Thomas Malthus

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pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

Ricardo would no doubt have enjoyed intellectual battles with Marx as much as he had done with Thomas Malthus. We will learn more about Marx in Chapter 15. For now it is worth noting one thing. It is an oddity of history that someone who is today seen as one of the fathers of abstract classical economics also bequeathed Karl Marx to the world. 10 JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY (1767–1832) John Maynard Keynes’s straw man David Ricardo did not think much of Jean-Baptiste Say. “M. Say came to me here from London at the request of Mr. Mill,” he wrote to Thomas Malthus in 1814. While he was an “agreeable man”, Ricardo noted that “in his book there are many points which I think are very far from being satisfactorily established… He does not appear to me to be ready in conversation on the subject on which he has very ably written.”

(The British government used the Sinking Fund to pay off debt.) In her autobiography Martineau recalls the amusement of Thomas Malthus “when I told him I was sick of his name before I was fifteen”. Malthus was not Martineau’s only famous friend. In her day she was something of a celebrity, especially after she moved to London in the early 1830s. Eventually, says Michael Hill, “her intellectual circle came to include Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin”. She was also exceptionally well-travelled.

If someone can make it seem as though their argument, no matter how arcane, was or would have been supported by one of these thinkers, it carries that bit more weight. Which makes it essential to get a better sense of what these economists really meant. What did Adam Smith mean by the term “invisible hand”? Did Karl Marx predict the end of capitalism? Was John Stuart Mill a utilitarian? Did Thomas Malthus believe that famines were desirable? This book will talk about what the founders of economics actually thought. That involves debunking some popular myths. I will also explain the significance of their ideas in simple language. The book has no equations and hopefully no jargon. After reading this book, you will know a few interesting things about the very famous (Smith, Malthus, Mill) and the much less famous (Harriet Martineau, Bernard Mandeville, Dadabhai Naoroji).


The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

This being 1858 on a miserable, sparsely populated speck of earth somewhere far, far south of London’s nobs, fops, top hats, and toffs, he has nothing with which to while the time away except for a copy of Tristram Shandy he has already read five times—that and his own thoughts… One day he’s lying back on his reeking bog of a bed…thinking…about this and that…when a book he read a good twelve years earlier comes bubbling up his brain stem: An Essay on the Principle of Population by a Church of England priest, Thomas Malthus.c The priest had a deformed palate that left him with a speech defect, but he could write like a dream. The book had been published in 1798 and was still very much alive sixty years and six editions later. Left unchecked, Malthus said, human populations would increase geometrically, doubling every twenty-five years.1 But the food supply increases only arithmetically, one step at a time.2 By the twenty-first century, the entire earth would be covered by one great heaving mass of very hungry people pressed together shank to flank, butt to gut.

He used his clout as a Gentleman and a leading naturalist to enter Jenny’s cage and study her expressions up close.29 Certain he was…and so what? That left him as stumped as everybody else who was so sure about it, including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus couldn’t figure out exactly how transmutationi—Evolution—occurred, and neither could his grandson. In October of 1838, Charles happened to pick up a copy of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population…“for amusement,” as he put it, apparently assuming that no deep thinker could possibly find a book as old and popular as Principle of Population profound.30 He started reading it, and— Ahura! That old Malthusian magic’s got me in its spell! It lights up Darwin’s brainpan precisely the way it would Wallace’s twenty years later—It!

a According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word “primitive” can be defined as: “of, belonging to, or seeming to come from an early time in the very ancient past; not having a written language, advanced technology, etc.;…of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal.” Notes Chapter I: The Beast Who Talked 1 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), chapter 2. 2 Ibid., chapter 1. 3 James Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Strahan and Cadell, 1794). 4 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, (London: J.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

It is difficult to predict what will happen to fertility rates in the future, and depending on which rate is factored into the assumptions, the United Nations notes that the world population could either grow or shrink.12 If we take a middle ground and assume moderate population growth owing to decreased fertility rates and increased longevity, then we should next consider whether we would have the resources needed for these additional people. FIGURE 3.1 SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, International Database, December 2010. WHY THOMAS MALTHUS WAS WRONG In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus advanced this thesis: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”13 This notion that population grows faster than the ability to provide for ourselves seems intuitive to some and was borrowed by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the 1968 best-selling eco-doom book The Population Bomb.

Table of Contents Also by Sonia Arrison Title Page Dedication Foreword CHAPTER 1 - Humankind’s Eternal Quest for the Fountain of Youth IT’S OUR FAULT OVERCOMING DEATH, IMAGINING TRAGIC RESULTS FIGHTING DEATH CHAPTER 2 - How Science and Technology Will Increase Life Span REDEFINING OLD AGE SCIENCE FICTION BECOMING REALITY LEARNING FROM SALAMANDERS MANIPULATING CELLS MANIPULATING GENES THE PLASTICITY OF AGING THE SEARCH FOR AN ANTIAGING PILL GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT OF ALL TIME CHAPTER 3 - Mother Nature and the Longevity Revolution THE EARTH’S ABILITY TO HANDLE LONGER-LIVED HUMANS MODELING POPULATIONS WITH LONGER LIVES WHY THOMAS MALTHUS WAS WRONG OLDER, RICHER, AND CLEANER NEXT STEPS PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE VERSUS INNOVATION CHAPTER 4 - The Longevity Divide NATURE AND HUMANITY THE PRUDENCE OF AUGMENTING NATURE THREAT OF EUGENICS? RESOURCE USE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE HUMAN RIGHTS, GENETIC WARFARE, AND ECONOMIC DIVIDES INNOVATION, EXPONENTIAL GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION OF TECHNOLOGY WOULD OUR ANCESTORS HAVE WANTED TO LIVE LONGER?

Billari, “Advances in Development Reverse Fertility Declines,” Nature 460 (August 6, 2009): 741–743, www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08230.html. 12 United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, Population Division, “World Population to 2300,” 2004, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf. 13 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Library of Economics and Liberty, www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html#I.17. 14 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), prologue. 15 Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61–62. 16 Ed Regis, “The Doomslayer,” Wired, February 1997, 12, www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html. 17 Ibid. 18 These were chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. 19 Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 103. 20 David McClintick and Ross B.


pages: 282 words: 82,107

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage

agricultural Revolution, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, carbon footprint, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

The problem was that the supply of land was finite, and it was needed for other things besides agriculture: to grow wood for construction and fuel, and to accommodate Europe’s growing cities. Again, the problem was particularly acute in England, where urbanization had been most rapid. People began to worry that the population would soon outstrip the food supply. The problem was elegantly summarized by the English economist Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. It was an extraordinarily influential work, and its main argument runs as follows: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

Butchers, bakers, shoemakers, weavers, carpenters, and shipbuilders depended on animal or vegetable raw materials, all of which were the products, directly or indirectly, of photosynthesis—the capture of the sun’s energy by growing plants. Since all these things came from the land, and since the supply of land was limited, Thomas Malthus concluded that there was an ecological limit that growing populations and economies would eventually run into. He first made this prediction on the eve of the nineteenth century, and he refined his argument in the following years. Yet Britain did not hit the ecological wall that Malthus anticipated.

Despite efforts to increase agricultural production, both countries relied on imported wheat. In a speech at the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898, William Crookes, an English chemist and the president of the association, highlighted the obvious solution to the problem. A century after Thomas Malthus had made the same point, he warned that “civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat.” With no more land available, and with concern growing over Britain’s dependence on wheat imports, there was no alternative but to find a way to increase yields. “Wheat preeminently demands nitrogen,” Crookes observed.


pages: 279 words: 87,910

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

If scarcity is always with us, then efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources, and economics, the science that teaches us efficiency, will always be necessary. Yet on any commonsensical view of the matter, scarcity waxes and wanes. We know that famines are periods of extreme scarcity and good harvests produce relative plenty. Thomas Malthus understood that when population grows faster than food supplies, scarcity grows; and in the reverse case, it declines. Moreover, scarcity, as most people understand it, has diminished greatly in most societies over the last two hundred years. People in rich and even medium-rich countries no longer starve to death.

In fact he and his contemporaries did not talk about growth at all but about “improvement,” a term encompassing moral as well as material conditions. At the end of this road lay the “stationary state”—a state in which the possibilities of improvement were exhausted. All the classical economists had this end point in mind, at varying degrees of affluence. Smith’s two famous successors, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, were much less optimistic than Smith himself. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, 1826) was written to challenge William Godwin’s utopian claim that property redistribution would make possible abundance for all. Its logic was straightforwardly cyclical. Without strenuous moral “checks,” population would inevitably outstrip the land available to support it: variations in population pressure would determine cycles of rising and falling incomes.

Our own aspiration is to persuade by joy, to present a vision of the good life as one to be pursued not from guilt or fear of retribution but in happiness and hope. Limits to Growth Keynes looked forwards to a final end of growth, a point at which all material wants are definitively satisfied. Others, more pessimistic, have postulated a limit to growth, an external barrier to further progress. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, mentioned in Chapter 2, is the first and classic statement of this point of view. Malthus’s argument is beguilingly simple. It starts from two certainties: the finitude of the earth and the existence of a certain “passion between the sexes.” The earth’s ability to bring forth food is inherently limited.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The case for government in general is famously well expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the ‘state of nature’ gives rise to continuous wars leaving human lives ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Even the best of governments, however, have difficulties coming up with policies that work in the international arena. 11. Thomas Malthus (ed. G. Gilbert), An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), p. 18. 12. For an attempt to rehabilitate Thomas Malthus, read Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). 13. From The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For an update on Marx and globalization, see Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, London, 2002). 14.

BACK TO THE CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS With scarce resources, there’s no particular reason why higher living standards should always be achievable, no matter how market-friendly an economy might be. How, then, have some societies managed to perform what would seem to be a remarkable trick? If resources are scarce, how have living standards consistently risen? How has the curse of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), author of An Essay on the Principles of Population (first published in 1798), been sidestepped? Is Western progress really just the result of market forces? Malthus’s arguments were, as far as I can tell, based on his view that labourers had voracious sexual appetites. In his words, ‘in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population.

Even though the fertility rate has dropped rapidly since the 1970s – partly a reflection of China’s one-child policy and the much wider use of contraception across the region as a whole – the decline has not been fast enough to prevent a population explosion. In the early 1950s, East Asia had a population of fewer than 700 million. Half a century later, the population had more than doubled. DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDENDS AND DEFICITS These numbers, although impressive, say little about the economic consequences of demographic change. Ever since Thomas Malthus first wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, there has been a heated debate over whether changes in population size are bad for welfare (the Malthusian subsistence argument), good for welfare (what might be termed the human ingenuity argument) or entirely neutral for welfare (the income per capita rather than total income argument).


pages: 370 words: 107,983

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

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

Around 2002, SFI researcher Jim Crutchfield (along with UC Berkley’s Karl Young) wondered what sorts of models algorithms could infer from the simplest possible capital-C complex system in the world. To examine this they employed the logistics equation, a simplified version of the Malthusian Model, derived from the same Thomas Malthus that inspired Charles Darwin.5 In 1845 the French mathematician Pierre François Verhulst, after he read the famous essay where Thomas Malthus theorized that human population growth would inevitably lead to starvation and misery due to the overuse of limited resources, rendered the idea in mathematical form, calling it the Malthusian Model, which was used to calculate the number of animals that might be grazed on a piece of land without destroying it, and even to explore human demographics, in line with the theories of Malthus.

And, the idea that mankind could work towards a perfect society on earth ran counter to traditional Christian thinking that held that man was innately sinful and the only way of overcoming the present misery was through religious salvation, and a paradise after death. Perhaps because of this, in 1798, curate and academic Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in response to Godwin’s theory that society and universal suffrage would lead towards a perfected world. In the essay, Malthus argued that humankind’s improvement was bounded by a harsh reality: populations could only increase until they exhausted their food supplies, which resulted in poverty, and constrained the vast majority of people in a sub-perfect equilibrium of tolerable starvation.

This is exactly what Kalyan’s more literal fitness-sharing algorithm was doing, except in the immune model there was no fitness-sharing function acting numerically on a numerical fitness. Instead, what the simulation showed was that natural resource sharing in the immune system had the emergent effect of maintaining diversity.19 If we recall the theory of eighteenth-century curate Thomas Malthus, limited resources are supposed to assure a sub-optimal social equilibrium, making evolutionary utopianism impossible. Darwin and Wallace transformed that idea into the mechanism of natural selection, which was eventually re-branded ‘survival of the fittest’. In their view, limited resource availability drove evolution because the less ‘fit’ didn’t survive and reproduce, ensuring the population became more and more fit over time.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

That outpaces gains in most other countries and reflects a dramatic rise in the standard of living of most people, bringing better food, better hospitals, and better housing. Whether or not China’s growth threatens the planet—as well as its own sustainability—is a matter of conjecture. Ever since Thomas Malthus, a cleric and scholar who wrote his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have been predicting that the earth is reaching its natural limits. Malthus thought that population growth would always outpace improvements in agricultural production, ensuring that living standards would stall and eventually catastrophe would strike.

In 1961 human demand accounted for 0.7 planet’s worth of biocapacity. That meant we were in the black. By the mid-1980s humanity had tipped into the red, and by 2008 the picture had changed dramatically. In that year, GFN said, we needed 1.5 planets to sustain us, something that is clearly unsustainable. It is enough to make Thomas Malthus stir from his grave to say, “I told you so.” * * * — Wealth is a measure not only of the present but also of the future. That is because today’s wealth—the balance sheet of all our assets, natural, physical and institutional—is tomorrow’s income. That contrasts with our standard economic gauge—GDP—which is essentially a backward-looking measure, a way of recording what has already been produced, say in the past year.

That’s why so many talk about Japan, with its mildly shrinking population and positive per-capita growth rates, as being in a “demographic death spiral.”4 Economists are so wedded to the idea that the economy must always be expanding that they find it hard to break the logic of “just add people.” If Thomas Malthus thought more and more people would be the death of human civilization, modern economists think the reverse. Yet unless we imagine the world’s population increasing indefinitely, we really must begin to imagine a world where the economy eventually stops expanding—in rich, mature economies at least.5 That does not mean that income per capita necessarily needs to stop rising.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The classical gold/silver standard restrains the state from depreciating the currency and provides a stable monetary environment in which the economy may flourish. As we shall see, the classical model of Adam Smith would repeatedly come under attack over the centuries by friends and foes alike. Adam Smith and the Age of Economists Adam Smith was not perfect by any means. He led disciples David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus down the wrong road with his crude labor theory of value, his critique of landlords, his strange distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor, and his failure to recognize the fundamental principle of subjective marginal utility in price theory. But these are parenthetical deviations that were unfortunately magnified by the classical economists and distort his overwhelming positive contribution to economic science.

Smith's model of universal prosperity was encouraged initially by mist, "I cannot get over the difficulty of the wine which is kept in a cellar for 3 or 4 years, or that of the oak tree, which perhaps had not 2/- expended on it in the way of labour, and yet comes to be worth £100" (Vivo 1987, 193). Even Thomas Malthus disagreed with his friend, writing, "neither labour nor any other commodity can be an accurate measure of real value in exchange" (Ricardo 1951, 416). Economists over the years have had difficulty understanding Ricardo's "corn model" and his Principles textbook, especially the twisted assumptions he required to prove his theories.

The price of gold is a valuable monitor of global economic instability, and it has been rising lately. Environmentalism is a major subject of debate. How can nations grow and increase their standards of living without destroying the air, polluting the water, devastating the forests, and causing global warming? The debate goes back to Thomas Malthus (chapter 2) and is related to historical and present-day concerns over unlimited growth and limited resources. In this ecological debate, economists, while not alarmists, have made numerous contributions to minimizing pollution and other environmental problems. To solve the "tragedy of the commons," for example, market economists have emphasized the need to establish defensive resource rights in water, fishing, and forestland, so that owners have the proper incentives to preserve these resources in a balanced way.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Later, he helped lend money to the British government to fight Napoleon. One of his deals was effectively a bet on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. By lending to the government Ricardo was taking a huge risk: if the British were defeated, he’d lose a lot of money. His friend and fellow economist, Thomas Malthus, who we’ll meet properly soon, had a small stake in the loan. Malthus panicked, and wrote to Ricardo to ask him to get rid of his share. Ricardo held his nerve, though, and held onto his own stake. When news came of the British victory, he became one of the wealthiest men in Britain overnight.

Scrooge scowls at the men and shoos them out of the room. Speaking about the poor, he says to the departing visitors: ‘If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Earlier, we met a financial genius and one of the great British economists, David Ricardo and his good friend, the clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus (1766–1834) wasn’t as good at earning money as Ricardo but turned out to be very good at coming up with economic theories that made people sit up and take notice. He was the first ever professor of economics, appointed in 1805 to the East India College, which trained officers of the East India Company, the famous British trading company.

At the time, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were terrible famines in Africa and Asia. The most obvious cause seemed to be a lack of food: people starve when the rains fail and the crops die. Or perhaps there were simply too many mouths to feed as a result of rapid population growth, the conclusion of Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century. Sen saw defects in the common explanations. Droughts happen in America from time to time, but no one ever starves there. And while Malthus warned of the consequences of too many people, famines have happened in Ethiopia and Sudan, places where the populations live thinly scattered over vast areas of land.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

One billion is more than triple the 2010 population of the United States, the third most populous country on Earth. Imagine a world in which we added one-plus USA, or two Pakistans, or three Mexicos, every four years. . . . Actually, this requires no imagination at all. It is reality. We will add our seventh billion some time in 2011. This extraordinary acceleration, foreseen over two centuries ago by Thomas Malthus,13 burst into popular culture again in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich, then a young biology professor at Stanford, jolted the world with The Population Bomb, a terrifying book forecasting global famines, “smog deaths,” and massive human die-offs if we didn’t somehow control our numbers.14 He became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and his ideas almost certainly helped nudge China toward its “One-Child” population control policy implemented in 1979.

Put another way, the urbanization of society—if also associated with modernization and women’s rights—helps slow the rate of growth. There are, of course, exceptions to this tendency, but as these phenomena continue to expand throughout the developing world, the global population explosion so feared by Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich is expected to decelerate. Already, in late-stage, low-immigration developed countries like Japan and Italy, and in regions like Eastern Europe, populations have not only stabilized but are falling. Assuming that fertility rates continue to drop as they are now, we are heading toward a total world population of around 9.2 billion in 2050, at which point we will still be growing but about half as fast as we are today.78 One of the most profound long-term effects of women having fewer babies is to skew societal age structures toward the elderly (the pulse of babies from population momentum is only temporary).

Are we about to run out of the raw materials our cities and mechanized farmlands so desperately need? Are We Running Out of Resources? The debate over natural resources, and whether we are running out of them, is a contentious and surprisingly ancient debate. Even Aristotle wrote about it. In 1798 Thomas Malthus’ first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that the exponential growth of human population, set against the arithmetic growth in the area of arable land, must ultimately lead us to outstrip our food supply, thus inevitably dragging us toward a brutal world of famines and violence.95 Among Malthus’ more odious ideas was that social programs are pointless because they enable poor people to have more babies, thus making the problem worse.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

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

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

What long-term trends there had been, such as population growth in Europe and in the world more generally, had been gentle and punctuated with unhappy setbacks. By around 1800 the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (essentially Britons and Americans) were escaping the constraints on population growth identified and defined by Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman, writer and thinker whose life spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of whom much will be said later. Ironically, however, they were escaping these constraints precisely as they were being identified. This era marks a meaningful break in demographic history, a demographic corollary of the industrial revolution, a landmark pointing both geographically and historically to global and permanent change.

When a population–or anything else–is growing at 1.33% per annum, it doubles in around fifty years, then doubles again in the next fifty years, and that is what the population of England did during the course of the nineteenth century. Just as this revolution was getting under way, the ‘old regime’ from which it was breaking was at last being identified, by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was a country parson from Surrey, a prosperous county in southern England, who identified what he believed was an iron law of history. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, written, published and progressively revised between 1798 and 1830, he argued that a growing population would always outstrip the ability of the land to support it, which would lead inexorably to misery and death.

New social and economic trends came to the fore, and now the trendsetter was the most populous country of the West, the United States. 6 The West since 1945 From Baby Boom to Mass Immigration Living in Surrey in the early nineteenth century, and seemingly oblivious to the revolutionary changes occurring in the industrial heartland a few hundred miles to the north, the Reverend Thomas Malthus was describing a vanishing world. It was a world in which the capacity of land to support people rose only gradually, while growth in human numbers might grow exponentially and would be kept in check, one way or another, by the limitations of slowly growing food production. Yet while Malthus was expounding his theory in various versions of An Essay on the Principle of Population, his agrarian assumptions were being undermined as a whole new society was being born around Manchester and other new industrial centres in England’s north and Midlands.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

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

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

A 1915 article published in Literary Digest confidently predicted that with electrification, it “will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will go to town to rest and get well.”9 Edison himself was convinced that electricity would help us overcome the greatest hurdle to further progress: our need to sleep. Technology was the new religion of the people. There was the sense that there was no problem that technology could not solve. In hindsight, and in the light of the gains brought by technology, it is astounding to think that economists of the early nineteenth century like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo did not believe that technology could improve the human lot. The technological virtuosity of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took some time to trickle down to the economics profession. But in the 1950s, Robert Solow, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987, found that virtually all economic advance over the twentieth century had been thanks to technology.

Broadly speaking, there are two strands of explanations. While some scholars have emphasized constraints on the supply of technology, others have pointed at limited demand. Joseph Schumpeter believed that for a given technology to be adopted, some kind of need must exist.2 This was also the view of Thomas Malthus, who reckoned that “necessity has been with great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the necessity of satisfying the wants of the body.”3 A number of examples of technological developments since the Industrial Revolution that conform to this view spring to mind, including the Manhattan Project, set up by the U.S. government to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so; the steam engine developed by Thomas Savery to pump water out of British coal mines; and the interchangeable parts pioneered by Eli Whitney to “substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for the skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience; a species of skill which is not possessed in this country to any considerable extent.”4 To return to the preindustrial world, most demand-driven explanations of the lack of preindustrial growth tend to emphasize the fact that labor-saving technologies, which allow us to produce more with less, make economic sense only if capital is relatively cheap compared to labor.

As Americans in the middle and at the lower end of the income distribution became the prime beneficiaries of progress, inequality went into reverse. Along with every other industrialized nation, America saw the share of income accruing to people at the top, fall. It may be telling that unlike economists of the Industrial Revolution (like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx) who were all fond of apocalyptic economic predictions, economists living in the aftermath of the Second Industrial Revolution were largely optimistic—perhaps overly so. In any event, the idea that industrialists grew rich on the misery of workers had evidently fallen out of fashion.


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The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Neanderthals, apparently, did not: Men, women, and children all behaved like human males, hunting reindeer and mastodons. So much for the past. Now, what about the future? ECONOMISTS ARE TYPICALLY wrong about the future, but few have ever been as spectacularly, famously, and lucklessly wrong as Thomas Malthus. Malthus, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a parson at Oke-wood church, near Albury, produced his most famous work in 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus offered two “postulata”: “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.”

Marshall’s idea was intuitive: Marshall’s idea was also mathematically convenient. David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Norton, 2006), chapter 7, explains the mathematical appeal of Marshall’s “externalities.” Economists were starting to realize that contrary to the dismal predictions of Thomas Malthus, the world was getting richer rather than running out of everything. The explanation was “increasing returns.” The world wasn’t running out of food or energy or space. Instead, more people, more investment, and larger firms made things cheaper. Marshall realized that if individual firms enjoyed increasing returns to scale, the mathematics of modeling them would be formidably complicated, and logically the world would be dominated by monopolists.

Also Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, “What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor Among Neanderthals and Modern Humans in Eurasia,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 6(December 2006): 953–80, www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v47n6/066001/066001.web.pdf. “First, That food is necessary”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798. “from one million B.C. to 1990”: Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change.” The end of the last ice age: ibid. Also see Clark, Farewell to Alms, chapter 7. Most commodity prices: Julian Simon, The State of Humanity (Boston: Blackwell, 1995).


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

The first, the “limits to growth” perspective, insists that people eventually and disastrously outstrip the supply of natural resources. When twenty-first-century Americans hear the words “population debate,” most think of—but do not agree with—the limits-to-growth principles set forth by British pastor Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). In his Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 but updated in a more widely read 1803 edition, Malthus concluded that overpopulation and misery were inevitable. “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” he observed. “Subsistence [the food supply] increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

The population policies of the new United States were indirect but powerful: the federal government subsidized the numerical and geographical expansion of the citizenry by acquiring new territories and removing Indians from them, providing cheap land to settlers and introduction 11 railroads, and welcoming the nearly unlimited immigration of people not of “African descent.” But the founders’ “republican” theory of democracy, sprung from the Enlightenment, valued an agrarian society with room to expand and fostered population anxieties among the elite well before Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. In the Early Republic, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party worried that population growth threatened the agrarian republic, whereas the Federalist Party embraced rising numbers, believing they accelerated commerce and spurred beneficial manufacturing.

Its followers feared that a rising population was fraught with peril and heralded the kind of fully settled, commercial- and manufacturing-based, deeply inegalitarian, and morally decrepit European society from which the colonists had fled.8 Ideas about population were not a perfect proxy for party affiliation, but whereas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans tended to imbibe republicanism’s aversion to population growth, John Adams’s Federalists and later the Whig Party tended to embrace liberalism’s celebration of it—and hoped to keep it confined to America’s great cities rather than seeing it disperse across the West. Thus Americans had engaged in substantial population debates long before the Rev. Thomas Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) that population growth doomed human societies by overwhelming natural resources. (Although Malthus published the first edition anonymously, and it was little read, he made no attempt to hide his authorship.


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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

Conversely, control of population through family planning-using condoms during sex tobe explicit-will promote the prosperityof poor nations. Population is an old concern in economics. Thomas Malthus in the early nineteenth century famously saw exponential population growth outracing food production, which he said would lead to a major population correction in the form of widespread famines. The latter-day incarnation of Thomas Malthus is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich in his famous cri de coeur of 1968, The PopuZation Bomb, foresaw that within a decadeafter his writing, famines would sweep ”repeatedly across Asia, Africa, and South America,” killing perhaps as many asone-fifth of the world’s population.’

He noted that this principle suggests a positive relationship between initial populationandsubsequentpopulation growth.28 A higher initial populationmeansmore idea creation, more people to use the idea, and more people to share the fixed cost of implementing the idea. The benefits to society then should make possible the support of more new babies, and so population growth Cash for Condoms? 95 should increase. This prediction is in stark contrast to the Thomas Malthus-Paul Ehrlich-Lester Brown principlethathigher initial population will lead to a population crash as famine sets in.So who is right: Boserup or Malthus? Kremer pointed out that the evidence of the very long run is in favor of Boserup. World population has been growing steadilyover time, from 125,000 in 1 million B.c., to 4 million in 10,000 B.c.


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The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

From the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, those societies that managed to harness accounting and long-term traditions of financial accountability and trust did so by full cultural engagement: Republican Italian city-states like Florence and Genoa, Golden Age Holland, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America all integrated accounting into their educational curriculum, religious and moral thought, art, philosophy, and political theory. Accounting became the subject of theological and political works, great paintings, social and scientific theories, and novels, from Dante and the Dutch Masters to Auguste Comte, Thomas Malthus, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Max Weber. In a virtuous circle, the elevation of practical, business-minded mathematics into the spheres of high and humane thinking allowed these societies not only to maximize their use of accounting but also to build complex cultures of accountability and awareness of the difficulties posed by such a culture.

From maps, biology, human behavior, and railroads to the probabilities of life and death and the management of time itself, all now came under the purview of the men of numbers. The spread of science into all aspects of life brought great advantages in industry, technology, and medicine, but it was also used for more morally ambiguous purposes.7 Whereas Jeremy Bentham had used a double-entry model to try to calculate happiness, Thomas Malthus used the analogy of a numerical balance in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In a pessimistic parallel to Bentham, Malthus also believed in two sides balancing each other out. In a biological reckoning, human subsistence requirements and the fatalities of vice would balance human population in a natural system of checks and balances, by which “the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino, 2009), 26. 5. Ibid., 17, 28. 6. Amanda Vickerey, “His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 1, Supplement 1 (2006): 12–38. 7. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 17–30. 8. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61. 9. Janet Browne, “The Natural Economy of Households: Charles Darwin’s Account Books,” in Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in the Honor Tore Frängsmyr, ed. Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin, and Svante Lindqvist (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson, 2008), 104. 10.


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Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

The Planet Can’t Hold Them When speaking to audiences about global poverty, I’m often challenged along the following lines: “Saving the lives of poor people now will only mean that more will die when the population eventually crashes because our planet has long passed its carrying capacity.” The challenge is evidence of the continuing relevance of the thought of the eighteenth-century English economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus, who famously claimed that population would always outstrip food supplies. If epidemics and plagues did not keep human population in check, he wrote, then “gigantic inevitable famine” would do so.24 Two centuries later, in 1968, entomologist Paul Ehrlich warned in his bestseller The Population Bomb that we had lost the battle to feed humanity.

Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 238-41; www.millenniumvillages.org. 23. “Millennium Villages: A New Approach to Fighting Poverty: FAQ,” www.unmillenniumproject.org/mv/mv_faq.htm; “The Magnificent Seven,” The Economist, April 26, 2006, p. 63. 24. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1st edition, 1798. 25. Paul Ehrlich, “Paying the Piper,” New Scientist 36:652-55, reprinted in Garrett Hardin, ed., Population, Evolution, and Birth Control, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1969), p. 127. See also Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p. 36. 26.


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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

Due to the war with France, England’s gold supply was under pressure so the Bank of England had stopped paying its notes in gold. Freed from this constraint, Ricardo argued that there was too much money printed by the central bank, which contributed to the high inflation of the time. This critique in his very first publication brought him to the attention of some of the leading thinkers of the time: Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, father of the prominent philosopher John Stuart Mill. An increase in tariffs on imported wheat in 1815 under the Corn Laws prompted his next major work, Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. The argument against the protectionist Corn Laws formed the foundation for his future and seminal work that set out the basis for trade models in economics.

Marxism It was after the 1857 global crisis that Marx began writing his treatise on political economy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published two years later. He analysed the ideas of the leading political economists of the day, particularly Adam Smith and his chief disciple, David Ricardo, as well as Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say and James and John Stuart Mill, among others. Somewhat surprisingly, Marx admired Ricardo, calling him ‘the greatest economist of the nineteenth century’.14 Even though Ricardo was a capitalist, Marx shared his belief in a conflictual course of capitalism. Recall from the previous chapter that Ricardo saw an inevitable conflict between the classes due to international trade.

Even though he lived in the world’s largest city after 1849, Marx became eventually convinced of the significance of agriculture in a capitalist economy and of the importance of social conflict in the countryside for revolution. In part, he gained these views from the French Physiocrats, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, all of whom considered the agricultural sector to be an essential part of the development process, and thus a source of capitalist conflict in Marx’s view. In Capital, Marx wrote of the labourers, capitalists, and landowners. Yet in the Communist Manifesto, written nineteen years before, he focused on two classes in a capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.


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

Due to the war with France, England’s gold supply was under pressure so the Bank of England had stopped paying its notes in gold. Freed from this constraint, Ricardo argued that there was too much money printed by the central bank, which contributed to the high inflation of the time. This critique in his very first publication brought him to the attention of some of the leading thinkers of the time: Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, father of the prominent philosopher John Stuart Mill. An increase in tariffs on imported wheat in 1815 under the Corn Laws prompted his next major work, Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. The argument against the protectionist Corn Laws formed the foundation for his future and seminal work that set out the basis for trade models in economics.

Marxism It was after the 1857 global crisis that Marx began writing his treatise on political economy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published two years later. He analysed the ideas of the leading political economists of the day, particularly Adam Smith and his chief disciple, David Ricardo, as well as Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say and James and John Stuart Mill, among others. Somewhat surprisingly, Marx admired Ricardo, calling him ‘the greatest economist of the nineteenth century’.14 Even though Ricardo was a capitalist, Marx shared his belief in a conflictual course of capitalism. Recall from the previous chapter that Ricardo saw an inevitable conflict between the classes due to international trade.

Even though he lived in the world’s largest city after 1849, Marx became eventually convinced of the significance of agriculture in a capitalist economy and of the importance of social conflict in the countryside for revolution. In part, he gained these views from the French Physiocrats, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, all of whom considered the agricultural sector to be an essential part of the development process, and thus a source of capitalist conflict in Marx’s view. In Capital, Marx wrote of the labourers, capitalists, and landowners. Yet in the Communist Manifesto, written nineteen years before, he focused on two classes in a capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Take a look at a map of the city nearest you in 1970 and contrast it with today and then imagine what it will look like when quadrupled in size and density over the next twenty years. But it would be a serious error to assume that human social evolution is governed by some mathematical formula. This was the big mistake made by Thomas Malthus when he first advanced his principle of population in 1798 (roughly the same time when Richard Price and others were celebrating – if that is the right word – the power of exponential growth in human affairs). Malthus’s arguments are directly relevant to the issue at hand, while they also provide a cautionary tale.

First, capital has a long history of successfully resolving its ecological difficulties, no matter whether these refer to its use of ‘natural’ resources, the ability to absorb pollutants or to cope with the degradation of habitats, the loss of biodiversity, the declining qualities of air, land and water, and the like. Past predictions of an apocalyptic end to civilisation and capitalism as a result of natural scarcities and disasters look foolish in retrospect. Throughout capital’s history far too many doomsayers have cried ‘wolf’ too fast and too often. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, as we have seen, erroneously predicted social catastrophe (spreading famine, disease, war) as exponential population growth outran the capacity to increase food supplies. In the 1970s Paul Ehrlich, a leading environmentalist, argued that mass starvation was imminent by the end of the decade, but it did not occur.

Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982; Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. 6. Bradford DeLong, ‘Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C.–Present’. Estimates given in Wikipedia entry on Gross World Product. 7. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 8. McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The World at Work: Jobs, Pay and Skills for 3.5 Billion People’, Report of the McKinsey Global Institute, 2012. 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Kalamazoo, Black & Red, 2000. 10.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

In the same period, however, some were raising doubts about the wisdom of aiding the poor. In his 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Law, the vicar Joseph Townsend had already, almost a decade before Speenhamland, warned that “it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.” Another clergyman, Thomas Malthus, elaborated on Townsend’s ideas. In the summer of 1798, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, he described “the great difficulty” on the road to progress, “that to me appears insurmountable.” His premise was twofold: (1) Humans need food to survive, and (2) The passion between the sexes is ineradicable.

See: Gabriel Thompson, “Could You Survive on $2 a Day?” Mother Jones (December 13, 2012). http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/extreme-poverty-unemployment-recession-economy-fresno 8. The Reading Mercury (May 11, 1795). http://www1.umassd.edu/ir/resources/poorlaw/p1.doc 9. This concerns the plague. See: Thomas Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf 10. For simplicity’s sake I refer to David Ricardo as an “economist,” but in his own day he was considered a “political economist.” As the chapter on GDP explains, modern economists are a 20th century invention. 11.


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Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Many reviewers have emphasized the infectious zaniness of the play, seemingly missing its explicit message — idealism and good intentions are insufficient responses to problems of population pressure and resource depletion. Maybe that’s just as well: Urinetown succeeds so well as comedy and theater that even people utterly immune to its insights still have a good time; thus more people are drawn to see it, including those who do “get it.” Thomas Malthus 1766-1834. What’s the significance of the play’s last line, “Hail Malthus!”? Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was a British political economist who theorized that unchecked population growth must eventually outstrip increases in food production. He is most famous for the Essay on Population (1798), in which he explained in simple terms the connection between population pressure and human misery.


pages: 314 words: 77,409

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, clean water, discovery of penicillin, Fellow of the Royal Society, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Skype, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship

Based on a maximum doubling time of twenty minutes, one can calculate how long it would take for one bacterium to give rise to enough bacteria to equal the weight of the Earth. The answer: just two days. But the world is not made of solid elephants or bacteria. Why? Because there are limits to the growth and numbers of all creatures. Darwin recognized that. And he understood it because Reverend Thomas Malthus stated it long before in his landmark Essay on the Principle of Populations (1798): Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. . . . The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.

[Figure 7.6] What the curves revealed was that the rate of increase of each species was higher when their numbers were fewer, decreased as the populations grew, and then turned negative (the populations decreased). In other words, the rate of change in the population depended on its density. This phenomenon is known as density-dependent regulation. It has been appreciated since the writings of social economist Thomas Malthus that populations will increase indefinitely unless something prevents them from doing so. Imagine, however, a group of large animals in a fixed space, like goats in a pasture. If the population starts out small in number, it can expand as rapidly as the animals can reproduce. But as the number of animals increases, space or food begins to run low.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The 1834 act made it illegal to give support to people outside of workhouses, and then required the conditions in the workhouses to be horrible as a matter of moral principle. And it worked. Workhouses were widely feared—a terrible fate to be chosen only by the most desperate. Victorian social thinkers like Reverend Thomas Malthus viewed poverty as a natural condition that particular workers fell into due to their personal moral failings. To avoid encouraging immorality and sloth, workhouse conditions were designed to be worse than those of the poorest free laborer outside of the workhouse. As Catherine Spence’s example illustrates, such conditions shifted between fair-to-middling in good years to dire deprivation, or simple starvation, in downturn years.

The Great Depression was launched by a historic stock market crash in 1929 that was made much worse by poor policy. Allowing banks to fail proved deadly, but the real fault went much higher. The sitting president, Herbert Hoover, stuck to his philosophic belief in minimal government. Using workhouse logic that would have made Thomas Malthus proud, he argued that helping the destitute would tempt them into laziness and dependency. As the 1929 recession became the Great Depression, a backlash became inevitable. In the United States, this took the form of an electoral landslide for a new type of politician—one who promised to end the view of poverty as a moral failing on the part of the poor and who viewed it as the government’s duty to be caring and interventionist.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

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

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

But since the dawn of the nineteenth century, a split second compared to the span of human existence, life expectancy has more than doubled, and per capita incomes have soared twenty-fold in the most developed regions of the world, and fourteen-fold on Planet Earth as a whole (Fig. 1).[2] This continuing improvement has been so radical, in fact, that we often lose sight of just how exceptional this period is in relation to the rest of our history. What explains this Mystery of Growth – the scarcely conceivable transformation in the quality of life of the last few centuries, in terms of health, wealth and education, which dwarf any other changes in these dimensions since the emergence of Homo sapiens? In 1798, the English scholar Thomas Malthus offered a plausible theory for the mechanism that had caused living standards to remain stagnant, effectively trapping societies in poverty, since time immemorial. He argued that whenever societies managed to bring about a food surplus through technological innovation, the resulting boost in living standards could only ever be temporary as it would lead inevitably to a corresponding rise in birth rates and a reduction in mortality rates.

Yet as noted at the outset, despite these enormous advances in knowledge and technology, quite mysteriously human living standards, measured in terms of lifespan, quality of life and our degree of material comfort and prosperity, remained largely stagnant. To resolve this mystery, we have to delve deeper into the origins of this stagnation: the poverty trap. 2 Lost in Stagnation The eighteenth-century cleric Thomas Malthus was raised in a wealthy family among England’s social elite. An influential scholar, he deplored the utopianism of contemporary philosophers such as William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet – luminaries of the Age of Enlightenment – who envisioned humanity’s path as one of inevitable progress towards an ideal society.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

“The man in the street in the 1790s,” Wrigley argues, “would be in no doubt about the occurrence of a revolution across the Channel in France, but he would have been astonished to learn that he was living in the middle of what future generations would also term a revolution.” Nor was the man in the street the only person in denial, Wrigley adds. “The three greatest of the framers of classical economics, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, not only were equally unaware of it, but were unanimous in dismissing the possibility of what later generations came to term an industrial revolution.”I14 Wagonways and railways extending to and from canals were numerous by 1800. A few railways hauling coal, like the Merthyr Tramroad, bypassed canals where traffic was heavy.

Tracing that link in detail is outside the scope of this book, but several scholars have done so, including Robert Zubrin in his 2013 study Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, and Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in a lengthy 2009 paper, “The Postwar Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb.”10 Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century English proto-economist, was himself no piker at human pruning, notoriously proposing: Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

“The postwar intellectual roots of the population bomb”: Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer, “The Postwar Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb: Fairfield Osborn’s ‘Our Plundered Planet’ and William Vogt’s ‘Road to Survival’ in Retrospect,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 37–61. 11. Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population, 6th ed., bk. 4, ch. 5 (London: John Murray, 1826), .300–1, quoted in Robert Zubrin, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 6. 12. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1969), 12. 13.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

But output can also be improved by new ways of organising production, such as the moving assembly line that allowed Henry Ford to produce cars more cheaply. Financial innovation, such as letters of credit, or legal reforms like the creation of the limited liability company, made it easier for traders to take risks and expand their operations. Perhaps the most important area of innovation has been agriculture. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century vicar, is famed for his gloomy forecasts about the dangers of population growth. He spotted the underlying problem of civilisation until that time: the limits on the ability to produce more food. New gadgets such as the seed drill may have helped escape this Malthusian trap, as it became known, but just as important were new crops, and new systems of field rotation that boosted output.

And without those same productivity improvements, the planet would never be able to support the 7.7bn humans who are alive today. In the first seven decades of the 20th century, an average of 49 people per 100,000 died from famines somewhere in the world; in the subsequent four decades (up until 2010), the average was just 4.5.3 Thomas Malthus, the cleric and scholar whose 1798 essay predicted that food production would never keep pace with population growth, has been proved wrong time and again. As recently as 1950, farming still employed two-thirds of the global workforce.4 We can classify the countries of the world by the proportion of the workforce involved in agriculture.

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 2. N.F.R. Crafts and C.K. Harley, “Output growth and the British Industrial Revolution: a restatement of the Crafts-Harley view”, The Economic History Review, vol. 45, no. 4, November 1992 3. Maddison, Growth and Interaction in the World Economy, op. cit. 4. Ibid. 5. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population 6. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, op. cit. 7. Jűrgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19th Century 8. Ibid. 9. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History 10.


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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

GETTING TO DENMARK PART FIVE - Toward a Theory of Political Development 29 - POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL DECAY THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS IDEAS AS CAUSE THE GENERAL MECHANISM OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT SPANDRELS EVERYWHERE INSTITUTIONS POLITICAL DECAY VIOLENCE AND THE DYSFUNCTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM 30 - POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, THEN AND NOW THOMAS MALTHUS POLITICS IN A MALTHUSIAN WORLD DEVELOPMENT UNDER CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS THE MODERN DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM WHAT HAS CHANGED ACCOUNTABILITY TODAY WHAT COMES NEXT ALSO BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Copyright Page PREFACE This book has two origins.

This is why the anachronistic application of contemporary property rights theory to historical situations leads to fundamental misunderstandings. Many economists believe that strong property rights promote growth because they protect private returns to investment, thereby stimulating investment and growth. But economic life in Han Dynasty China resembled the world described by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population much more than the world that has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years.6 Today, we expect increases in labor productivity (output per person) as the result of technological innovation and change. But before 1800, productivity gains were much more episodic.

We need, then, to disaggregate the political, economic, and social dimensions of development, and understand how they relate to one another as separate phenomena that periodically interact. We need to do this, not least because the nature of these relationships is very different now than it was under the historical conditions of a Malthusian world. THOMAS MALTHUS The world changed very dramatically after approximately the year 1800, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Before then, economic growth in the form of continuously increasing productivity based on technological change could not be taken for granted. Indeed, it barely existed at all.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

., new “rules of the outer skies” and cooperative space standards and practices—that can allow a fair and equitable set of practices for the “cosmic commons” and (3) the strategic and even military space systems that will “police” the new space economy as it grows and matures further and further away from Planet Earth . Astral Abundance Unless we turn to the commercial opportunities of New Space and breakthrough new technologies here on Earth, we could indeed be in deep trouble. This will be ever clearer as populations continue to rise and resources shrink (Fig. 1.3). Dr. Thomas Malthus, the economic prophet of the eighteenth century who predicted we would eventually run out of food and vital resources, will be proven right even though he was perhaps three centuries premature. Some very capable people have gathered data from all over the world to put together the following chart on so-called “non-renewable resources .”

There are larger versions that are 2–6 units that are used for many new applications for commercial applications. Earth’s finite resourcesThere have been various warnings about the world’s mounting human population and the limits of natural resources, potable water, and food that the planet can sustain. Thomas Malthus was the first to publicly warn of such a concern, but in more recent times there has been the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” study, the book Population Bomb and many other books and studies. Global Navigation Satellite Services or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)Satellites used to provide navigation and targeting capabilities as well as precision timing.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

It was that many believed technology would solve the problem. The Economist epitomized this mood in an article on environmental scares published in December 1997. “Forecasters of scarcity and doom,” the magazine announced, are “invariably wrong.” It traced the history of environmental scares all the way from Thomas Malthus’s predictions of impending famine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to contemporary predictions that the world was running out of oil or food. As the article illustrated, forecasters of scarcity and doom had consistently failed to anticipate how new technologies would solve the problems that worried them.

In 2007, the year before the financial crisis hit, the world price of basic foodstuffs rose by 50 percent.8 Several countries were shaken by riots over rising food prices, including Mexico, Indonesia, and China. Indeed Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, claimed in 2009 that there had been food riots in more than sixty countries over the previous two years, adding, “Massive hunger poses a threat to the stability of governments, societies and borders.”9 Ever since Thomas Malthus first predicted that a rising population would provoke famine, gloomy predictions about food shortages have always eventually been confounded by technological advances, which have ensured that supply has kept pace with demand. Over the long term, that may well prove to be the case again. But over the next decade, a resumption of global economic growth, combined with uncertain weather linked to climate change, is likely to provoke further destabilizing spikes in food prices.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. , accessed 08/19/2010); and Frank Newport, “Religious Identity: States Differ Widely,” Gallup Report, August 7, 2009 (www.gallup.com/poll/122075/religious-identity-states-differ-widely.aspx, accessed 07/19/2010). 201-205 The Price of the Future: The description of the Reverend Thomas Malthus is drawn from Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, revised 7th edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), pp. 75-104. Malthus’s quote is in Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: or, A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42-43. Carlyle’s quote is in Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1847), p. 383.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

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

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

Nonetheless, the U.N.’s median prediction puts the likely world population at nearly 8 billion by 2025 and just under 9 billion by 2050.111 Surprisingly, the experts think that, for the foreseeable future, there will be enough food to go around. In 1798, when the world had barely 1 billion people, Thomas Malthus foresaw terrible disasters flowing from the imbalance in “the proportion between the natural increase of population and food.”112 But in a global perspective of two centuries, Malthus has been proved wrong. Thanks largely to the so-called Green revolution, food production per head has increased in every region of the world except Africa since the late 1970s, despite the spectacular growth in the number of mouths to feed.

See http://www.unfpa.org/6billion/ccmc/thedayofsixbillion.htm and UNPD, World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, on http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.ht. 109. See http://www.unfpa.org/6billion/. Every two-fifths of a second is my timing of that counter. 110. World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, p. 1. 111. Ibid., p. vii. 112. Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population, quoted in Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 205. I follow Sen’s argument. 113. Ibid., Table 9.1 on p. 206. 114. Human Development Report 2003, p. 227. 115. Ibid., p. 125. “Water stress” is defined as consuming more than 20 percent of your renewable water supply every year. 116.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

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

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

But why should you read this particular book, given that its author is an economist and not a scientist or an engineer? One reason is that I will use economic analysis to predict how probable changes in technology will affect society. For example, the theories of nineteenth-century economists David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus provide insights into whether robots might take all of our jobs (Ricardo) and why the creation of easy-to-copy emulations of human brains might throw mankind back into a horrible pre-Industrial Revolution trap (Malthus). Economics also sheds light on many less-significant economic effects of an advanced AI, such as the labor-market consequences if sexbots cause many men to forgo competing for flesh-and-blood women.

Robin thinks that in the long run, emulations will drive wages down to almost zero, pushing most of the people who are unfortunate enough to rely on their wages into starvation—because emulations will kick us back into a “Malthusian trap.” MALTHUSIAN TRAP Arguably, humanity’s greatest accomplishment was escaping the Malthusian trap. Thomas Malthus, a nineteenth-century economist, believed that starvation would ultimately strike every country in the entire world. Malthus wrote that if a population is not facing starvation, people in that population will have many children who grow up, get married, and have even more children. A country with an abundance of food, Malthus wrote, is one with an increasing population.


pages: 133 words: 31,263

The Lessons of History by Will Durant, Ariel Durant

long peace, mobile money, plutocrats, profit motive, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Malthus, trade route

When Rome fell the Franks rushed in from Germany and made Gaul France; if England and America should fall, France, whose population remained almost stationary through the nineteenth century, might again be overrun. If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war. In a famous Essay on Population (1798) Thomas Malthus explained that without these periodic checks the birth rate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food. Though he was a clergyman and a man of good will, Malthus pointed out that the issuance of relief funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to marry early and breed improvidently, making the problem worse.


pages: 361 words: 105,938

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

An impressive roll call of luminaries chose over the years to become associated with or full members of the various new bodies—the Bath and West of England Society, the Bath Agricultural Society, the Bath Philosophical Society, the Literary Society, and today’s successors to them all, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution and the Royal Bath and West of England Society (now based in Shepton Mallet). There was Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen); Thomas Malthus (the economist and population expert), Sir William Herschel (who discovered Uranus* lurking way at the back of the solar system), Humphry Davy (who discovered sodium and potassium), and one Augustus Voelcker, a German, who was a specialist in the chemistry of cheese and set up a school to teach cheesemaking in Wells, nearby.

But the young man’s interests were in fact wider and more catholic by far than those of a typical ducal employee: He soon left Woburn (sacked by an incoming duke) and became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious properties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam engines, the decimalization of currencies, and the population theories of Thomas Malthus. He was also hugely interested in and stimulated by Smith, and traveled with him frequently as a devoted acolyte and apprentice in those early years of the century, learning theories and techniques that he was eventually to put to good use on his own account. Rather too good, Smith was eventually to complain bitterly—in an incident that illustrates the growing problems, some real, others merely the consequence of his perception, that were beginning to cloud Smith’s life.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

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

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

For example, a country like Ethiopia, where the total fertility rate is 6.12 children per woman, is fifty-one times poorer than the United States, where the total fertility rate is 2.05. This strong relationship has convinced many, including academics and policy makers, of the validity of an old argument first popularized by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College, near London, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Malthus believed that the resources countries have are more or less fixed (his favorite example was land), and he therefore thought that population growth was bound to make them poorer.5 By this logic, the Black Death, believed to have killed half of Britain’s population between 1348 and 1377, should get credit for the high-wage years that followed.

Gwatkin,“Political Will and Family Planning:The Implications of India’s Emergency Experience,” Population and Development Review 5 (1): 29–59 (1979), which is the source of this account of the forced sterilization episode during the Emergency. 2 John Bongaarts, “Population Policy Options in the Developing World,” Science 263 (5148) (1994): 771—776. 3 Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008). 4 World Health Organization, Water Scarcity Fact File, 2009, available at http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/water/en/. 5 Thomas Malthus, Population: The First Essay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978). 6 Alywn Young, “The Gift of the Dying: The Tragedy of AIDS and the Welfare of Future African Generations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (2) (2005): 243–266. 7 Jane Forston, “HIV/AIDS and Fertility,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1 (3) (July 2009): 170–194; and Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, “AIDS, ‘Reversal’ of the Demographic Transition and Economic Development: Evidence from Africa,” NBER Working Paper W12181 (2006). 8 Michael Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (3) (1993): 681–716. 9 Gary Becker, “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1960). 10 Sachs, Common Wealth. 11 Vida Maralani, “Family Size and Educational Attainment in Indonesia: A Cohort Perspective,” California Center for Population Research Working Paper CCPR-17-04 (2004). 12 Mark Montgomery, Aka Kouamle, and Raylynn Oliver, The Tradeoff Between Number of Children and Child Schooling: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995). 13 Joshua Angrist and William Evans, “Children and Their Parents’ Labor Supply: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size,” American Economic Review 88 (3) (1998): 450–477. 14 Joshua Angrist, Victor Lavy, and Analia Schlosser, “New Evidence on the Causal Link Between the Quantity and Quality of Children,” NBER Working Paper W11835 (2005). 15 Nancy Qian, “Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy: The Positive Effect of Family Size on School Enrollment in China,” NBER Working Paper W14973 (2009). 16 T.


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

After many months spent as a jobbing labourer, he eventually found a position more suited to his interests, as a teacher in Leicester. In his spare time he visited the city’s local library, where he read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. He also met his lifelong friend Henry Walter Bates (1825–92), another self-educated young man who had also acquired an interest in beetles. Alfred and Henry made regular excursions into the Leicestershire countryside to return with catch nets full of beetles, butterflies and other insects.

In this sense it was closer to Kepler’s kinematic laws rather than Newton’s causal laws. The missing piece of the puzzle was why and how allied species emerge in the same place and at the same time. With perhaps his own mortality in mind – it was only seven years since his brother had died of a tropical fever similar to his own – his ideas turned to Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population and its grim observation that reproduction always outstrips available resources, leading to an inevitable natural cull on population growth. He now combined this notion with the extensive variation that he, and others, had discovered within any species.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history”). Malthus, in turn, was an important influence on Charles Darwin, both of whose grandfathers knew Franklin well.

* * * To understand why anyone would care about bird droppings, it helps to know a little about preindustrial agriculture. Farming in the nineteenth-century United States was not like it is today, acres of staggeringly prolific fields bristling with high-yield crops. It was a touch-and-go business. The reason Benjamin Franklin’s population numbers had alarmed Thomas Malthus was that Malthus couldn’t see where the food would come from to feed those multiplying generations. New farmland and virgin soil had given North Americans a margin of ease, he acknowledged, but that could only be temporary. In the end, he wrote, “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

Von Valtier, “‘An Extravagant Assumption’: The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five-Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155 (2011): 158–88. “rapidity of increase”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 105. Malthus, in turn: Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC, 2009), 45. 1890 census: Conway Zirkle, “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus and the United States Census,” Isis 48 (1957): 62. surpassed that of Britain: MPD. population of France: U.S. and French figures from MPD. For my understanding of U.S. population growth, I am indebted to D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 1993), and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, UK, 2009).


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

In particular, there has always been an understandable fear that capitalism’s dynamic of endless and accelerating growth will collapse when faced with the depletion of the inputs to that growth, whether those are energy inputs like coal and oil or raw materials like wood and iron. But while scarce resources have impinged on capitalist development at various points throughout its history, this has repeatedly happened in ways that caught theorists of the system by surprise. Writing at the turn of the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus worried that the limits of agricultural productivity, combined with the inevitable propensity of the poor to reproduce, meant that it was impossible to achieve both population growth and increasing economic prosperity. To this day, those who claim that capitalism is ultimately constrained by the carrying capacity of the earth are popularly referred to as “Malthusians,” even if the particular forms of scarcity they point to are very different than those Malthus was interested in.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

This combination would lead not just to development diminished, but to development derailed and progress reversed. It is to these growing threats that I now turn. TWELVE FUTURE 3—PROGRESS DERAILED: CLIMATE AND CONFLICT HALT DEVELOPMENT The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. —Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798 When a powerful storm destroyed her riverside home in 2009, Jahanara Khatun lost more than the modest roof over her head. In the aftermath, her husband died and she became so destitute that she sold her son and daughter into bonded servitude. And she may lose yet more.

Democracy is seen as a failed experiment, and dictators rise again. For more than two centuries, people have predicted that the combination of growing population, increased demand for resources, and environmental and ecological damage will lead to famine, war, and a reversal of progress. This view dates back at least to the great English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus, captured in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. Malthus argued in 1798 that “the passion between the sexes” was so strong that world population was destined to grow much faster than food supplies. Specifically, he argued that global population would increase geometrically, while food production could grow only arithmetically.


pages: 131 words: 41,052

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard

Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, global reserve currency, Global Witness, invisible hand, knowledge economy, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension reform, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, shareholder value, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

The figure is forecast to grow to 47 per cent in 2020 and 70 per cent in 2050, leading to a European Commission forecast that annual growth could decline from around 2 per cent to 11/4 per cent by 2040.17 But the fact that demographers have spotted a trend does not mean that it will lead inexorably to disaster: most demographic predictions – dating right back to Thomas Malthus and his apocalyptic visions of the rise in population leading to mass starvation – have been wrong. And there are many signs that today’s merchants of doom will be mistaken. After years of a falling birth rate, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain, and France are showing signs of a reverse while others are learning from their example.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Don’t think solely about what happened; think as well about what did not happen, and thereby is unseen. In our great spinning world, what do we not see? As a prelude to the book’s three goals, ponder for a moment the tribulations our world does not have. Granaries are not empty. It has been two centuries since Thomas Malthus said rising population would lead to mass starvation—unavoidably, as an iron law. During the 1960s, it was predicted that hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, soon would die of hunger. Instead, by 2015, the United Nations reported global malnutrition had declined to the lowest level in history.

The production of food is the first window to understanding why many expected calamities give way to mostly positive trends. The kinds of steps that prevented expected starvation can work against other challenges to come. Historically, expectations of starvation have been keen. Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus declared that population would increase faster than food production, leading to general ruin. This would happen inexorably, Malthus said, because nature uses scarcity to control species, and it would be physically impossible to cultivate enough land to feed all those being born. Famines that struck China, India, Ireland, and Japan about a generation after Malthus seemed to confirm his contention.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s. The first person to explain why the average human living in the seventeenth century was as impoverished as his or her counterpart in the seventh was the English demographer Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population demonstrated that throughout human history, population had always increased faster than the food supply. Seeking the credibility of a mathematical formula (this is a constant trope in the history of social science), he argued that population, unless unchecked by war, famine, epidemic disease, or similarly unappreciated bits of news, always increased geometrically, while the resources needed by that population, primarily food, always increased arithmetically.* The “Malthusian trap”—the term has been in general use for centuries—ensured that though mankind regularly discovered or invented more productive ways of feeding, clothing, transporting or (more frequently) conquering itself, the resulting population increase quickly consumed all of the surplus, leaving everyone in precisely the same place as before.

.* They inspired David Ricardo’s exposition, in 1817, of the principle of diminishing returns: his argument that the growth of the first decades of industrialization was certain to level off, as each successive improvement produced smaller results. Helped along by the inflation in food prices caused by the Napoleonic Wars, they even set the stage for Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, with its famous argument that population always grows geometrically, food production arithmetically. What they didn’t do was explain how wealth, profit, and competition can all grow over time. In short, it didn’t explain the two centuries of growth that were beginning just as Wealth of Nations was being published.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

But the great beast is hard to tame. Repeatedly it has been thought that the problem has been solved, and that the “end of history” has been reached in a kind of utopia of the masters. One classic moment was at the origins of neoliberal doctrine in the early nineteenth century, when David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and other great figures of classical economics announced that the new science had proven, with the certainty of Newton’s laws, that we only harm the poor by trying to help them, and that the best gift we can offer the suffering masses is to free them from the delusion that they have a right to live.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Hayek then addressed an element missing from Cantillon and Hume, “the influence of the quantity of money on the rate of interest, and through it on the relative demand for consumers’ goods on the one hand and producers’ or capital goods on the other.”30 A glut of money tended to lower the price of borrowing, which caused consumer goods to increase in price while making saving less attractive. He traced how the relationship between money and interest rates had been explored by thinkers such as Henry Thornton,31 David Richard,32 and Thomas Tooke,33 and how the link between money and capital, in the shape of “forced savings,” was addressed by Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus,34 John Stuart Mill,35 Léon Walras,36 Knut Wicksell, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In drawing attention to what he perceived as a flaw in Wicksell’s logic, Hayek took a swipe at the central assumption in Keynes’s Treatise on Money,37 that if the “natural rate” of interest and the “market rate” of interest were identical, prices would remain stable.38 Exactly why he disagreed with Wicksell—and Keynes—Hayek promised to expand on in a later lecture.

., p. 199. 29 Richard Cantillon (1680–1734), Irish-French economist who referred to the “natural” behavior of the economy and the notion that economies tended toward an equilibrium. 30 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 205. 31 Henry Thornton (1760–1815), English economist and member of Parliament. 32 David Ricardo (1772–1823), English economist. 33 Thomas Tooke (1774–1858), English economist who lent his name to the chair of economics that Hayek was awarded as a result of his LSE lectures. 34 Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), English economist. 35 John Stuart Mill (1806–73), English philosopher, political theorist, economist, and member of Parliament. 36 Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (1834–1910), French economist. 37 It is not known whether Hayek had read Keynes’s Treatise, published in December 1930, by the time he delivered his first lecture at the LSE in February 1931. 38 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 215. 39 Ibid., pp. 217–218. 40 Ibid., p. 219. 41 Ibid., pp. 220–221. 42 Ibid., p. 241. 43 Ludwig von Mises, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (Duncker & Humblot, Munich, 1912) p. 431. 44 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 272. 45 Ibid., p. 273. 46 Ibid., p. 275. 47 Ibid., p. 299. 48 Ibid., p. 288. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 290. 51 Ibid., p. 298. 52 Ibid. 53 Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist, p. 127. 54 John Cunningham Wood and Robert D.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

Politicians, academics and pub bores around the world have found the authority of The Wealth of Nations and the simplicity of its core ideas an irresistible combination, and routinely draw on them to dignify and adorn their own beliefs or arguments. The result has been to obscure Smith, to mistake the range and power of his ideas and to breed myths without number. Smith’s reputation advanced by stages throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1820s he was being acclaimed by no less an authority than the great population theorist Thomas Malthus, who echoed Pownall’s early review by remarking that The Wealth of Nations had ‘done for political economy what the Principia of Newton had done for physics’. But Smith’s death itself excited very little immediate comment at the time; and so it remained for several decades. There were few obituaries, and they were desultory and brief: twelve lines in the Annual Register, nine in the Scots Magazine.

The attraction of this approach was its apparent potential to be objective and scientific: to reduce vague moral intuitions to objective facts about human psychology that could in principle be tested. ‘Utility’ became a catch-all for the satisfaction of human wants or preferences, and the general idea of a ‘utility function’, mapping an individual’s consumption of goods to their utility, was born in embryo. Less than a decade later, Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). There he predicted that, left unchecked, the world’s population would grow geometrically, as in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16…, while food production could only grow arithmetically, as in the series 1, 2, 3, 4…, creating a gap with potentially catastrophic consequences.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

Wallace, a naturalist, was there to work, but he only made a few preliminary observations of the local tribes and collected some insects before falling ill with fits of malarial fever, which sometimes left him feeling so cold that he rolled his lanky frame into blankets, even though it was a balmy 90 degrees outdoors. His thoughts slipped and tumbled around his overheated mind—his notions about species, tribes, and populations, about resources and poverty, all his obsessions eddying madly around each other. Then, perhaps inspired by the malaria, Wallace thought of Thomas Malthus and of that clergyman’s book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. Wallace had read it more than a decade ago, but he remembered its arguments: that human populations grow in geometric haste to outstrip their supplies of food and that their numbers are kept in check only by the ravages of war, disease, and famine.

Even in this, he was fated to be yoked to Darwin. The article’s subtitle was “My Relations with Darwin in Reference to the Theory of Natural Selection.” 158 “for amusement”: Darwin, Charles, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins, 1958), 120. 158 “not be considered as comfortable asylums”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 37. 158 “our population is more largely renewed”: Alfred Russel Wallace, “Human Selection,” Fortnightly Review 48 (September 1890). 159 “progress is merely accidental”: Marx to Engels, August 7, 1866. 160 volunteered to act as a bouncer: From Haldane, Why I Am a Cooperator. 161 “I consider the present distribution”: From Haldane’s essay “What I Think About,” in The Inequality of Man, 218–19. 161 “I would trust Shakespeare”: From Haldane’s essay “Possibilities of Human Evolution,” in The Inequality of Man, 91–92. 161 “How, in a society based on hierarchies”: Gary Werskey, The Visible College, 108. 162 “for the stupid to inherit”: Julian Huxley, What Dare I Think?


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

“Each century will add new enlightenment to that of the century that has preceded it,” Condorcet wrote in 1782, “and this progress, which nothing can henceforth halt or delay, will have no other limits than that of the duration of the universe.” Ibid. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61. 41. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 417. 42. Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2014), 45. 43. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 452. 44.

In 1846, Ireland exported three million quarts of grain and corn flour to Britain, and 730,000 cattle and livestock. 49. Quoted in Fred Pearce, The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 18. 50. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition, 265. 51. Thomas Malthus, letter to David Ricardo, 1817, in Thomas Robert Malthus: Critical Assessments, John Cunningham Wood, ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 262. 52. John and Richard Strachey, The Finances and Public Works of India (London: K. Paul Trench & Company, 1882), 172. 53. The House of Commons of the United Kingdom, “Copy of Correspondence Between the Secretary of State for India and the Government of India, on the Subject of the Famine in Western and Southern India,” in Parliamentary Papers, vol. 59, H.M.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

The structure is also ideological, a philosophy that best serves the wealthy and powerful but shapes all of our lives, reinforced as the conventional wisdom disseminated by the media, from news hours to disaster movies. The facets of that ideology have been called individualism, capitalism, and Social Darwinism and have appeared in the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Malthus, as well as the work of most conventional contemporary economists, who presume we seek personal gain for rational reasons and refrain from looking at the ways a system skewed to that end damages much else we need for our survival and desire for our well-being. Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society.

It justified callousness toward those who lost out in the economic struggle: they did so because they were unfit, ill adapted, and lazy, rather than because the system was unfair—a common justification of colonial rapacity, the deprivation of the poor, and basis for theories of racial inferiority. They deserved it, or they were at least doomed and could not be saved, if the forces that trampled them down were as inevitable as nature itself. Social Darwinists also tend to share Thomas Malthus’s belief that life must almost inevitably be a scramble for the scarce resources of the earth, a scramble in which some must die because there is not enough for all. Capitalism’s fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

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

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

As the planet’s population continues to expand, we’ll be faced with an inability to produce enough food. Mass starvation will eventually bring the population back to sustainable levels, which is not comforting to those who don’t make the cut. His conclusion is based on undisputed historical data, verified by sources across the globe. The British economist was Thomas Malthus and the study was the Essay on Principle of Population, which he penned two hundred years ago in 1798. Malthus believed population growth was such a powerful force that eventually it would outpace man’s ability to keep up, resulting in a return to subsistence level conditions. More and more people would be born into a world that couldn’t possibly keep up with feeding them.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

“What people mean by the word technology,” says computer designer Alan Kay, “is anything invented since they were born.” Computer designer Danny Hillis counters, “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” Technology is both the problem and its own solution. No wonder it obsesses us. The gathering acceleration of history was noted in the 1790s by Thomas Malthus and in 1909 by Henry Adams, who wrote, The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard . . . the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800—the force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

But this understanding of a system of bank money causing rates of interest to fall was lost in the classical economics of one David Ricardo (a financier). As a result, the theories of credit and associated bank-money policies lived on only, as Keynes put it, in ‘an underworld’ of scholars and activists. These included Henry Thornton, Thomas Malthus and Henry Dunning McLeod, and the sociologists Peter Knapp and Georg Simmel, who were not content to leave the question of the nature of money to the economists. Keynes’s great achievement was to retrieve this understanding from its burial by economic scholars. He understood that basing a theory of the economy on a fallacious theory of bank money would lead to profound misjudgements in economic policy, and to financial and economic crises.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

The invention of agriculture is itself a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. The economist Thomas Malthus explored the first dilemma, and thinkers from Christ to Marx have touched on the second. As the Chinese saying has it: “A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in.” Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps.


pages: 225 words: 189

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, edge city, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Honoré de Balzac, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to vi­ olence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philoso­ pher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world. CONSIDER "CHICAGO." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area 10 / THE COMING ANARCHY have named after the American city.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

And in the twentieth century, the world population soared to new heights, more than doubling from 1950 to 1992: from 2.5 billion to 5.5 billion. It now stands at 6.7 billion. Every year, 79 million people join the human race, which is more than the entire population of France. As a result, many predictions of doomsday have been made, yet so far humanity has been able to dodge the bullet. Back in 1798, Thomas Malthus warned us what would happen when the population exceeded the food supply. Famines, food riots, the collapse of governments, and mass starvation could ensue until a new equilibrium is found between population and resources. Since the food supply expands only linearly with time, while the population grows exponentially, it seemed inevitable that at some point the world would hit the breaking point.

Luttwak, Edward Lutz, Robert Maes, Pattie Maglev trains and cars, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic energy, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic field to create nuclear fusion Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as mind-reading technology, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3 replicators and reverse engineering the brain and Mallouk, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Mammoth resurrection Markram, Henry Marquess, Ron Marriage and family life in 2100 Mars landing/­colonization Martel, Sylvain Martian moon landing Matrix movies, 2.­1, 7.­1 Maxwell, James Clerk McGinnis, Dave McRae, Hamish, 7.­1, 7.­2, 7.­3 Medicine/­biotechnology augmented reality and brain injury treatments cancer screening cancer therapies, 1.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2, 4.­1, 9.­1 Cave Man Principle and cloning, 3.­1, 3.­2 computers and creating new life-­forms curing all diseases, 3.­1, 8.­1 depression treatments designer children, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 far future (2070), 3.­1, 9.­1, 9.­2 gene therapy, 3.­1, 3.­2 genetic enhancements genomic medicine germ warfare memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 midcentury (2030) Moore’­s law and muscle disorder treatments nanotechnology and near future (present to 2030) nightmare scenarios quantum theory and resurrecting extinct life-­forms robotics and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 side effects of biotech revolution spinal cord injury treatments stem cell technology surgery three stages of tissue engineering (organ replacement), 3.­1, 3.­2 virtual reality and See also Longevity Memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 Men in Black (movie) “­Merger of Flesh and Machine, The”­ (Brooks) Merrill Lynch company Methane gas, 5.­1, 6.­1 Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), 4.­1, 4.­2 Middle class, planetary Miesenbö­ck, Gero Miller, Webb Mind-­body problem Mind reading EEG and MRI technology for ethics of Kaku’­s brain scan mini-­MRI machines photographing of dreams Mining operations on other worlds Minsky, Marvin, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 Mischel, Walter Modha, Dharmendra Modular robots, 2.­1, 4.­1 Mohamad, Mahathir Moon landing/colonization, 6.­1, 6.­2 Moore, Gordon, 1.­1, 4.­1 Moore’s law computers and, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 4.­1 medicine and nanotechnology and, 4.­1, 4.­2 Moravec, Hans, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 More, Sir Thomas Morfoot, Linda Morphing Moses, Edward MRI-­MOUSE Muscle disorder treatments Musical robots Music industry Myrabo, Leik Najmabadi, Farrokh, 5.­1, 5.­2 Nanobots, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 Nanocars Nanoparticles, 4.­1, 4.­2 Nanorods Nanostarships Nanotechnology carbon nanotubes, 4.­1, 6.­1 commercial applications today computers and DNA chips energy for molecular machines far future (2070) manipulation of individual atoms medicine and midcentury (2030) Moore’s law and, 4.­1, 4.­2 nanomachines in our bodies near future (present to 2030) potential of quantum theory and shape-­shifting technology space travel and, 6.­1, 6.­2 See also Replicators National Ignition Facility (NIF) Neanderthal resurrection Neecke, Nikolas Neumann, John von, 2.­1, 2.­2 Neural networks News broadcasting Newspaper industry Newton, Isaac, itr.­1, 6.­1, 7.­1 New York Times Nicolelis, Miguel A.­


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Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Smith was not writing about the manufacture of pins, any more than Akerlof had been describing the activities of the members of the Retail Motor Federation, or Tucker the functioning of the American criminal justice system. They were using these models as illustrations of principles of much more general applicability. Economics subsequently made advances through a whole series of small-world models of this type. Two decades after Smith, Thomas Malthus provided a notorious model of population and growth, which we discuss further in chapter 20 . In addition to his principle of comparative advantage, David Ricardo developed a model of economic rent: the amount received by the supplier of an input in excess of the amount necessary to ensure its supply (many people in the sports and financial services industries would surely work there for lower rewards than they currently receive).

And it is the pervasive nature of radical uncertainty which is the source of the problem. 20 THE USE AND MISUSE OF MODELS Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rates of return and strategic studies prepared by his troops. —WARREN BUFFETT 1 I n the eighteenth century there were country clergymen of exceptional intelligence who had time on their hands. They benefited from a secure reference narrative. Thomas Bayes was one; Thomas Malthus another. In 1798, Malthus set out what might be regarded as the first growth model in economics. He hypothesised that population tended to grow exponentially, as a result of what he coyly termed ‘the passions’, while food supplies could grow only linearly. The rising population would put pressure on food supplies, and then the resulting destitution would reduce that population.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Byron wasn’t entirely convinced that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romantic, politically charged epic that was obviously inspired by his own life, was suited for publication. A business partner convinced him otherwise. He sold the manuscript to an enterprising Fleet Street bookseller named John Murray, who was just embarking on his literary publishing career; he would soon publish Jane Austen and Thomas Malthus, too. Byron was still in London when he received word that his mother had fallen gravely ill. He rushed home for Newstead but did not make it in time. “I heard one day of her illness, the next of her death,” Byron wrote. His grief would only compound, as a season of death set in. In a matter of months, three of his friends would pass away, two of consumption and one of drowning.

There was already a sense, even then, that they were doing more than enriching themselves at the expense of the workingmen whom their devices were making redundant; they were using those machines to impose an entirely new mode of work onto the populace. Theirs were the guiding hands on new technologies that were helping to forge the very shape of industrial capitalism. Footnote 1 Also crucial were the ideas of the economist Thomas Malthus, who held that periods of mass suffering among the working poor were inevitable in any prospering economy as the population grew too fast for food production to keep pace. B November 1811 In a secret meeting at the Falstaff Hotel in Manchester, in the middle of a black November night, a man who dressed and presented as a cloth worker listened in as a delegate from the town of Royton spoke up.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

If wages rose too much above this level, the result would be an increase in population—because more children could survive—and in the labor force. As a consequence, wages would drop back down to their “natural” level. The main beneficiaries of economic advances and technological progress would therefore be owners of land, which was in finite supply. It was this kind of thinking, associated in particular with Thomas Malthus, that led the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas Carlyle to famously call economics the “dismal science.” Marx, whose influence would extend well into the twentieth century, also adhered to the labor theory of value. He, too, believed that wages were held down. But in his theory the culprits were capitalists who exploited workers and managed to discipline them through the “reserve army of the unemployed.”


pages: 202 words: 58,823

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

This spike appears to be the result of bets made in bars by traders goofing around—they put no money behind the contracts, had no money to pay, and perhaps no expectation that the contracts would be enforced. There are no credible contemporaneous accounts of economic distress; the speculation caused only the transfer of wealth, and little wealth was transferred in the end. 2. Zeckhauser, “Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable.” Ricardo persuaded Thomas Malthus to join him in buying bonds, but Malthus chickened out before the battle and sold at a small profit. 3. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 64. Emphasis mine. FIVE For-Itself Decision-Making within a Group 1. Even if the entrepreneur did manage to convince the venture capitalist, many communication hurdles would still lie ahead.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

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

It’s forecast that food production globally will have to increase by 50 percent by 2030 and to double by the year 2050 to feed the planet’s rapidly growing population. If this is true, it presents something of a challenge, but we have been here before to some extent. Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would run into severe trouble because agricultural production would not be able to keep pace with population growth. He was absolutely right about population growth, but totally wrong about agricultural productivity and the ways in which free-market mechanisms respond to demand.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

The cloud created by this enforced move had a silver lining. After shining at high school he went to the University of Chicago at the age of 16. ‘I was reborn, born as an economist, at 8.30am on January 2nd 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom,’ he said in a memoir published just before his death.2 The trigger was a lecture about Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who wrote about population and poverty. From then on Samuelson was hooked on economics. He graduated with a master’s economics degree in 1935 so his time at Chicago coincided with the worst years of the Great Depression. Chicago was already emerged as a haven for neoclassical economists under the influence of Milton Friedman.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

I was wrong, and she was right (on average, for professional parents, perhaps, with a host of other caveats as well). But I can’t bring myself to apologize in the main text, so I am relegating this to an end-note. 5. Jun Fletcher, “For Mansion Owners, A Little-Noticed Tax Break,” The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 1997. 6. The fundamental paradox in agrarian societies was identified by Thomas Malthus: Food production increased arithmetically (gradually) but human populations increase geometrically (i.e., like rabbits multiplicatively). This fact, according to Malthus, would yield a situation of near-constant human misery. Any improvement in agricultural technology would lead humans to have more babies and thus erase any improvement in living standards.


pages: 274 words: 66,721

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

In defence of Sombart, however, Eve Chiapello responds to his critics by suggesting that the links between capitalism and accounting are not so much historical as conceptual, that capitalism could only ‘be born conceptually’ thanks to double entry—which makes sense of the fact that the only historical links between accounting and capitalism that are outlined by Sombart and also affirmed by historians occur from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth. It was during this period that the social science of political economy was born, that the work of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo was published (and influenced Marx’s thinking during the same era). The emerging social sciences looked to accounting for their foundations. It was double entry that allowed economists to build the models they used to analyse economies and revealed to Marx the building blocks of nineteenth-century industrial production and management.


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

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

Like any patriotic American, I have my doubts about all those countries (some don’t put enough ice in their drinks, and some have weird ventless dryers that don’t actually dry clothing), but they’re all perfectly pleasant places that people from all over the world visit happily. One billion Americans won’t make us overcrowded; we’re extremely undercrowded today—and significant parts of the country are depopulating. The long shadow of the Malthusian past Thomas Malthus, one of the earliest economists, famously argued that human societies would inevitably become poorer as they become more populated. Eventually a people would become so impoverished that famine or disease would cull the population and lead to a higher standing of living.* Malthus wrote in the late eighteenth century, on the verge of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of a long technological liftoff that would prove him wrong.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

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

“Millions on an anthill” For most of the twentieth century, people both within and outside India viewed us through a lens that was distinctly Malthusian. As a poor and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s uniquely despondent vision—that great population growth inevitably led to great famine and despair. The time that Thomas Malthus, writer, amateur economist and clergyman(the enduring term history gave him would be “the gloomy parson”), lived in may have greatly influenced his theory on population. Nineteenth-century England was seeing very high birth rates, with families having children by the baker’s dozen.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

If the freedom to acquire property existed independently of the state, it seemed that no government could legitimately restrict it; if the power of the state to enforce human rights was so overwhelming that its citizens could, in Rousseau’s words, be “forced to be free” by the government, then property rights might, as Babeuf argued, lawfully be extinguished by the state. As though to underline the divide, the English economist and cleric Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote an essay in 1800, On the Present High Price of Provisions, in which he explained in terms as uncompromising as Babeuf’s why the unconstrained working of the free-market, even in times of famine, was the most efficient way of feeding a population. “The man who refuses to send his corn to market when it is at twenty pounds a load because he thinks that in two months time it will be at thirty [pounds],” Malthus argued, “if he be right in his judgment and succeed in his speculation, is a positive and decided benefactor to the state.”

There would be an enhanced two-way trade between the colonies and the home country, and where Australia was concerned, the chance of opening up a three-way network exporting cereals to China, Chinese tea to Britain, and British manufactures to Australia. Wakefield’s analysis of the colonies’ economic potential was grounded in the theories of the era’s two preeminent free-market economists, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Ricardo’s theories on profit made it clear that the high price of British property rendered its purchase an inefficient use of capital compared with investing it in cheaper, productive land elsewhere. Malthus’s stark warning of overpopulation focused more closely on the wastage of labor in the unemployed poor: “Increase the demand for agricultural labour by promoting cultivation, and with it consequently increase the produce of the country, and ameliorate the condition of the labourer, and no apprehensions whatever need be entertained of the proportional increase of population.”


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

All individuals are always vying for survival—even if the laws of the jungle are less vicious on the African savannah than on Wall Street. It’s no surprise, then, that economic behavior is often best viewed through the lens of biology. The connections between evolution and economics are not new. Economics may have even inspired evolutionary theory. The British economist Thomas Malthus deeply influenced both Charles Darwin and Darwin’s close competitor, Alfred Russell Wallace.8 Malthus forecast that human population growth would increase exponentially, while food supplies would increase only along a straight line. He concluded that the human race was doomed to eventual starvation and possible extinction.

In addition to Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality, it’s worth reviewing the other strands of academic research, both past and current, that lend support to Adaptive Markets. Ours is certainly not the first attempt to fuse insights from biological systems with economic thinking—we’ve already mentioned Thomas Malthus, who used biological examples to illustrate his principles about population growth. As an Anglican clergyman, he framed his arguments in moralistic terms, but his reasoning can easily be restated in terms familiar to today’s economists. After the death of Charles Darwin, evolutionary theory languished, remaining undeveloped for decades, a crude version of it (“social Darwinism”) used to justify inhumane government policies.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

After the invention of agriculture—including the planting and harvesting of those grains of wheat the Grand Vizier was hankering for—the human population of this planet began increasing, entering an exponential phase, which is very far from a steady state. Right now the doubling time of the world population is about 40 years. Every 40 years there will be twice as many of us. As the English clergyman Thomas Malthus pointed out in 1798, a population increasing exponentially—Malthus described it as a geometrical progression—will outstrip any conceivable increase in food supply. No Green Revolution, no hydroponics, no making the deserts bloom can beat an exponential population growth. There is also no extraterrestrial solution to this problem.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

These early economists aimed to tackle big questions about how the economy worked (and whether it could be made to work better), weighing in on such important matters as market function (and dysfunction), the origin of value, business cycles, and unemployment. It was set in motion by Smith and carried on for one hundred years thereafter by the classical economists—David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, among others. It was continued for nearly one hundred years more by neoclassical economists like Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and an enduring hero of free-market proponents, Joseph Schumpeter. Pareto, who lived from 1848 until 1923, is emblematic of both the worldliness and precision of these towering figures in the history of economic thought.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

In an analysis worthy of someone as well traveled as Doctor Who, Kremer shows that the growth of human population over the history of the world is consistent with how technological change happens. Kremer does this in an elegant way, making only a small set of assumptions. First he states that population growth is limited by technological progress. This is one of those assumptions that has been around since Thomas Malthus, and it is based on the simple fact that as a population grows we need more technology to sustain the population, whether through more efficient food production, more efficient waste management, or other similar considerations. Conversely, Kremer also states that technological growth should be proportional to population size.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

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

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

[xxv] During the early 19th century, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, most members of the newly-established social science of economics argued that any unemployment caused by the introduction of machinery would be resolved by the growth in overall economic demand. But there were prominent figures who took the more pessimistic view, that innovation could cause long-term unemployment. They included Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and even the most respected economist of the time, David Ricardo.[xxvi] The Luddite fallacy and economic theory The debate can get quite technical, but there are two reasons why it has been correct to reject the Luddite fallacy up until now. The first reason is economic theory: companies introduce machines because they increase production and cut costs.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

From the perspective of mouths to feed that means it won’t look that different from today – an extra 3 billion people – which is what the world has added since 1974. Indeed, it is rising expectations in diet, combined with declining crop yields as a result of climate change, which represent the biggest hurdles in eliminating world hunger. Claims about rising populations and the natural limits of the Earth are nothing new. Indeed Thomas Malthus, one of the most important thinkers in the early history of political economy, was obsessed by the issue. In his 1798 polemic An Essay on the Principle of Population, he observed how any increase in food production led to a growth in population rather than an improvement in the average standard of living.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Beckerman overstated the case, but he was right that the discipline has historically tended to optimism about the environment and is adept at creating narratives about why solutions for environmental problems will naturally emerge. Economists have seen the very idea of ecological limits as a rehash of the discredited theories of the early nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus believed that population growth would outrun increases in agricultural productivity, so that food production would fail to keep up with mouths to feed. He foresaw rising poverty and famines. The standard view is that he got it wrong, given the tremendous increases in agricultural productivity and the demographic transition toward lower birth rates.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This chapter traces ‘growth’ economics from the insights of the classical economists to the emergence of development economics as a distinct subfield of economics in the second half of the twentieth century, and the gradual dissolution of the developmental perspective into the neoclassical Washington Consensus. Population If the economist is a tragedian, the Revd Thomas Malthus has a claim to be considered its tragedian in chief. Before Malthus there was the allure of a more prosperous future; after him gloom. For the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, economics was known as the ‘dismal science’. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus set out to refute the utopianism of writers like Condorcet, Godwin, and Thomas Paine.


pages: 255 words: 79,514

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, Donner party, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, mass immigration, Nash equilibrium, nuclear winter, out of africa, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, trolley problem, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile

So whether or not our industrial and agricultural activities have caused the current warming, we would do well to remember that the earth’s climate is naturally unstable. Our real problem is how we cope with these changes as they occur. The optimists will want to rely on science. After all, they might say, science has already got us out of one such mess. Nearly two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus stirred a few feathers by pointing out that the world was heading for disaster because agricultural productivity couldn’t keep step with the rate at which the population was increasing. Darwin was greatly influenced by Malthus when he was writing his Origin of Species: it provided him with the insight as to how natural selection might work.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change,’ writes Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, who could scarcely have imagined the scale of the challenges ahead 200 years ago, yet understood the nature of them perfectly. A world of nearly 8 billion people might have surprised Shelley, especially if her 1826 apocalyptic plague horror The Last Man was a nod to Thomas Malthus’s theory on limits of population growth.3 A phenomenon we neglect in the present day is not the number of people around the world, but their distribution. Rural-to-urban migration creates huge pressure for dense public transport in mega cities while also embedding long-distance domestic travel as people keep ties to connections back home.


pages: 289 words: 87,292

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

By the end of the nineteenth century, the role of biology in the shaping of cultural events was acknowledged by Charles Darwin, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim, among others.1 At about the same time, and into the early decades of the new century, biological facts were invoked by a number of theorists (among them Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus) to defend the application of Darwinian thinking to society. These efforts, generally known as social Darwinism, resulted in eugenic recommendations in Europe and in the United States. Later, during the Third Reich, biological facts were misinterpreted and applied to human societies with the goal of producing a radical sociocultural transformation.


pages: 329 words: 85,471

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

3 By the early 1920s, the geographer Ray Hughes Whitbeck documented how “one or more railway companies, several truckmen, a wholesale dealer or two, a retail dealer and his clerks, a delivery boy, and perhaps several other persons or corporations” along with perhaps even “one or more brokers” stood between a grapefruit grower and his laborers and his final consumer in a northern American city.4 Not surprisingly, these activities have long been decried as superfluous and parasitical by critics who, as Bastiat observed in 1848, “would willingly eliminate the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the merchant, accusing them of interposing themselves between producer and consumer in order to fleece them both, without giving them anything of value.”5 Antipathy against intermediaries was always heightened during food crises. Writing in the early years of the Napoleonic wars, a time of rapid price increases, the political economist Robert Thomas Malthus observed that the general indignation of common people had fallen upon “monopolizers, forestallers, and regraters—words, that are . . . applied indiscriminately to all middle men whatever, to every kind of trader that goes between the grower of the commodity and the consumer . . .”6 Today’s locavores are but the latest activists to echo this sentiment with their contention that direct relationships between producers and consumers will improve a community’s social capital while putting more money directly into farmers’ (as opposed to intermediaries’) pockets.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Simpson, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2009). 11 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (University of Chicago, 1998). 12 The title of the work in which Bacon lays this out—Novum Organum—is a reference to Aristotle’s Organum. 13 See Chapter 3 of Barry Gower’s Scientific Method (Routledge, 1997), http://books.google.com/books?id=D3rV2t2XkWYC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40. 14 Ibid., p. 49. 15 Poovey traces the role of interests to Hobbes and following thinkers. 16 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1 (first edition). This is online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html. 17 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 229. 18 “Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Bill,” Hansard 39 (February 16, 1819): 448–454, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1819/feb/17/chimney-sweepers-regulation-bill. 19 Sir Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815–1870, 2nd ed.


pages: 334 words: 82,041

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

But as the US academics Fred Block and Margaret Somers explain in their fascinating book The Power of Market Fundamentalism, those who implemented it seemed to recognise that occasional unemployment was an intrinsic feature of working life.2 But in 1786, as economic crises threw rising numbers onto the mercy of their parishes, the clergyman Joseph Townsend sought to recast poverty as a moral or even biological condition. ‘The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action – pride, honour, and ambition’, he argued in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws.3 ‘In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them onto labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.’ Thomas Malthus expands on this theme in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798.4 Poor relief, he maintained, causes poverty. It destroys the work ethic, reducing productivity. It also creates an incentive to reproduce, as payments rise with every family member. The higher the population, the hungrier the poor become: kindness results in cruelty.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

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

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

doc=76 46 World Health Organization; World Food Program; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; United Nations Children Fund. 47 Max Roser, “Life Expectancy,” Our World in Data, 2017. http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/life-expectancy 48 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, April 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/ 49 Mike Hanlon, “World Becomes More Urban Than Rural,” Gizmag, 29 May 2007. http://www.gizmag.com/go/7334 50 Soylent Green, DVD, directed by Richard Fleischer (Los Angeles: MGM, 1973). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/ 51 Inferno, DVD, directed by Ron Howard (Los Angeles: Sony, 2016). 52 Donna Gunn MacRae, “Thomas Robert Malthus,”Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Robert-Malthus 53 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson, 1798). http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html#Chapter%20I 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ron Broglio, “The Best Machine for Converting Herbage into Money,” in Tamar Wagner and Narin Hassan, eds., Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption 1700–1900 (Lanham: Lexington, 2007), 35. https://books.google.com/books/about/Consuming_Culture_in_the_Long_Nineteenth.html?


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The most important inter-class behavioural difference was considered to be the fact that capitalists invested (virtually) all of their incomes while the other classes – the working class and the landlord class – consumed them. On the landlord class, opinion was split. Some, like Ricardo, saw it as a consuming class that hampered capital accumulation, while others, such as Thomas Malthus, thought that its consumption helped the capitalist class by offering extra demands for their products. However, on the workers, there was a consensus. They spent all of their income, so if the workers got a higher share of the national income, investment and thus economic growth would fall. This is where ardent free-marketeers like Ricardo meet ultra-left wing communists like Preobrazhensky.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

That’s well over 10 trillion trillion times the current world population. The Commandant would need more than the world population just to advance to the eleventh roll. Are we being overly literal in pointing this out? I would say so. The shooting room invokes exponential growth for the same reason that Thomas Malthus and Gordon Moore did. It’s our lived reality, for the time being. A sizable fraction of all the people who have ever lived are living right now—in the last round? So let’s suspend disbelief on the numbers. Crowd-management issues aside, there is nothing magical or mysterious about the shooting room.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

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

As Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, two economists at Berkeley, argue in their book Information Rules, even an information economy needs some formal institutions to guard against monopolies. 41 The use of deliberate structure to preserve the spontaneity of self-organization may be one of humanity's most productive assets. Since the nineteenth century, when the economist Thomas Malthus gloomily predicted that the geometric growth of population would outstrip the arithmetic growth in resources, predictions appear regularly that humanity is on the edge of destroying itself.42 Most of these predictions take humans to be, like insects, relatively passive in the face of such problems.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In the last forty years, the Club has distributed more than 12 million copies of the report, which also asserts that global society is likely to overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity. Once that happens, the club contends, society won’t be able to avoid a large-scale environmental collapse. Prophets of doom have sounded similar alarms before. Some two hundred years ago, Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that population growth was an inexorable force that would exhaust the land’s capacity to provide sustenance. He foresaw starvation and pestilence arising as an inevitable result of overpopulation, bringing about a dying off that would cull the number of people in the world. Along with epidemics that would increase the death rate, Malthus also believed that moral restraint was necessary to keep the birthrate in check.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Before Henry Ford made his dramatic intervention, a number of economists had explored the economic consequences of a lack of working class purchasing power, a problem labelled the theory of ‘underconsumption’. Such theories were developed during the nineteenth century by a range of British scholars, most notably Thomas Malthus—who developed his own theory of the insufficiency of demand as early as the 1920s—and fifty years later by John A Hobson. Writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Hobson —who was born in Derby in 1858—challenged much of the accepted economic thinking of the time.


pages: 281 words: 79,958

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

Farmers in developing countries often see their crops rot in the fields long before they can be eaten or rushed across rutted dirt roads to markets many hours away. To those people, the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world—one with the power to kill them. IT’S HARD to find anything positive to say about Thomas Malthus. After all, his dour view of the world has consistently been proven wrong. In 1798, he argued that the earth’s population was rising exponentially and the food supply necessary to feed it was not. He famously promised “famine . . . the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” It took another 125 years for the world’s population to double, but only fifty more for it to double again.


pages: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

“In lieu thereof,” he built “iron furnaces & foundrys which . . . is more perminant [sic] & more profitable in proportion to their being more usefull to the publick.” He advised his son “to confine his persuits to things usefull rather than ornamental.” The war and the expanding market for steam engines underwrote his embrace of utility. After the wars, the influential political economist Thomas Malthus claimed, “In carrying the late war, we were powerfully assisted by our steam-engines.” In fact, war had assisted the spread of steam engines. These inventions—steam engines, lathes, the puddling process—facilitated the rise of large-scale industry. They were interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and the state stood at the center of the networks around them.

Later investigations into the chemical properties of the ore improved its strength, enabling the use of puddled iron in arms. M. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America, 380. They, too, multiplied: John, “War and the English Economy,” 334. “Golden toys or ormolu”: Matthew Boulton, 1796, quoted in P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 228. Thomas Malthus claimed: Quoted in Crouzet, “The Impact of the French Wars on the British Economy,” 209. Other big purchasers: Shenhav, “At a Gun Point,” 26. worth “unremitting exertions”: Deakin to Mulgrave, October 27, 1814, and Deakin to Ordnance Board, August 18, 1814, in Deakin, Plain Narrative of the Circumstances That Have Occurred in the Transactions, 16 and 24–26.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

What hand, Darwin asked, had guided the creation of such different varieties of finches on those distant volcanic islands or made small armadillos out of giant precursors on the plains of South America? Darwin knew that he was now gliding along the dangerous edge of the known world, tacking south of heresy. He could easily have ascribed the invisible hand to God. But the answer that came to him in October 1838, in a book by another cleric, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, had nothing to do with divinity. Thomas Malthus had been a curate at the Okewood Chapel in Surrey by daytime, but he was a closet economist by night. His true passion was the study of populations and growth. In 1798, writing under a pseudonym, Malthus had published an incendiary paper—An Essay on the Principle of Population—in which he had argued that the human population was in constant struggle with its limited resource pool.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In Influences, his clearest point was conveyed in statistical tables which claimed to show that production costs in England were competitive with Europe; given other variables, like soil conditions and cost of transport, foreign grain was unlikely to flood the home market.17 Still more significant, however, were the theoretical foundations for this claim. In contrast to Ricardo and Thomas Malthus he did not see class conflict as an inherent fact of economic life: from the former he discarded or modified the theory of marginal rents and wages, and from the latter the pessimistic forecast that population always outpaces food supply. Ricardo suggested that landed capital gained at the expense of industrial capital, and Malthus that working-class wages tended towards the bare minimum necessary for survival.

In the new century, Bush’s good intentions were also unjustly criticized, for America ‘waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against a genuine but elusive foe, extreme Islamism’, even if operations in Iraq were unhappily less well informed and prepared than in Afghanistan.36 As an economic doctrine, liberalism is scarcely less sanitized. In the nineteenth century, laissez-faire is dismissed as an urban legend, without mention of Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus or James Wilson, let alone the famines in Ireland or India that its doctrines justified. Rather, Liberals were eminently practical arbiters of the mutable borders between the state and the market, rivals that also needed one another – resisting the supremacy of either, viewing both as variable instruments to be used according to the changing needs of ‘human betterment’, and by the mid-twentieth century getting the balance right.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Fuller with his sister Rosamond in the playpen that he built for her at Bear Island (1907). Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller It was also evidently around this time that Fuller had a long talk with his uncle. His grandmother may have taught him the Golden Rule, but Rockwell King sided with the English economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that rising population led to scarcity and grief. “If you are going to survive and have a family of five and wish to prosper,” King said, “you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how.” In 1906 Fuller recovered from appendicitis in time to visit Bear Island with Wolcott, and they returned following the birth of their younger sister, Rosamond, in September.

It required a correspondingly vast idea, and Fuller found it in the challenge of using the earth’s resources for the welfare of all mankind—a legitimately urgent and worthwhile goal that would have greater appeal to the young than the military and industrial applications he had pursued in the past. In July he spoke in London at the World Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA), attacking the “you or me” ideology of the English economist Thomas Malthus. Industrialization trended toward universal wealth, but because capitalists and politicians acted only in war, Fuller contended that power ought to be given to students instead. By arguing that architectural schools should take responsibility for encouraging radical design solutions in peacetime, Fuller was really just changing the name of the patron, which was a role that he intended to assume himself.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

The vaccine wars of today, stirred up most recently by outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles, are nothing new. They are as old as vaccination itself. When Edward Jenner, a brilliant English country doctor, developed the vaccine for smallpox in 1796, he was both praised and mocked, lauded and feared. Religious authorities accused him of playing God, and even the equally bright economist Thomas Malthus lost sleep over the thought that vaccines would lead to unsustainable surges in the number of people on the planet. And when people first heard about getting an injection of foreign animal matter into their bodies, they were taken aback.4 Jenner himself was the butt of jokes as cartoons emerged showing cows’ horns shooting up from the heads of recently vaccinated people.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

Charles Darwin was himself no slouch, obviously, yet few people outside academic departments of biology and economics associate his name with ideas in economics. Those who have studied Darwin’s theory of evolution carefully, however, realize that he was in fact heavily influenced by the works of the economists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus had been a student of Smith’s, and Ricardo was heavily influenced by The Wealth of Nations. So even if my prediction comes true, Smith’s fans can still justifiably think of him as the great-grandfather of economics. 16 DARWIN’S WEDGE 17 I base my prediction on a subtle but extremely important distinction between Darwin’s view of the competitive process and Smith’s.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

.), The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1–57, where Callon first uses the term. 13. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). 14. David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 15. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Geoffrey Gilbert. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 16. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Kissimmee: Signalman, 1936). 17. Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 18.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

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

In a famous letter to George III, the Qienlong emperor, who ruled from 1736 to 1795, rejected Britain’s request for trade, explaining, “We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.” The Chinese had closed their minds to the world.5 Without new technologies and techniques, Asia fell prey to the classic Malthusian problem. Thomas Malthus’ famous 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, is remembered today for its erroneous pessimism, but, in fact, many of Malthus’ insights were highly intelligent. He observed that food production in England rose at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4, . . .) but population grew at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . .).


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Ricardo’s ‘law of rent’ challenged established theories of wages that existed at the time, in particular the belief that as the population of a country increased, wages would inevitably fall to just above that which was required for sustenance. This was the ‘iron law of wages’ associated with Thomas Malthus (1872).3 One important aspect of Ricardo’s argument is that the landowner is not free to choose the economic rent they charge for the use of their land. This rent will change over time as land is developed around any particular plot, out of the control of any individual landlord. But equally, economic rent is not related to the investment the landowner has put into the land.


pages: 257 words: 94,168

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths by Steven M. Gorelick

California gold rush, carbon footprint, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jevons paradox, meta-analysis, North Sea oil, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, statistical model, stock buybacks, Thomas Malthus

There are classical historical arguments that have been used to support the notion of natural-resource exhaustion and the scientific basis for the decline in global oil production. The oil depletion debate has occurred in the context of repeated panics that the world is entering an oil-supply crisis. Has the crisis finally arrived? The Malthusian Doctrine In 1798, Thomas Malthus, a 32-year-old British economist and demographer, published An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. There, he argued that society as it was then known was not sustainable: … I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. … Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.


pages: 442 words: 94,734

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Anthropocene, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

We just want to tell it how it is, or at least how it seems to be, and while we cannot ever claim to tell the absolute truth, we can at least try to be as truthful as possible. Of course this attempt at scientific objectivity is easier said than done. When the Statistical Society of London (later the Royal Statistical Society) was set up in 1834 by Charles Babbage, Thomas Malthus and others, they loftily declared that ‘The Statistical Society will consider it to be the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications – to confine its attention rigorously to facts – and, as far as it may be found possible, to facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables.’7 From the very start they took no notice whatsoever of this stricture, and immediately starting inserting their opinions about what their data on crime, health and the economy meant and what should be done in response to it.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Here, too, capitalism is likely to encounter limits and barriers which will become increasingly hard to circumvent. Nowhere has the idea of limits to capital been more stridently and persistently asserted throughout capitalism’s history than with respect to scarcities in nature. The famous Enlightenment economists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo both held that diminishing returns in agriculture would eventually lead the profit rate to fall to zero, thus spelling the end of capitalism as we know it because all profit would be absorbed by rent on land and on the supply of natural resources. Malthus went still further, of course, insisting (in the first version of his population theory) that the conflict between population growth and natural limits was bound to produce (and already was producing) crises of famine, poverty, pestilence and war, no matter what policies were implemented.


pages: 324 words: 90,253

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

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

Perhaps, as the Skidelsky family would argue, we already have enough.1 Perhaps we should accept, with equanimity, our declining influence in world economic and political affairs and, as I put it in Losing Control, learn to grow old gracefully. For good or bad, plenty of sages have warned that nature imposes a natural and inevitable limit on living standards and that stagnation, or worse, is our ultimate destiny. Thomas Malthus argued in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798): Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio … By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.


pages: 342 words: 88,736

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Regardless, ideas that worked spread and took hold. Our species’ trademark of accumulating knowledge through trial-and-error and sharing new knowledge was in play. People had no other choice but to try to resolve the conundrums within their available means. The mayhem of the late eighteenth century was the context for the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s famous dire warnings. Malthus argued in a 1798 essay that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Malthus saw the situation from the lens of the time in which he lived. He was viewing the world from the pinnacle of a ratchet that had resulted from many centuries of increasing yields, which had produced more food, more people, more profit-seeking, bigger cities, and still greater demand for a reliable source of food.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Notes Introduction: README Jesse Ausubel’s amazing essay: Jesse Ausubel, “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment,” Breakthrough Journal 5 (Summer 2015), https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature. Chapter 1: All the Malthusian Millennia “the passion between the sexes is less ardent”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798; repr., Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, http://www.esp.org, 1998), 12, http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

Some environmentalists claim that there can be no more economic growth at all, and hence the future generation will not be better off in this respect.[5] The argument is that the earth has finite resources and hence the population runs up against natural constraints. It is not just that we should not have economic growth, but that we will not. It is the argument advanced by Thomas Malthus, and later by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome.[6] This is far too pessimistic. There is (sadly) no chance of us running out of fossil fuels, nor of many of the other main minerals that are crucial to the economy. But, more importantly, there is one resource which we continually invent and do not run out of.


pages: 404 words: 92,713

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

We just want to tell it how it is, or at least how it seems to be, and while we cannot ever claim to tell the absolute truth, we can at least try to be as truthful as possible. Of course this attempt at scientific objectivity is easier said than done. When the Statistical Society of London (later the Royal Statistical Society) was set up in 1834 by Charles Babbage, Thomas Malthus and others, they loftily declared that ‘The Statistical Society will consider it to be the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications—to confine its attention rigorously to facts—and, as far as it may be found possible, to facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables.’7 From the very start they took no notice whatsoever of this stricture, and immediately starting inserting their opinions about what their data on crime, health and the economy meant and what should be done in response to it.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Darwin’s account left out many key details, and indeed it was written a century before the discovery of dna. But it still carried enormous power to connect macroscale biology—species and ecosystems—with the pressures on individual organisms. In Darwin’s account, his eureka moment came while reading Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that society is doomed to outstrip its food supply because human population grows geometrically. If every couple has four surviving children, for example, the population will double every generation. In a flash, Darwin realized that natural selection would not be cumulative, but compounded: the population of organisms with favorable traits multiplies with every succeeding generation.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

FIGURE 1 HOW THE WORLD CHANGED AFTER 1800 The rate of economic growth accelerated dramatically around the year 1800 with the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that moment, which corresponds to the historical period covered in the first volume of this book, much of the world lived under the conditions described by the English writer Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population painted a gloomy picture in which population growth would outstrip economic resources in the long run. Figure 2 shows an estimate of per capita income over an eight-hundred-year period in England, where the Industrial Revolution started. The hockey-stick shape of the curve, and the sudden transition to a much higher rate of growth, reflects the fact that the later period saw continual year-on-year increases in productivity that vastly outstripped the rate of population growth.

In the days when the markets for such skills and services were localized due to the high costs of communications and transportation, there were plenty of openings for people farther down the hierarchy because mass audiences did not have access to the best of the best. But today, anyone can attend a performance by the Metropolitan Opera or the Royal Ballet live on a high-definition screen, which many would watch in preference to a third- or fourth-tier local company.13 MALTHUS REVISITED Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population had the bad luck to be published in 1798, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, just as a technological tsunami was gathering force. His prediction that human population growth would outstrip increases in productivity proved very wrong in the two centuries that followed, and human societies succeeded in enriching themselves on a per capita basis to a historically unprecedented degree.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Today we can readily enough imagine proving Darwin's first case — the brute historic fact of descent with modification — quite independently of any consideration of Natural selection or indeed any other mechanism for bringing these brute events about, but for Darwin the idea of the mechanism was both the {40} hunting license he needed, and an unwavering guide to the right questions to ask.1 The idea of natural selection was not itself a miraculously novel creation of Darwin's but, rather, the offspring of earlier ideas that had been vigorously discussed for years and even generations (for an excellent account of this intellectual history, see R. Richards 1987). Chief among these parent ideas was an insight Darwin gained from reflection on the 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus, which argued that population explosion and famine were inevitable, given the excess fertility of human beings, unless drastic measures were taken. The grim Malthusian vision of the social and political forces that could act to check human overpopulation may have strongly flavored Darwin's thinking (and undoubtedly has flavored the shallow political attacks of many an anti-Darwinian), but the idea Darwin needed from Malthus is purely logical.

The idea that Design is something that has taken work to create, and {73} hence has value at least in the sense that it is something that might be conserved (and then stolen or sold), finds robust expression in economic terms. Had Darwin not had the benefit of being born into a mercantile world that had already created its Adam Smith and its Thomas Malthus, he would not have been in position to find ready-made pieces he could put together into a new, value-added product. (You see, the idea applies to itself very nicely.) The various sources of the Design that went into Darwin's grand idea give us important insights into the idea itself, but do no more to diminish its value or threaten its objectivity than the humble origins of methane diminish its BTUs when it is put to use as a fuel. 4.


pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vigorously among themselves—in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because detailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after regrowth of forests. With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda (Chapter 10), Haiti (Chapter 11), and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, "Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape." Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

In fact, it has been exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibi-otics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man's lands fought over by adjacent smaller polities. Population problems such as those of East Africa are often referred to as "Malthusian," because in 1798 the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus published a famous book in which he argued that human population growth would tend to outrun the growth of food production. That's because (Malthus reasoned) population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. For instance, if a population's doubling time is 35 years, then a population of 100 people in the year 2000, if it continues to grow with that same doubling time, will have doubled in the year 2035 to 200 people, who will in turn double to 400 people in 2070, who will double to 800 people in the year 2105, and so on.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Allotments are small plots for city dwellers and others to grow vegetables and fruit for consumption by themselves, family and friends. They symbolise the historical continuity of the commons. Allotments have had a chequered history. At the time of the Speenhamland system, they were opposed by Thomas Malthus and Edmund Burke on the grounds that they would reduce labour supply to employers and slow capital accumulation. But gradually through the nineteenth century, sentiment changed. Three Parliamentary Acts between 1887 and 1908 empowered local authorities to acquire land to turn into municipal allotments and, in rural areas, County Smallholdings Estate.


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

Paul Klemperer, the auction designer who features in chapter 7, helped to design an auction for the United Kingdom government to kick-start their program of tradable emission permits. Anyone doubting my statement that “economists have long been in the forefront of analyzing environmental problems” will be surprised to hear that one of the first environmentalists was also one of the first and most famous economists, Thomas Malthus, whose study of overpopulation was published in 1798. (“An Essay on the Principle of Population” (London: Murray). Only slightly less famous is the inspiration for this entire chapter: Arthur Pigou, professor of economics at Cambridge University, whose seminal book The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920) developed the theory of externalities and the solution of externality pricing.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The planet’s only other similar boundary is the one separating the Sahara desert from the rest of Africa. That desert has expanded by 10 percent, too; in the winter, the figure is 18 percent. * * * — The privileged children of the industrialized West have long laughed at the predictions of Thomas Malthus, the British economist who believed that long-term economic growth was impossible, since each bumper crop or episode of growth would ultimately produce more children to consume or absorb it—and as a result the size of any population, including that of the planet as a whole, was a check against material well-being.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Such communities would engage primarily in farming and only secondarily in manufacturing, but they would utilize the latest machinery and draw on the best agricultural science. Moreover, they would be able to grow enough food to supply an expanding population that, according to some economists such as Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), was doomed to increase faster than the means of subsistence. The affluence necessary for nearly all serious utopian schemes would thus be available. As envisioned by Owen, these communities would consist of multi-storied “parallelograms,” each housing between three hundred and two thousand men, women, and children.


pages: 336 words: 97,204

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson

British Empire, Columbine, Corn Laws, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, George Santayana, Honoré de Balzac, James Watt: steam engine, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus

The draconian, Malthusian New Poor Law of 1834, however, was trying to address a question which demanded more than the occasional Christmas turkey being taken to a delighted Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. The population had grown, and expert opinion, in and out of government, agreed with the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s view that there was only a fixed amount of food available at any one time: therefore when the population grew, the poor were in trouble. Malthusian economics, moreover, taught that the more the wages of the poor were subsidized, the less money there would be: there being, in this wrong-headed view of things, only a fixed amount of money to pay wages or subsidies.


pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vigorously among themselves—in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because detailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after regrowth of forests. With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda (Chapter 10), Haiti (Chapter 11), and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

In fact, it has been exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibiotics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man’s lands fought over by adjacent smaller polities. Population problems such as those of East Africa are often referred to as “Malthusian,” because in 1798 the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus published a famous book in which he argued that human population growth would tend to outrun the growth of food production. That’s because (Malthus reasoned) population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. For instance, if a population’s doubling time is 35 years, then a population of 100 people in the year 2000, if it continues to grow with that same doubling time, will have doubled in the year 2035 to 200 people, who will in turn double to 400 people in 2070, who will double to 800 people in the year 2105, and so on.


pages: 445 words: 105,255

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

Bernal, and the father of theoretical astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. 15fn1missions to asteroids have become part of NASA’s plans: See, for example, http://www.nasa.gov/about/obamaspeechfeature.html. 15fn2because in the end Malthus was right: In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Reverend Thomas Malthus argued that population tended to grow exponentially and that this exponential growth would overrun the limits of food production even if production steadily increased. His general argument regarding exponential growth holds true for any imaginable production technology within the bounds of the material universe. 18His bold visions started early: In our forward-looking conversations Arthur had occasion to mention only a few of his past accomplishments.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Most economists would probably agree with the view that environmental constraints and a crisis in the financial world don’t add up to the end of growth — just a speed bump in the highway of progress. That’s because smart people will always be thinking of new technologies and of new ways to do more with less. And these will in turn be the basis of new commercial products and business models. Talk of limits typically elicits dismissive references to the failed warnings of Thomas Malthus — the 18th-century economist who reasoned that population growth would inevitably (and soon) outpace food production, leading to a general famine. Malthus was obviously wrong, at least in the short run: food production expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to feed a fast-growing population.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State . . . but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood . . . George Bernard Shaw, also on the political left, said ‘The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man.’ The British never did adopt a eugenics policy, despite England being the intellectual birthplace of the idea. Before Darwin and Galton, Thomas Malthus had formally fretted about population growth and control, and therein laid the foundations of improving the ‘stock’ of a people. But in the USA, and a few other countries (notably Sweden), the forced, involuntary and often secret sterilization of undesirables was embraced enthusiastically. From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states, with California the most vigorous adopter.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Moreover, a higher rate of population growth would mean a higher ratio of nonproductive children to productive adults. (Mind you, just as in many poor societies today, stringent efforts were made to make children to some degree productive from an early age.) The constraints on living standards imposed by rising population were the central element in the theory propounded by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who was both a minister of the Church and one of the early economists. These days his rank pessimism has been completely discredited. And rightly so. He really did give economics and economists a bad name. Writing in England in 1798, he said: The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Everyone realized that radical transformations were under way, precipitated by sustained demographic growth—a previously unknown phenomenon—coupled with a rural exodus and the advent of the Industrial Revolution. How would these upheavals affect the distribution of wealth, the social structure, and the political equilibrium of European society? For Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published his Essay on the Principle of Population, there could be no doubt: the primary threat was overpopulation.1 Although his sources were thin, he made the best he could of them. One particularly important influence was the travel diary published by Arthur Young, an English agronomist who traveled extensively in France, from Calais to the Pyrenees and from Brittany to Franche-Comté, in 1787–1788, on the eve of the Revolution.

My goal in writing was to make this book accessible to people without any special technical training, while the book together with the technical appendix should satisfy the demands of specialists in the field. This procedure will also allow me to post revised online versions and updates of the tables, graphs, and technical apparatus. I welcome input from readers of the book or website, who can send comments and criticisms to piketty@ens.fr. Introduction 1. The English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) is considered to be one of the most influential members of the “classical” school, along with Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). 2. There is of course a more optimistic school of liberals: Adam Smith seems to belong to it, and in fact he never really considered the possibility that the distribution of wealth might grow more unequal over the long run.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

Such a view of gradualism—that small causes, taken over long periods, can have very large effects—was anathema to religious fundamentalists of the day, but Lyell’s evidence was compelling to Darwin, especially as, on his voyage, he could see for himself the results of different kinds of geological processes. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) drew Darwin’s attention to the fact that population growth leads to competition for food and other resources. Malthus’s essay was about human population growth, but Darwin would adapt these ideas to explain the evolution of all living organisms via a continual “struggle for existence.”


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

For when one considers the sheer number of original ideas and contributions across so many areas of economic thought that Ibn Khaldūn invented we are left in absolutely no doubt that he is more worthy of the title.9 Ibn Khaldūn discovered a number of key economic notions several hundred years before their ‘official’ births, such as the virtues and necessity of a division of labour (before Smith), the principle of labour value (before David Ricardo), a theory of population (before Thomas Malthus) and the role of the state in the economy (before John Maynard Keynes). He then used these concepts to build a coherent dynamic system of economic theory.10 Not only was he the forerunner of European economists, such was his intellect that he is also considered to be the undisputed founder and father of the field of sociology.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

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

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

And while the authors were careful to qualify their forecasts with caveats, their tone was decidedly apocalyptic: “When there is plenty of unused arable land, there can be more people and also more food per person. When all the land is already used, the trade-off between more people or more food per person becomes a choice between absolutes.” Warnings about a world unable to feed its population were nothing new; the English cleric Thomas Malthus had predicted much the same in 1798. But Malthus had fallen out of favor, largely because, nearly two centuries on, the anticipated catastrophe had not happened. The Limits to Growth went beyond Malthus in predicting a world short of oil to heat its homes, metals for its factories, and even clean water to drink.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

It may not feature in the textbooks but this S curve is no newcomer to the theatre of economics: it is, in fact, one of the oldest but most miscast of all actors in the play. Its shape first stepped on to the economic stage in 1838 when the Belgian mathematician Pierre Verhulst drew it to depict the trajectory of population growth, showing that populations would not increase exponentially, as the Reverend Thomas Malthus had believed, but would tend to a limit set by the availability, or carrying capacity, of resources such as food. It was a brilliant insight – worthy of an economic Oscar – but hardly anyone noticed the S curve’s star-like qualities, so it got dropped from the cast list for over a century. Left to languish backstage, the S curve’s talents were spotted by ecologists, biologists, demographers and statisticians who realised that it was a strong fit for describing many processes of growth in the natural world – from a child’s feet and the world’s forests to bacteria in a Petri dish and tumours in a body – and so they have used it ever since.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The default answer is yes—unless, and until, we adjust to the decay of power and accept that the ways we cooperate across borders, both inside and outside the framework of governments, must change. There is no reason we cannot do so. The collapse of the world system has been repeatedly predicted at times of technological change and cultural and demographic flux. Thomas Malthus predicted that the world could not carry an expanding population. Yet it did. Witnessing the industrial revolution and the expansion of global markets and trade in the nineteenth century, the Marxists anticipated a collapse of capitalism under the weight of its internal contradictions. It did not.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

French Enlightenment philosopher and revolutionary Marquis de Condorcet captured the euphoria of the new age of progress when he proclaimed, No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties . . . the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; . . . the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which Nature has placed us.16 Giddy over the prospect of creating a material cornucopia on Earth, the classical economists, with the exception of Thomas Malthus, were united in their belief that human industriousness could create a utopian paradise. The very idea that an acceleration of economic activity might result in a degraded environment and a dark future for unborn generations would have been unfathomable. HOW ECONOMIC THEORY BECAME IRRELEVANT This ideological blind spot shows up in nearly every one of the underlying assumptions of classical and neoclassical economic theory.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

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

Enlil’s action is violent, but it has a certain ecological logic: the noisiness of the human race is an outgrowth of overpopulation, a serious issue in ancient Mesopotamia, whose large populations often put the region’s resources under stress. It all reads like an early chapter in Steven LeBlanc’s chronicle of “constant battles” brought about by fecund humanity perpetually colliding with carrying capacity. Thomas Malthus told the same story in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); so did my teacher Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968) put overpopulation at the top of the Green agenda. His book begins: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Amongst this traffic, going by foot seemed the best of all possible methods of getting around. Hanging on to the train’s door jamb, it was easy to think that at that moment the world was too full. Mega-cities can be seen both as a sign of increasing efficiency in our management of lives and proof that we are over-populated. In 1789 the Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that mankind was doomed if it ever reached 1 billion, because ‘the power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’.3 In 1968 Paul Ehrlich came up with the same cry for help in his influential book, Population Bomb, whose first editions started with the prediction: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

The economist David Ricardo argued that handouts to the poor pushed up the wages at which people were willing to work, and so increased unemployment. By saving today’s poor from hunger, charity was only perpetuating or worsening the problem by ensuring there would be more mouths to feed tomorrow, argued the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he predicted that demand for food would outstrip supply as the population continued to grow. Although neither critique stood the test of time particularly well, Malthus and Ricardo shook the confidence of philanthropists in the rectitude of what they were doing, helping to bring the second golden age of philanthropy to an end with a whimper.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

But food comes from agriculture, so the price of food regulates wages: a low price of food (or ‘corn', as Ricardo wrote in the language of the day) will permit lower wages and therefore higher profits and incentives to invest in future production (for example in manufacturing) and promote economic growth. A high wage due to low productivity in agriculture will mean lower profits, and hence little investment in future production, which in turn leads to slower economic growth. Ricardo inherited this ‘dismal theory' of wages from his contemporary Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), another English writer on political economy, who proposed that whenever real wages are above subsistence level, the population will grow until it is so large that the demand for food will push up food prices enough to bring wages back to subsistence level.35 In Ricardo's view, then, wages depended heavily on the productivity of agriculture: if productivity rose and food became cheaper, wages would fall.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

To Polanyi, an upheaval in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain yanked the nation’s financial markets from a previous position of being embedded in society and religion and stood them on their own—the rise of the unregulated and self-correcting market, which Polanyi discerned in economic developments and also in the theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, with some reference back to Adam Smith.33 Much more was involved than just that. Over more than two decades of studying the circumstances of the three leading world economic powers that preceded the United States, I have been drawn to see other origins—a kind of passing of the baton that initially included non-Anglo-Saxons.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

As rocket scientist David Murray explains, Darwin argued that organic material “evolves just as inorganic material does: with minute changes in each descendant that, over time, accumulate to form new biological appendages like eyes, hands, or wings.”67 Darwin also drew inspiration from the late-eighteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that humans tend to outgrow resources like food, creating a competition for survival. This competition, Darwin believed, drove the evolutionary process, leading the species best adapted to their environment to survive.68 Combinatory play is also the hallmark of great musicians.


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Arthur Young began publishing the monthly Annals of Agriculture in 1784, and counted among his contributors Jeremy Bentham, the pioneering Coke of Holkham and King George III (who adopted Ralph Richardson, the name of his shepherd, as his nom de plume). At the end of the eighteenth century began to appear Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which sounded the first of many alarm-bells about growth – in this case the growth of population, made apparent by the flight to the towns and the sudden visibility of the ordinary people. The plight of the land and of those who were employed on it was a leading concern of William Cobbett, the farmer and pamphleteer whose Rural Rides (summarizing two decades of environmental activism between bouts of hare coursing and fox hunting) appeared in 1830.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

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

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

Crops could be ruined by disease or pests, spoil after harvesting, or get stolen by invading armies. Most farmers lived hand to mouth, often working as serfs, giving up much of their scant crop. Even in the most productive parts of the world, yields were low and fragile. Life was tough, lived on the edge of disaster. When Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that a fast-growing population would quickly exhaust the carrying capacity of agriculture and lead to a collapse, he wasn’t wrong; static yields would and often did follow this rule. What he hadn’t accounted for was the scale of human ingenuity. Assuming favorable weather conditions and using the latest techniques, in the thirteenth century each hectare of wheat in England yielded around half a ton.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Assuming a raindrop is about 4 cubic millimetres, by the 47th minute the deluge would be 600 million litres of water.7 Of course, the rain in the 48th minute will be twice as large, so you are likely to get soaked in the car park. And if you make it to the car, the deluge in the 50th minute will comprise 5 billion litres of water. It would weigh 5 million tons. Frankly, if exponential rain is forecast, you’re best off staying at home. Exponential processes are counterintuitive. And we struggle to grasp them. Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century political economist, first articulated the problem. According to Malthus, the human population tends to grow exponentially – but we won’t realise the power of that exponential growth until too late. Eventually, human needs will outgrow our ability to produce food, bringing famine and pestilence.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

He built on theories from the likes of Anaximander and Lucretius, Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin read Adam Smith, and was thus familiar with the idea that an undirected process with numberless small instances of local competition could have extraordinary results: in Smith's case this was economic growth. Darwin was familiar with Thomas Malthus and his studies of population. Charles Lyell's key work on geology had radically shifted the perception of time. Darwin specifically acknowledged that ‘descent with modification’ had been recognised by thirty-four predecessors.25 Indeed, he was a generalist relying on an extensive communication with specialised experts – he maintained a continuous discussion with hundreds of correspondents (at least 231).26 His research was the work of a lifetime – a gradual realisation over years on the Beagle and decades of patient study.


pages: 416 words: 112,159

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, business cycle, clean water, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, full employment, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, global village, haute couture, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market clearing, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Pareto efficiency, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, telemarketer, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, working poor

For instance, if there were too many carriage makers and not enough automobile assembly workers, wage adjustments in these and other labor markets would quickly restore the proper balance—all without government bureaucrats ever having to lift a finger. Eighty-three years after publication of The Wealth of Nations, Charles Darwin launched a series of books that analyzed competition not among human traders but among animals in the wild. Darwin was much influenced by the British economist Thomas Malthus, an intellectual descendant of Smith’s. It is therefore no surprise that Darwin’s view of competition was in many ways similar to Smith’s. For example, in Darwin’s scheme, the beneficial mutation played the role of Smith’s cost-saving innovation, and transmission was accomplished not by emulation but by relative reproductive success.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Carnegie built 2,509 libraries (costing $56 million) and established other public works using over 90% of his $480 million steel-made wealth. 42. Ruane’s first wife, Elizabeth, suffered from a mood disorder and committed suicide in 1988. 43. Bill Ruane and others recalled this speech. 44. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968; Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principles of Population. The Population Bomb was based on the work of the nineteenth-century demographer and statistician Thomas Malthus, who said that humans procreate in a geometric rather than arithmetic progression; thus the earth’s population would inevitably expand beyond the point at which its resources could support it. At some point, Malthus postulated, misery and vice (e.g., war, pandemic, famine, infant mortality, political unrest) would reduce the population to a sustainable level.

The debate essentially centered over whether technology could outpace population growth, species extinction, and global warming. Buffett looked at the problem of expanding population and diminishing resources in terms of a “margin of safety.” “There is a carrying capacity to the earth. It’s far, far, far, far, far greater than [Thomas] Malthus ever dreamed. On the other hand, there is some carrying capacity, and the one thing about carrying capacity is that you want to err on the low side. If you were provisioning a huge rocket ship to the moon and had enough for two hundred people and didn’t know how long the journey would take, you probably wouldn’t put more than a hundred fifty people on the ship.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

It is difficult to appreciate just how grim life was for ordinary people for most of man’s recorded history. If families had an average of five children each, then on average three of them had to die in order to maintain a stable population that could be supported by the available resources. This was famously documented by Thomas Malthus, who wrote in 1798 that “the power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man … that the actual population is only kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice”. Providing more food for the destitute merely increases their number and thereby multiplies their misery.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

60 The households in Beverly Stadum’s study of relief applicants from 1900 to 1930 are also ones in which addicted, philandering, and abusive men are common, men whose presence, as often as not, is deemed by women to be more harmful than beneficial; sometimes even by caseworkers who usually sought to enforce a “traditional” family structure—even they could see that a two-parent home was not always the best solution.61 Finally, as Raphael writes:The presence of abusers in the lives of large percentages of women on welfare means that we need to seriously rethink conventional wisdom about the large numbers of single mothers supposedly raising their children without the presence of a male.62 Sex, Power, Poverty Throughout American history, relief policy has been obsessed with the sexual and reproductive behavior of poor women, if not always in a consistent or coherent fashion. Some of this might be traced back to English Parson Thomas Malthus and his fear that the unchecked reproduction of the lower classes would lead to scarcity in the food supply. Malthus had a profound influence on the English Poor Law of 1834 (which sought to end cash relief and provide aid only in the workhouse) and, by extension, on ours.63 Much of his line of argument was adopted by the morality-minded reformers of the Gilded Age, like Josephine Shaw Lowell:While the acknowledgment is made that every person born into a civilized community has a right to live, yet the community has the right to say that incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

It is not enough to produce a quantity of food for people to sustain themselves; they must also be able to A FUTURE GEOGRAPHY OF HUMAN POPULATION 105 afford to buy it. Well-stocked markets most of whose local customers cannot pay for a pound of rice do not reflect an absence of malnutrition. MOMENTOUS TRANSITION When the English economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 published a warning that the population in Britain was growing faster than the means of subsistence, he predicted that population growth would be checked by hunger within 50 years, leading to the disintegration of the social order. For three decades after sounding the alarm, Malthus faced severe criticism from those who saw the future differently, but he gave as good as he got.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

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

The pressures on the ecological systems are intensifying, and development and dissemination of sustainable technologies are far too slow. If we do little more than scale up what we are consuming today, we will drive many of the planet’s ecosystems, and countless species, to the point of collapse. The most famous early doomsday prediction came in 1798 from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who noted that populations tend to rise geometrically (in compounded multiples) while food production only rises arithmetically (in added increments). Populations would be held in check mainly by misery. Gains in productivity, Malthus opined, would be quickly swallowed up by further population growth, which would drive temporary advances in living standards back down to subsistence.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Indeed, it has been responsible for most of the worst human-caused disasters of the past two hundred years. So let's take it apart. Figure 12.1. Contrary to Malthus's theory, human global well-being has increased with population size, and at an accelerating rate. Two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus set forth the proposition that population growth must always outrun production as a fundamental law of nature. This theory provided the basis for the cruel British response to famines in Ireland and India during the latter part of the nineteenth century, denying food aid or even regulatory, taxation, or rent relief to millions of starving people on the pseudoscientific grounds that their doom was inevitable.1 Yet the data show that the Malthusian theory is entirely counterfactual.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

In short, fostering productivity growth is like raising children: We know what kinds of things are important even if there is no blueprint for raising an Olympic athlete or a Harvard scholar. The study of human capital has profound implications for public policy. Most important, it can tell us why we haven’t all starved to death. The earth’s population has grown to six billion; how have we been able to feed so many mouths? In the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus famously predicted a dim future for humankind because he believed that as society grew richer, it would continuously squander those gains through population growth—having more children. These additional mouths would gobble up the surplus. In his view, humankind was destined to live on the brink of subsistence, recklessly procreating during the good times and then starving during the bad.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

It was after the Hamburg fire of 1842 that reinsurance was developed as a way for insurance companies to share the risk of major disasters. ag Wallace was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, to which he presented his ‘Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times’, a work which in some respects anticipated Thomas Malthus’s later Essay on the Principle of Population. ah Scott was a victim of the financial crisis triggered by the first Latin American debt crisis (see Chapter 2). Perhaps he was also a victim of his own appetite for real estate. To help finance the cost of his beloved country seat at Abbotsford, the author had become a sleeping partner in the printers that published his books, James Ballantyne and Co., and the associated publishing house of John Ballantyne & Co.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Is there really something essential and vital about acoustic instruments that computers can’t touch? Another incarnation of Pascal’s bargain presents itself. I don’t really know, but the cost of holding on to my perception of a difference is manageable, while the cost if I let go might be great, even if the resulting amnesia would hide the loss from me. CAN WE HANDLE OUR OWN POWER? Thomas Malthus articulated fear of an apocalypse in a naturalistic framework instead of the established supernatural ones. The future he dreaded from the perspective of the 18th century was one where our own successes grant us gifts we cannot absorb, leading to catastrophe. In a typical Malthusian scenario, agriculture, public health, medicine, and industrialization enable an unsustainable population explosion, which leads to catastrophic famine.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Rudolf Virchow understood the organism to be made up of a community of cooperating cells, each working for the good of the whole, just as a population of interdependent cooperating citizens underpinned the operation of a healthy nation-state (Ball [2019], ch. 1). to exist at all: For “close to the margins” see Sapp (2004). The relationship between Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Thomas Malthus’s analysis of food supply and human populations, and Adam Smith’s theory of the market has received considerable scholarly attention. See for example Young (1985). “bodily, intellectual, and moral”: Sapp (1994), ch. 2. “for this year’s Symposium”: Sapp (2004). free of cultural bias: For Needham see Haraway (2004), p. 106; Lewontin (2000), p. 3.


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

Meanwhile the planned obsolescence of software means that earlier versions of major programs may no longer be supported. Computer managers are moving users to Windows without always giving them the processor power, memory, or disk space to work effectively. For many users, computer software seems related to hardware as Thomas Malthus believed population responded to food resources: software does not just match but eventually outstrips hardware in their respective rates of growth. Users who do not have enough computer power spend more and more time waiting for their systems to finish work or struggling with messages that protest, accusingly, "out of memory."'


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

But in this chapter I’ll simplify it as a dual-process model, pitting reason (above the neck) against the two sets of passions (below). 10. This famous phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, but Darwin used it too. 11. Darwin 1998/1871, part I, chapter 5. More on this in chapter 9. 12. The idea was developed by Herbert Spencer in the late nineteenth century, but it goes back to Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century. Darwin did believe that tribes competed with tribes (see chapter 9), but he was no social Darwinist, according to Desmond and Moore 2009. 13. Hitler was a vegetarian too, but nobody would argue that endorsing vegetarianism makes one a Nazi. 14. Pinker 2002, p. 106. 15.


Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

With characteristic style, the historian Thomas Carlyle deplored the degradation of the ‘working body of this rich English Nation’. 4017.indd 10 25/01/13 8:21 PM introduction: ‘a simple naritive’ 11 And writers from across the political spectrum took up their pens to join Carlyle in debating the ‘Condition of England’. The educated few had been muttering about the failure of the nation’s increasing wealth to better the condition of the labouring poor since the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1790s, Thomas Malthus’ gloomy predictions concerning the consequences of unchecked population growth, and the investigations of the Rev. Mr David Davies and Sir Frederick Eden into the hardships created by rising food prices, opened a new line of enquiry into the living standards of the poor. By the early nineteenth century, interest in the question extended beyond political economists.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

But even though Britain had thus assured itself preferential treatment, by the 1890s the best guano was largely gone and the nitrates were going. Crookes warned that ever-increasing demand would use up the desert’s best beds in just a few decades. The worry that the supply of food could not keep up with the growth of the population was not new. Crookes was speaking exactly a century after the parson Thomas Malthus had first voiced concerns on the matter in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Nor was it new to worry that a mineral resource might run out. As Crookes noted, Stanley Jevons had warned decades before that Britain could run out of coal, arguing that the more efficiently the stuff was used, the greater the demand for it would be.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

By following the long-term trends in evolution we can show what technology wants. 7 Convergence In 2009, the world celebrated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and honored his theory’s impact upon our science and culture. Overlooked in the celebrations was Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the same theory of evolution, at approximately the same time, 150 years ago. Weirdly, both Wallace and Darwin found the theory of natural selection after reading the same book on population growth by Thomas Malthus. Darwin did not publish his revelation until provoked by Wallace’s parallel discovery. Had Darwin died at sea on his famous voyage (a not uncommon fate at that time) or been killed by one of his many ailments during his studious years in London, we would be celebrating the birthday of Wallace as the sole genius behind the theory.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

As national populations rose and social tensions increased because of economic change, so governments became more interested in emigration, seeing it not as a source of loss, as previously, but rather as a potential safety-valve for emerging demographic problems. In Britain, the ideology of ‘systematic colonization’ became a fashionable set of ideas and theories associated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield and others. Building on the theories of Thomas Malthus, it was argued by advocates such as Wakefield that emigration could be a blessing rather than a curse, creating markets abroad for British industry while, at the same time, easing population pressures at home. These views became widely influential and in 1837 the New Zealand Association was formed in London along the lines suggested by Wakefield to support emigration to the Antipodes.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

In his ‘Builder’s Creed’ (1917), Eaton said – somewhat immodestly – that he aspired to create ‘God’s garden’: ‘I shall try to build at Forest Lawn a great park, devoid of mis-shapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly Death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers.’73 With its wide roads, carefully manicured lawns and ornamental flowering shrubs, the memorial park was thoroughly suburban and for many Americans this final resting place felt just like home. The Urban Graveyard Effect Cities were once decidedly bad for your health. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, more people died in cities than were born in them, a situation referred to as the ‘urban graveyard effect’. It was Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803), who first described the urban graveyard effect. He calculated that half of all children born in Manchester and Birmingham died before the age of three. Malthus put this high mortality rate down to the ‘closeness and foulness of the air’. In 1861, the life expectancy of a male baby born in Liverpool was twenty-six years compared to fifty-six for one born in the rural community of Okehampton, Devon.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

It was a hint of the secret project that the royals have pursued for decades through their manipulation of the Commonwealth, the European Union, and the global financial system—a conspiracy to reshape the world with a brutal form of laissez-faire economics adapted from the ideas of the British philosophers Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. “You mean utilitarianism?” I asked. “You may want to call it that,” he laughed. “Maybe ‘fascism’ would be a better word.” And he reflected on a state visit to Germany that the queen had made that June. Did I think it was a coincidence that she had gone to meet Angela Merkel just a few days before the Greek referendum on a financial bailout from the European Union?


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Trade is never free, and freedom means far more than having the right to trade. WHAT WAS FREE TRADE? What are the British actually good at? One thing the British produce is an unusual number of economists, including those who later came, through their work, to define the academic subject. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and James Mill are remembered now, perhaps unfairly, for talking about the magical invisible hand of the market (Smith), the problem of poor people having too much sex (Malthus), and how India was a basket case until the British arrived (Mill).5 Their ideas all had great influence, but none of those ideas have actually survived the test of time as much as those of their contemporary David Ricardo and his theories about free trade.6 David Ricardo, son of a Dutch stockbroker, was born in London in 1772.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

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

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

In Britain the number of people who attend mosques every week is closing in on the number who attend Anglican churches—despite the fact that Muslims only make up 3 percent of the population and Britain has two thousand years of history as a Christian nation. The Muslim population is bound to grow. The continent that gave the world Thomas Malthus, the first great worrier about overpopulation, is suffering from a birth dearth. Over the next twenty-five years the number of Europeans of working age will decline by 7 percent while the number of retired people will increase by 50 percent. Europe has little choice but to import workers from the Muslim societies on its southern periphery, where birth rates are high and job opportunities limited.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

As far as I know, the first economist to recognize the fundamental problem and its relation to the money system was Frederick Soddy, a Nobel laureate and pioneer of nuclear chemistry who turned his attention to economics in the 1920s. Soddy was among the first to debunk the ideology of infinite exponential economic growth, extending the reasoning of Thomas Malthus beyond population to economics. Herman Daly describes Soddy’s view succinctly: The idea that people can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness … is just another perpetual motion scheme—a vulgar delusion on a grand scale. Soddy seems to be saying that what is obviously impossible for the community—for everyone to live on interest—should also be forbidden to individuals, as a principle of fairness.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Charles Buller, his private secretary, had been born in Calcutta, studied history with Thomas Carlyle and had won a reputation as a brilliant barrister before entering the House of Commons; while Durham’s principal adviser, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had written extensively on land reform in Australia – ironically, while languishing in Newgate prison, where he had been sent for three years for abducting an under-age heiress. He was just one of many thinkers of his generation who were haunted by the spectre, conjured up by the statistician Thomas Malthus, of unsustainable population growth at home. To Wakefield, the colonies were the obvious answer as an overflow for surplus Britons. But to encourage free settlement, as opposed to continued transportation, he was convinced that some kind of accommodation had to be reached with the settlers’ inherently British sense of independence.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

A woman who was sixty in 1902, and subject to that year’s mortality rates, would have expected to live for another fourteen and a half years. By 2012 that expectation had increased to over twenty-five years. Changes in average longevity have proved hard to predict. In 1798, the English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus wrote that ‘with regard to the duration of human life, there does not appear to have existed, from the earliest ages of the world, to the present moment, the smallest permanent symptom, or indication, of increasing prolongation’.10 That past experience was to prove a poor predictor of the future.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Even if Menger and the other marginalists saw their work as groundbreaking, a gradualist picture better characterizes the social scientific landscape.21 At the turn of the nineteenth century, political economy developed rapidly, primarily under the influence of Scottish and English scholars such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Their work introduced a new level of abstraction and theorization to questions of trade, industry, and exchange. These classical economists sought to explain the fundamental principles of human interaction: how human self-interest benefited society, how the division of labor led to greater productivity and wealth, how competition in the marketplace ensured the best prices and outcomes for producers and consumers.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

On August 29, a 38-yearold stockbroker as spokesman for this community submitted the first of three letters on this matter to the Morning Chronicle, complaining that the public "do not seem to be sufficiently impressed with the importance of the subject, nor of the disastrous consequences which may attend the further depreciation of the paper."" His name was David Ricardo, and this was the first time his name had appeared in print. The letters and additional commentary subsequently appeared as a tract titled "The High Price of Bullion." Ricardo was born in 1772, when Adam Smith was fifty years old and Thomas Malthus, Ricardo's beloved friend and unremitting intellectual opponent, was six years old; Ricardo first met Malthus in 1809 at the very moment he was sending in his letters to the Morning Chronicle.19 Ricardo's father was a Jewish merchant banker and stockbroker jobber, as the English call it-who took his son in as an employee when the boy was only fourteen.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It’s true that you’re unlikely to find the needle the majority of the time, but optimal stopping is your best defense against the haystack, no matter how large. Lover’s Leap The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. —THOMAS MALTHUS I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up. —BARBARA BUSH Before he became a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon, Michael Trick was a graduate student, looking for love. “It hit me that the problem has been studied: it is the Secretary Problem!


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Adam Smith may not have been the first writer on economic matters to reduce the welfare of nations to the action of individuals, but he put it most succinctly and with the greatest authority: Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. Thomas Malthus, the founder of population studies, saw that the Adam Smith argument could be applied not only to the development of the economy of nations but also to the survival of human populations. He is well known for his proposition that "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Specialization in meat production for the English market led to an excessive dependence on the potato to feed the rural workforce and therefore acute vulnerability to the blight of that vegetable, Phytophthora infestans, which struck in the mid-1840s. True to Ricardian principles, the British government declined to send emergency food to alleviate the famine; a million people died, vindicating not Ricardo but Thomas Malthus, the author of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which predicted such calamities. The surviving Irish were reduced to exporting themselves, mostly to America. * The ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the text may well refer to the Albion Flour Mills, built by Boulton & Watt in London in 1769 and destroyed by fire in 1791


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

Mancur Olson argued that democracies inevitably become the prisoners of powerful interest groups. “On balance,” he concluded, “special interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.”3 A group of MIT academics, who mysteriously called themselves the Club of Rome, outdid Thomas Malthus by arguing that the world was about to run out not only of food but also of all the basic materials of life, from oil to water; The Limits to Growth (1972) sold more than 12 million copies. In 1975, Time magazine published a cover story asking, “Can Capitalism Survive?” A nation that had emerged from the Second World War believing firmly that it was successful and good came to believe that, at the very least, it was unsuccessful and bad, and that, quite possibly, it was doomed.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

In 1795, in the midst of the revolutionary terror instigated by Robespierre, the Marquis de Condorcet used his enforced period of hiding to write a book called Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind. It is, to this day, one of the great accounts of the idea of human progress. Condorcet argued that social evils were the result of ignorance. He eschewed belief in a utopian end-state, writing that human history was a permanent state of adaptation. The book inspired Thomas Malthus to write An Essay on the Principle of Population, which he published in 1798. Malthus infamously argued that the world could not cope with population growth were it not for periodic natural disasters and social catastrophes such as famine. Condorcet thought human societies were flexible enough to adapt; Malthus thought population growth would bring disaster.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

But as hardware supply is very elastic, and may even be downward sloping, em wages should stay low, at least in the absence of strong wage or population regulations. Malthusian Wages Thus the introduction of competitively supplied ems should greatly lower wages, to near the full cost of the computer hardware needed to run em brains. Such a scenario is famously called “Malthusian,” after Thomas Malthus who in 1798 argued that when population can grow faster than total economic output, wages fall to near subsistence levels. Note that in this section we are assuming that enough ems are willing to copy themselves to fill new job openings, and that they have not organized to avoid competing with each other.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

We will consider in more detail in the next section some of the political institutions that rule over these hierarchies of the global system. Finally we should add, as in a sinister cookbook, one final ingredient that completes the recipe of the global topography of poverty and exploitation, one final portion about demography, the social science most firmly linked to biopower. Already in nineteenth-century England, Thomas Malthus, an economist and Anglican minister, warned of the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation. It is not uncommon today to hear similar calls for population control from international aid organizations and the NGO community. What these organizations propose (in charitable and humanitarian tones) is often in fact dictated and enacted in much more sinister terms by the major international agencies and national governments.


The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth. * Darwin told us that he derived his original inspiration for natural selection from Thomas Malthus, and perhaps this particular phrase of Darwin was prompted by the following apocalyptic paragraph, called to my attention by my friend Matt Ridley: ‘Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Moore’s law has persisted because spending on research and development has generated a near constant rate of improvement. Demographers apply the exponential growth model to human populations. A population that grows at 6% a year doubles in size in twelve years. In thirty-six years, it doubles three times, and in one hundred years, it doubles eight times (increasing 256-fold). In 1798 British economist Thomas Malthus noticed that the population was growing exponentially and wrote a model showing that if the economy’s ability to produce food only increased linearly, then a crisis loomed. The short version goes as follows: Population was growing like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,.… Food production was growing like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,.… Malthus foresaw disaster.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Roger Scruton once wrote that ‘Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with Right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with Left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.’18 It’s hard to make this point without sounding smug but it’s obviously true, and not a recent phenomenon. Thomas Sowell cited this pattern going back to the eighteenth century, when Thomas Malthus said of his critics that ‘I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.’ In return the radical William Godwin called Malthus ‘malignant’ and questioned ‘the humanity of the man . . . I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.’


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

His final act of forewarning came just a few months before his death in 2010, when he told the Australian newspaper that the human population explosion and “unbridled consumption” had already sealed our species’ fate. Humanity would be gone in the next hundred years, he said. “There are too many people here already.”10 We’ve heard this song before, of course. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the global human population was screaming past the 1 billion mark, the English scholar Thomas Malthus warned that advances in food production inevitably led to population growth, placing increasing numbers of poor people at greater risk of starvation and disease. Viewed from the developed world, it often looks as though a Malthusian catastrophe has largely been avoided; agricultural advances have kept us one step ahead of disaster.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

The terms can also refer to moods, such as cheerfulness or depression, but, again, moods do not necessitate any particular stance about the future: the statesman Winston Churchill suffered from intense depression, yet his outlook on the future of civilization, and his specific expectations as wartime leader, were unusually positive. Conversely the economist Thomas Malthus, a notorious prophet of doom (of whom more below), is said to have been a serene and happy fellow, who often had his companions at the dinner table in gales of laughter. Blind optimism is a stance towards the future. It consists of proceeding as if one knows that the bad outcomes will not happen.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

14 Darwin’s second premise is that all living creatures tend to produce more offspring than the environment can support. It’s a cruel world, in which only a fraction of the wolves and turtles and dragonflies that come into existence manage to find sustenance and avoid predators long enough to reproduce. The English economist Thomas Malthus had quantified these harsh facts of life by pointing out that most species reproduce geometrically, while the environment can support no better than a linear increase in their populations.* Darwin read Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population in London in 1838—“for amusement,” he recalled—and the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection began to take form in his mind.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

(Note that pleasure and preference do not enter into Ricardo's analysis. Our attorney may enjoy carpentry and decide to do the job himself-a valid emotional choice, but not an economically rational one.) Alas, Principles, and Ricardo himself, arrived too late to save England from the draconian Corn Law of 1815. In response to a pro-Corn Law tract by Thomas Malthus, Ricardo wrote an anti-Corn Law pamphlet, "An Essay on the Influence of a low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock." In it, he pointed out that the major advantage of the "real" England (as opposed to the hypothetical England of Principles) lay in its factory machinery. The corn laws, he wrote, impeded the purchase of foreign grain and forced England to waste its precious labor in less productive farmwork.


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

Just before oil prices started to plunge that year, President Putin was celebrated on magazine covers as “the most powerful man in the world” following a string of apparent foreign policy successes including the occupation of the Crimea.8 It was a classic case of hype peaking after the end of a trend: Russia was already falling behind the West in average income, and its oil-fueled recession would accelerate the slump. The Rosy Disaster Scenarios Although the fortunes of commodity economies have strong links to volatile price swings, the hype for them is often driven by an emotional form of straight-line thinking derived from the Malthusian disaster scenario. Ever since the English scholar Thomas Malthus first predicted in the early nineteenth century that rising global population would outpace farm output and lead to mass starvation, experts have put forth pessimistic theories every few decades, if not every few years, despite Malthus’s prediction never having been realized. Just after a spurt in food prices in 2011, the international organization Oxfam warned that a slower rate of increase in farm output amid rising population would lead to food shortages.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines. Both had traveled to exotic places where they observed the variation of species, and both had read “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas Malthus, an English economist. Malthus argued that the human population was likely to grow faster than the food supply. The resulting overpopulation would lead to famine that would weed out the weaker and poorer people. Darwin and Wallace realized this could be applied to all species and thus lead to a theory of evolution driven by the survival of the fittest.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

While most of the fanfare centered on CRISPR’s potential for treating human disease, some commentators, including British author and politician Matt Ridley, were struck by the implications for crops. Ten thousand years ago, farmers in what is now Turkey used cross-breeding to select a random mutation in wheat plants in the Q gene on chromosome 5A, which rendered the seed head less brittle and the seed husks easier to harvest efficiently.9 In 1798, English political economist Thomas Malthus published a famous treatise in which he showed that human population growth was outstripping the increase in agricultural productivity. The growing competition for resources leads inevitably to a Malthusian collapse caused by war, famine, or pestilence. In her book The Age of Living Machines, MIT president emerita Susan Hockfield argues that Malthus was wrong because of the repeated invention of new technologies that have increased agricultural productivity.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

You see serious people overreacting so they can claim they’re ‘doing something,’ and they’re doing something before they assess the real costs of whatever it is they’re doing, not to mention the benefits of what we already have. We could go back to the Stone Age if we really wanted to reduce our carbon footprints to zero, but the cure would be worse than the disease. “People seem to be very Malthusian right now,” he added. “Thomas Malthus argued food supply would increase, and so would population— only faster—until the latter outraced the former and then you would have famine and catastrophe. Instead, for the last two hundred years, population grew, standards of living went up, and life expectancy soared. Connectivity was the key—connectivity and trade.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

He concluded: “My opinion is against an over-Â�doing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority; the meddling with the subsistence of the Â�people.”26 By far the most detailed and influential critique of public assistance to the poor, the Essay on the PrinciÂ�ple of Population (1798) penned by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), was published just two years Â�after Pitt’s attempt to generalize Speenhamland. Its empirical basis was largely drawn from Frederic Morton Eden’s State of the Poor (1797), a lengthy history and critique of the Poor Laws that came to the conclusion that a Â�legal provision for the poor “checks that emulative spirit of exertion, which the want of the necessaries, or the no less powerÂ�ful demand for the superfluities of life, gives birth to: for it assures a man, that, Â�whether he may have been indolent, improvident, prodigal, or vicious, he Â�shall never suffer want.”27 Malthus’s essay developed this analyÂ�sis, arguing that the generalization of public aid to the poor Â�causes them to work and save less, encourages them to marry younger and have more Â�children, and pushes up the price of the goods they consume, thereby reducing their real wages.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

An extraordinary proportion of work came out of the rector, the English parish priest with no worries, erudition, a large or at least comfortable house, domestic help, a reliable supply of tea and scones with clotted cream, and an abundance of free time. And, of course, optionality. The enlightened amateur, that is. The Reverends Thomas Bayes (as in Bayesian probability) and Thomas Malthus (Malthusian overpopulation) are the most famous. But there are many more surprises, cataloged in Bill Bryson’s Home, in which the author found ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even inventors. In addition to the previous two giants, I randomly list contributions by country clergymen: Rev.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

All this was a rehearsal of the debate which followed the end of the First World War, with the arguments and sequence of policies being almost identical. Jacob Viner noted that Ricardo was blind to the short-run consequences of the policies he advocated. The Ricardian vice of abstraction from reality is beautifully illustrated by an exchange between Ricardo and his friend Thomas Malthus in January 1821 concerning the causes and consequences of the great depression in trade which had followed the Napoleonic wars. Ricardo accused Malthus of having ‘always in your mind the immediate and temporary effects of particular changes – whereas I put these immediate and temporary effects quite aside, and fix my whole attention on the permanent state of things which result from them’.24 Malthus admitted his tendency to ‘refer frequently to things as they are, as the only way of making one’s writing useful to society’ and 48 t h e f ig h t for t h e g ol d s ta n da r d of avoiding the ‘errors of the tailors of Laputa, and by a slight mistake at the outset arrive at conclusions most distant from the truth’.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

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

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

These difficult times for ordinary people were the result of the religious and aristocratic elite structuring technology and the economy to make it hard for most of the population to prosper. Day-to-day sway over the population through persuasion power rested on a strong bedrock of religious belief reinforced by court action and coercion. A Malthusian Trap An alternative interpretation of stagnant living standards during the Middle Ages is rooted in the ideas of Reverend Thomas Malthus. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus argued that the poor were feckless. If you gave them enough land for a cow, they would just have more children. As a result, “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

We now have to consider yet another leveler—the Fourth Horseman, epidemic disease. It differs from the other three in that it involves other species but not in violent terms: yet some bacterial and viral assaults on human societies were much more lethal than almost any human-caused disaster. How do epidemics reduce inequality? They do so by acting as what the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population called “positive checks.” In its barest outlines, Malthusian thinking is rooted in the premise that in the long run, population tends to grow more quickly than resources. This in turn triggers checks on further population growth: “preventive checks” that depress fertility through “moral restraint”—that is, delayed marriage and reproduction—and “positive checks” that raise mortality.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

For a start, evolution as a concept was already decades old by the 1830s. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus, had paid tribute to evolutionary principles in a poem of inspired mediocrity called “The Temple of Nature” years before Charles was even born. It wasn't until the younger Darwin was back in England and read Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (which proposed that increases in food supply could never keep up with population growth for mathematical reasons) that the idea began to percolate through his mind that life is a perpetual struggle and that natural selection was the means by which some species prospered while others failed.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Perhaps Moore's law, combined with the explosive potential of converging technologies, has given our civilization, in effect, a new energy source, one that is potentially limitless and therefore doesn't conform to Tainter's theory. The favorite whipping boy of these technology optimists, known as cornucopians, is the hapless Thomas Malthus, a late-eighteenth-century English cleric who was the first to warn of the dangers of exponential growth. Malthus reasoned that if the human race were to transcend the diseases and wars that kept population in check, their numbers would expand exponentially, but the resources to feed them were finite, so the result would inevitably be mass starvation.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

So the creation of life annuities and the imagining of a future in which they could help everyone in society—not just those who could afford to buy them—led to the realization of another previously un-imagined consequence: humanity would become the victim of its own success. The negative shadow of Thomas Malthus hovered over the shining hope of finance. 16 EFFICIENT MARKETS Nineteenth-century print of the Paris Bourse. The Enlightenment tradition of mathematical inquiry was stimulated by the financial markets and the variety of unusual securities traded in them and vice versa. In this chapter, we take a look forward in time.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

The easily accessible firewood was being burned up; and the acres needed for raising the flax or wool to clothe the increasing population was being turned over to marginal subsistence agriculture. Costs rose. Living standards dropped. Famine, epidemic disease, war, political instability, and full-scale social collapse were next. English clergyman Thomas Malthus wrote about this cycle in a famous 1798 pamphlet. Food production, he argued, could increase arithmetically at best, while population could expand geometrically. Thus, no increase in the standard of living was sustainable. It would always run up against resource limits. Western societies acquired massive new resources between 1500 and 1800.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Cambridge was also Newton’s shrine, and the base of the powerful ‘Trinity and John’s’ group of scientific academics. This time the list of those attending included almost all those who would soon become the rising stars in the firmament of early Victorian science: Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The only notable absentee was Charles Darwin, just then botanising in Uruguay during the Beagle’s voyage.34 Some of ‘the ladies’ were also pressing for admittance, including several powerful scientific wives, like Margaret Herschel and Mary Somerville. They pretended to be fully engaged in hosting receptions and choosing the menus, while unofficially they listened at the back of the lecture halls, took notes, and critically judged the quality (and appearance) of the speakers.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The modern mind can conceive of a substance as a combination of atoms, the plan for a living thing as the combination of DNA nucleotides, and a relationship among quantities as a combination of mathematical symbols. Language, itself a combinatorial system, allows us to share these intellectual fruits. The combinatorial powers of the human mind can help explain a paradox about the place of our species on the planet. Two hundred years ago the economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) called attention to two enduring features of human nature. One is that “food is necessary for the existence of man.” The other is that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” He famously deduced: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

There is still hunger (including among the poor in developed countries), and there were famines in East Africa in 2011, the Sahel in 2012, and South Sudan in 2016, together with near-famines in Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen. But they did not kill on the scale of the catastrophes that were regular occurrences in earlier centuries. None of this was supposed to happen. In 1798 Thomas Malthus explained that the frequent famines of his era were unavoidable and would only get worse, because “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Instead, profound and conscientious thinkers in successive generations groped toward some kind of understanding of both the real world of economic activity and the intellectual concepts that would make it possible to study such things systematically. The supply and demand analysis that can be taught to today’s beginning students in a week took at least a century to emerge from the controversies among early nineteenth-century thinkers like David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Jean-Baptiste Say. In one of many letters between Ricardo and his friend Malthus, discussing economic issues over the years, Ricardo said in 1814: “I sometimes suspect that we do not attach the same meaning to the word demand.” He was right; they did not. {xxxix} It would be decades after both men had passed from the scene before the term could be clarified and defined precisely enough to mean what it means to economists today.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

British and Dutch commerce and institutions: Brenner 2003, H. Cook 2008, de Vries and van der Woude 1997, Jardine 2008, Pincus 2009. Anglo-French trade and war: Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, Simms 2008. Mercantilism: Tracy 1990, 1991. Political economy: the classic texts are Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed., 1798), and David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), all republished many times. 10. THE WESTERN AGE Bayly 2004 and Darwin 2008 and 2009 are outstanding recent surveys on the global scale, but Eric Hobsbawm’s four-volume treatment (1964, 1975, 1987, 1994) remains my favorite.


pages: 768 words: 291,079

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, full employment, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, wage slave, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws (which had excluded cheaper foreign wheat) was often understood as the symbolic initiation of Victorian free trade. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone had by 1860 removed import duties on over 400 categories of goods, leaving only a few luxury items subject to tariffs. ‘Over-population!’: Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), in his influential Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), argued that population grows faster than food supply and that poverty was thus a condition with the force of a law of nature. 19 poverty in France?: French fertility levels moved down from 38 to 40 per thousand before the French Revolution (1789), to 25 per thousand by the 1870s.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

But politics, postmastering, and other interests intervened, and the polishing never took place. Finally, in 1754, Franklin consented to its publication as it stood, and the next year it was printed in Boston. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and was reproduced in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus, among many others, read it appreciatively. Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.)


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

At its present 7.2 billion people, or its predicted peak of 10 billion, I have noted, the global population is an order of magnitude below the carrying capacity of the earth. And the angry biologist needs to be reminded that life itself is a local exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, precisely because it is not a closed system. Or again, an angry remark by another apparent scientist: “Thomas Malthus was always logical, just subject to delays for his worst-case scenarios. . . . It’s unclear if Simon understood [in 1971 at the first edition of his pathbreaking book The Ultimate Resource (executive summary: not oil, but human creativity)] that U.S. oil production had already peaked in 1970.”15 But Malthus’s scenarios were not “worst-case.”


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The most distinctive aspect of U.S. demography was the rapid rate of population growth, which from the founding of the Republic in 1790 to the eve of the Civil War in 1860 had averaged 3.0 percent per year, an unprecedented rate that implied a doubling of the population every twenty-three years.12 After 1860, the population growth rate slowed to 2.3 percent during 1860–1890, 1.9 percent during 1890–1910, and 1.4 percent during 1910–1930. Nevertheless, these rates were high compared to the developed countries of western Europe, where population growth rates during 1870–1913 were 1.2 percent per annum for Germany, 0.9 for the U. K., and a mere 0.2 for France. As early as 1798, Thomas Malthus commented on the high fertility and large family sizes in the United States, which he attributed to the extreme cheapness of farm land: And on account of the extreme cheapness of good land a capital could not be more advantageously employed than in agriculture…. The consequence of these favorable circumstances united was a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The plan to settle British emigrants along the eastern border of the Cape Colony has been described as ‘nothing but a political manoeuvre by a Tory Government, desperate to demonstrate public concern for the unemployed in order to stave off pressures for more radical reform’.1 Certainly there was widespread social unrest in Britain at the time, and the government was under pressure to act. Mass unemployment and political riots had followed the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and theories of ‘overpopulation’ derived from Thomas Malthus's gloomy Essay on the Principles of Population, published in 1798, provided a convenient explanation for these troubles. Malthus had pointed out that in all creatures – including humans – the potential to produce offspring exceeds the growth of the resources needed to feed them. If overpopulation was the problem, a growing body of influential opinion surmised, emigration was the solution.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

After two massive crises of mortality in the 1770s and again in the famine of 1815–16, with death rates soaring respectively to more than fifty and just under forty per thousand, before the late 1840s Sweden experienced no more major peaks in the death rate, which declined unevenly but steadily from just under thirty per thousand in a normal year in the late eighteenth century to just over twenty per thousand by 1840. In the late eighteenth century the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had warned that in an agrarian society, population tended to grow beyond the capacity of the land to sustain it. Dearth and famine would be the result. In Britain this threat was averted not merely by agricultural improvement but also by the increasing ability to use income from the export of industrial goods to import foodstuffs, above all following the abolition in 1846 of grain duties.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

For ‘the ordinary individual’, the ‘normal expectation was to live on the edge of starvation’, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith assured us. ‘Progress would enhance the wealth of those who, generally speaking, were already rich but not of the masses. Nothing could be done about it.’95 Not even the Revd Thomas Malthus, the poster-boy of the ‘dismal science’ was that gloomy. In the first edition of his Essay on Population in 1798, Malthus did indeed have no hope for improvement: higher wages and more children would end in a subsistence crisis and famine. In subsequent editions, however, there were rays of hope.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Slave countries are comparatively poverty-stricken all over the world…. West-Indian history has been a history of distress and complainings…. The southern states of America are far behind their northern neighbors in prosperity.”18 The natural world and human society were governed by “beneficent necessity.” Turning Thomas Malthus on his head even more radically than Darwin would seven years later, Spencer argued in 1852 that population growth led not to accelerating destitution, but to “greater production of the necessities of life.” “From the beginning pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress….


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Ibn Saud and the other leaders of the time, as well as the various potentates since, were under the thrall of David Ricardo, a fantastically successful stockbroker in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century England. (Among other things, he made a killing on Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.) By origin a Jew, Ricardo became a Quaker, then a learned member of the House of Commons, and was one of the founding fathers of modern economics. He and Thomas Malthus, his friend and intellectual rival, constituted between themselves the successor generation to Adam Smith. Ricardo developed the concept that was to provide the framework for the battle between nation-states and oil companies. It was the notion of "rents" as something different from normal profits.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

In brute terms, the population rose from c.150 million in 1800 to over 400 million by 1914. The accelerating rate of increase was more than twice as great as in the previous three centuries (see Appendix III, p. 1294). Europeans were reminded of the implications from the start. In 1816 the English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published the final edition of his depressing Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted that, while the production of food might rise arithmetically, the growth of population would proceed geometrically. If he had been correct, Europeans would have begun to starve to death within a few decades.