Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up?” 50, 57. 16. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 20 –21, quoted in Thrift, “Romance Not the Finance Makes Business Worth Pursuing,” 426; Alan Greenspan, “The American Economy in a World Context,” at the 35th Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, May 6, 1999, available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/ board-docs/speeches/1999/19990506.htm, quoted in Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up?”

Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Bryant, John, William Aspray, Andrew Goldstein, and Frederik Nebeker. Rad Lab: Oral Histories Documenting World War II Activities at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, 1993. Brynjolfsson, Erik. “The Productivity Paradox of Information Technology.” Communications of the ACM 36, no. 12 (1993): 67–77. Buderi, Robert. The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. [ 296 ] B i b l i o g ra p h y Burner, David.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

“Technology has progressed nonstop for 250 years, and in the U.S. unemployment has stayed between 5 to 10 percent for almost all that time, even when radical new technologies like steam power and electricity came on the scene,” writes one such optimist, Byron Reese, a futurist and the author of The Fourth Age. The people making this argument often cite today’s economic data to bolster their point. Often, they refer to the “productivity paradox”—the fact that U.S. productivity growth has actually slowed over the past several decades, which is the opposite of what you’d expect to see if mass automation were making companies much more efficient, and destroying jobs left and right. Ultimately, they say, there’s no evidence that this technological shift is any different from the ones that came before it, and we should let the past reassure us about the future. 2.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Cars and airplanes now incorporate computers, but their overall design and operation is still, for the most part, what it was in 1975. NASA managed the Apollo missions and reached the moon without access to modern computing power. Even the space shuttle dates back to the introduction of the first PCs. Likewise, economists speak of something called the productivity paradox, which basically says that, at least until quite recently, the economy has not really shown the productivity gains you might expect given all the new computers that have been introduced into workplaces. The computer revolution seems, so far, to have largely turned its energy inward on itself, resulting in advances primarily in the information and communication areas.* *[ Even much of biotechnology and genetics could be considered a type of information science because it is focused on cataloging and understanding the information in our DNA. ] I have the feeling that this staggering increase in our computational capability represents a pent up resource that is poised to burst out in new and unexpected ways.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

But when Loveman ran all the numbers, totaled the investments in information technology and then compared them to the productivity totals of the industries, he was startled, if not astonished by the results. "There was no positive effect," he said. "There may even have been a negative effect." This gap between accepted reality (computers make us more productive) and the quantifiable result (they don't), has come to be known as the Productivity Paradox. A true puzzler: If computers enable us to get so much work done, in a much shorter period of time ... why can't we measure it? Where did the productivity go? Some people deny that the paradox even exists, and indeed, more recent studies indicate that the information technology investment is beginning to payoff-in part because of the ease-of-use of graphical interfaces like the Macintosh.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Abrams, 1995), 21. 2 The brothers hired a celebrated painter, Henri Brispot, to illustrate the scene, then turned it into the world’s first movie poster. 3 Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth,” The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89–118, doi:10.1353/mov.2004.0014. 4 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7. 5 David L. Morton, Jr. Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 38–39. 6 Paul A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer, an Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review, 80, no. 2 (1990): 355–361. 7 Ashley Lutz, “20 Predictions from Smart People That Were Completely Wrong,” Business Insider, May 2, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/false-predictons-2012-5?op=1#ixzz3QikI1PWu. 8 David Lieberman, “CEO Forum: Microsoft’s Ballmer Having a ‘Great Time,’” USA Today, April 30, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer-ceo-forum-usat_N.htm. 9 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 10 Thomas S.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Every year, 1.3 billion tires are shipped to third world countries to be burned or discarded in giant heaps into the oceans, polluting air, sea, and land equally. Green Rubber, a company based in rubber-rich Malaysia, has pioneered the science of devulcanizing tires and recycling them into new products. Paradoxically, the information revolution has not only failed to deliver the paperless office, it has also vastly increased electricity consumption. The world’s data centers consume more energy than all of Sweden. Air-conditioning accounts for 96 percent of the electricity that data centers use, with only 4 percent needed to actually store data.


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

They pointed to competitors with more finished products. As I listened to their lengthy objections, it became clear to me that the features the engineers wanted to add all came from Loudcloud requirements. As painful as it might be, I knew that we had to get into the broader market in order to understand it well enough to build the right product. Paradoxically, the only way to do that was to ship and try to sell the wrong product. We would fall on our faces, but we would learn fast and do what was needed to survive. Finally, I had to rebuild the executive team. I had a CFO who didn’t know software accounting, a head of sales who had never sold software, and a head of marketing who did not know our market.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

We expect the use of cash would be slightly lower in 2015. 18. Newspaper Association of America, “Newspaper Circulation Volume,” http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers/Circulation-Volume/Newspaper-Circulation-Volume.aspx. 19. Paul David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1990), 356. 20. Ibid., 356–357. 21. Kirsten Korosec, “Another Ride-Sharing Startup Becomes a Unicorn: BlaBlaCar Valued at $1.6 Billion,” Fortune, September 16, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/blablacar-unicorn-list/. Index Abrams, Jonathan, 145 access charges, 94–95, 97 advertising, 29, 35–36 apps and, 48 design in balancing externalities with, 128–129 development of, 200–201 newspapers and, 99–100 pricing and, 154 search engine pricing and, 93–94 two-step strategy and, 79 Advertising Age, 200–201 Affirm, 80–81 agglomeration effects, 132–133 Ahrendts, Angela, 194, 195 Airbnb, 8, 12, 18, 197–198 Akamai, 43 algorithms, matching with, 127 Alibaba, 58–61 critical mass of, 68 fraud controls in, 138 ignition strategy at, 79 platform of, 63–65 pricing in, 82 retail, 62–63 Alimama, 64 Alipay, 62–63, 64 Allaire, Jeremy, 82 Amazon Alibaba compared with, 64 Cloud services, 44 ecosystem for, 105–106 Marketplace, 106 reseller platform in, 107–108 American Express, 2, 95, 96, 157 Travelers Cheques and, 189–190 anchor tenants, 80, 130, 131 Android, 47–48, 101–102 ecosystem for, 110–113, 114–119 Apple, 8, 26–27, 35, 109 App Store, 80, 117, 139, 142–143 Apple Pay, 58, 149–150, 156–164 ecosystem for, 110, 112–115, 117–119 iPhone, 101–102, 110, 112–115, 117–119 market cap of, 40 operating system, 47–48 stores, 195 apps, 47–48.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

While Euripides gets the laughs with his inside/outside schtick, we might think instead about his slave. Away from the political stage, the slave’s remark that the playwright is both ‘within’ and ‘not within’ the home, because his mind is off wandering in imagined lands, offers us a more seductive, productive paradox. The only stable form of obscenity exists in the imagination, that natural habitat for things that are both real and unreal, and also neither real nor unreal. Our imaginations are often out roaming through hidden rooms, back rooms, far-off rooms, long-forgotten rooms, filling them with furniture and their own emotional weather.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

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

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

Crawford, Rowena, Dave Innes, and Cormac O’Dea. 2016. “Household Wealth in Great Britain: Distribution, Composition and Changes 2006–12.” Fiscal Studies 37 (1): 35–54. doi:10.1111/j.1475-5890.2016.12083. David, Paul. 1990. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80 (2): 355–61. Davies, Daniel, and Tess Read. 2015. Secret Life of Money—Everyday Economics Explained. Metro. Davies, Richard, Andrew Haldane, Mette Nielsen, and Silvia Pezzini. 2014. “Measuring the Costs of Short-Termism.” Journal of Financial Stability 12 (June): 16–25.


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

N e w York: Touchstone, 1990. . Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. N e w York: R a n d o m House, 1998. David, Paul A. "The D y n a m o and t h e C o m puter: An Historical Perspective on t h e Modern Productivity Paradox." American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (May 1989): 3 5 5 - 6 1 . See also David's longer paper: " C o m p u t e r and D y n a m o : T h e Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror." Center for Economic Policy Research 172, Stanford University (July 1989). Dornbusch, Rudiger, and Sebastian Edwards, eds. The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

Robert Gordon has given the definitive skeptical statement in “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no.14 (Fall 2000): 49–74. Paul David’s argument that new technology takes time to have a real economic impact is most famously expounded in “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, May 1990, 355–61. The results of my lost bet with John Kay are in the Financial Times, October 29, 1999, or at http:// www.johnkay.com/articles/search.php?action=view&doc_id=127&date=&title=&topic=. Although I am generally dismissive of the idea that Internet companies enjoy a first-mover advantage, I think there is at least one important exception.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

and References 317 Dadush, Uri, Ashok Dhareshwar, and Ron Johannes. 1994. ”Are Private Capital Flows to Developing Countries Sustainable?” World Bank policy research working paper 1397. Daly, Herman. 1992. “Sustainable Development Is Possible Only If We Forgo Growth.” Earth Island Journal 7, no. 2 (spring). David, Paul A. 1990. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (May). Davis Steven J., and JohnHaltiwanger. 1998. ”Measuring Gross Worker and Job Flows.” In J. Haltiwanger, M. Manser, and R. Topel, eds., Labor Statistics Measurement Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Long, J. Bradford. 1988. ”Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare: Comment.”


pages: 429 words: 114,726

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Under IBM’s substantial umbrella a broad and diverse set of subsidiary industries flourished, including not just manufacturers of complementary (or even competing) hardware products but also programming services companies, time-sharing “computer utilities,” and independent data processing service providers. When we consider such subsidiary industries, our estimate of the total size of the computer industry almost doubles.13 And yet by the late 1960s there were signs of trouble in paradise. Foreshadowing the “productivity paradox” debate of later decades, hints began to appear in the literature that a growing number of corporations were questioning the value of their investment in computing. As an article in 1969 in Fortune magazine entitled “Computers Can’t Solve Everything” described the situation, “After buying or leasing some 60,000 computers during the past fifteen years, businessmen are less and less able to state with assurance that it’s all worth it.”


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Manuel Castells—From the Informational City to the Information Age, London: Sage, 2004. ed. Wilkinson, Elizabeth, and L. Willoughby. On the Aesthetic Education of Man—In a Series of Letters/Friedrich Schiller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. ed. Willcocks, Leslie, and Stephanie Lester. Beyond the IT Productivity Paradox, Chichester: Wiley, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso, 1980. ——— Towards 2000, London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. ed. Williamson, Oliver, and Sidney Winter. The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development: New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. David, P. A. “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox.” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 355-361. de la Peña, Carolyn. “‘Slow and Low Progress,’ or Why American Studies Should Do Technology.” American Quarterly 58 (2006): 915-941. de la Peña, Carolyn, and Siva Vaidhyanathan, eds. Rewiring the “Nation”: The Place of Technology in American Studies.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Jaffe, “A $4.5 Billion Trump Food Program Is Running Out of Money Early, Leaving Families Hungry and Food Assistance Charities Scrambling,” Washington Post, December 8, 2020. 59. A. Bhattarai and H. Denham, “Stealing to Survive: More Americans Are Shoplifting Food as Aid Runs Out During the Pandemic,” Washington Post, December 10, 2020. CHAPTER 12. VACCINE RACE 1. P. A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 355–61. 2. R. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, 36. 3. L. Light, “Good Vaccine News Has Immediate Impact on the Stock Market,” Chief Investment Officer, September 2, 2020. 4. A. Scaggs, “High-Yield Bonds Are Surging While Treasuries Slump on Vaccine News,” Barron’s, November 2, 2020.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

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

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

Dallery, Thomas, ‘Post-Keynesian Theories of the Firm under Financialization’, Review of Radical Political Economics 41:4, 2009, pp. 492–515. Dalton, George, ‘Primitive Money’, American Anthropologist 67:1, Feb. 1965, pp. 44–65. David, Paul A., ‘The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox’, American Economic Review 80:2, 1990, pp. 355–61. Day, Richard B., The Crisis and the ‘Crash’, London: NLB, 1981. De Brunhoff, Suzanne, Marx on Money, New York: Urizen Books, 1976. De Grauwe, Paul, ‘The ECB as a Lender of Last Resort’, VoxEU, October 2011. De Grauwe, Paul, ‘The European Central Bank: Lender of Last Resort in the Government Bond Markets?’


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

p. 234 ‘pulling ploughs by cable through a field at the Menier estate near Paris’. Rolt, L.T.C. 1967. The Mechanicals. Heinemann. p. 234 ‘like the computer it took decades to show up in the productivity statistics’. David, P.A. 1990. The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. American Economic Review 80:355–61. p. 234 ‘One recent study in the Philippines’. Barnes, D.F. (ed.). 2007. The Challenge of Rural Electrification. Resources for the Future Press. p. 235 ‘Joule for joule, wood is less convenient than coal, which is less convenient than natural gas, which is less convenient than electricity, which is less convenient than the electricity currently trickling through my mobile telephone.’


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Pine nuts, 5.7 oz (2 oz = 140 mg) 10. Brazil nuts, 6.3 tbsp (2 tbsp = 128 mg) NO DAIRY? REALLY? DOESN’T MILK HAVE A LOW GLYCEMIC INDEX? It’s true that milk has a low glycemic index (GI) and a low glycemic load (GL). For the latter, whole milk clocks in at an attractive 27. Unfortunately, dairy products paradoxically have a high insulinemic response on the insulinemic index (II or InIn) scale. Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have examined this surprising finding: Despite low glycemic indexes of 15–30, all of the milk products produced high insulinemic indexes of 90–98, which were not significantly different from the insulinemic index of the reference bread [generally white bread].… Conclusions: Milk products appear insulinotropic as judged from 3-fold to 6-fold higher insulinemic indexes than expected from the corresponding glycemic indexes.


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

Enoch Powell, “Rivers of Blood” (speech), Conservative Association meeting, Birmingham, UK, April 20, 1968, transcript, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html. 22. Gordon, Rise and Decline of American Growth; Cowen, Great Stagnation. 23. Gordon, Rise and Decline of American Growth, 13. 24. Paul A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” The American Economic Review 80, no. 2, (May, 1990): 355–61. 25. James, Europe Reborn, 390–91. 26. See Chad Syverson, “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the U.S. Productivity Slowdown,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (Spring 2016): 165–86. 27. Judt, Postwar, 541. 28.


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

Demand is a big part of the story, but I think there is also the technology lag story that you mentioned. To your original question, I had the pleasure between 1999 and 2003 to work with one of the academic advisors of the McKinsey Global Institute, Bob Solow, the Nobel laureate. We were looking at the last productivity paradox back in the late 1990s. In the late ‘80s, Bob had made the observation that became known as The Solow Paradox, that you could see computers everywhere except in the productivity numbers. That paradox was finally resolved in the late ‘90s, when we had enough demand to drive productivity growth, but more importantly, when we had very large sectors of the economy—retail, wholesale, and others—finally adopting the technologies of the day: client-server architectures, ERP systems.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour Saving Inventions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962; David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States, 1850–1920, Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 1978. 29. Paul A. David, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review 80, no. 2 (May 1990): 355–361. 30. Daniel Raff, “Wage Determination Theory and the Five-Dollar Day at Ford: A Detailed Examination” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987); Daniel M.G. Raff and Lawrence H. Summers, “Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

David, P.A. (1975) Technical Choice Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century, London: Cambridge University Press. —— and Bunn, J.A. (1988) “The economics of gateways’ technologies and network evolution: lessons from the electricity supply industry”, Information Economics and Policy, 3 (April): 165–202. David, Paul (1989) Computer and Dynamo: the Modern Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Center for Economic Policy Research, working paper No. 172. Davis, Diane (1994) Urban Leviathan: Mexico in the 20th Century, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Davis, Mike (1990) City of Quartz, London: Verso. Dean, James W., Yoon, Se Joon and Susman, Gerald I. (1992) “Advanced manufacturing technology and organization structure: empowerment or subordination?”


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Daugherty et al., Power Capacity and Production in the United States. Washington, DC: US Geological Survey, pp. 5–112. Davenport, C. B. 1926. Human growth curve. Journal of General Physiology 10(2):205–216. David, P. 1990. The dynamo and the computer: An historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. American Economic Review 80:355–361. David, S. 2003. The Indian Mutiny. New York: Penguin. Davis, J. 2011. Mercedes-Benz history: Diesel passenger car premiered 75 years ago. http://www.emercedesbenz.com/autos/mercedes-benz/classic/mercedes-benz-history-diesel-passenger-car-premiered-75-years-ago/.


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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

“The Consequences of Childhood Overweight and Obesity,” The Future of Children 16, no. 1 (spring): 47–67. Darby, Michael. (1976). “Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934–1941.” The Journal of Political Economy. 84, no. 1 (February): 1–16. David, Paul A. (1990). “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 80, no. 2 (May): 355–61. Davis, Steven J., and Haltiwanger, John. (2014). “Labor Market Fluidity and Economic Performance,” NBER Working Paper 20479, September. Decker, John, Haltiwanger, John, Jarmin, Ron S., and Miranda, Javier. (2014).