spectrum auction

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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

The two members of the audience, put on the spot, were quite unable to work out what the optimal strategy was for bidding in the auction. The difficulty—which is a challenge for bidders in many auctions, including spectrum auctions—is that the two victims just didn’t know the value of what they were bidding for. They knew part of the value, of course, because they knew how much money had been in their own wallet. But each knew nothing about the contents of the other’s wallet. In a spectrum auction, the prob- • 162 • T H E M E N W H O K N E W T H E V A L U E O F N O T H I N G lem is similar: each bidder has his own forecasts and technology plans, but each knows that other bidders will probably have different insights.

Union of Needletrades, Industrial, Vehicle Excise Duties, 82 and Textile Employees vehicle taxes, 82–83 (UNITE), 224 Ven der Beurs family, 201–2 unions, 25–26, 224–25 Venezuela, 23 United Kingdom Venkatesh, Sudhir, 24 air pollution, 81 Vickrey auctions, 164 efficiency vs. fairness, 73 Vietnam, 228–29 fuel prices, 88 village enterprises, 244 health care system, 28, 120, 121, viruses, 184 122, 126, 132 Visudyne, 127, 133 immigration, 28 Vodafone, 173, 174 industrial revolution, 233 Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), infrastructure, 183 190 railroads, 151 Von Neumann, John, 156, 158, 161– spectrum auctions, 163, 165–68, 62, 167, 175 168–73, 173–75 vouchers, 90 taxation, 82 unions, 26 wages, 24–26, 67, 94 wealth inequality, 89 The Wall Street Crash—And After United States (Fisher), 148–49 exports, 245 Wal-Mart, 26 fuel prices, 88 waste, 192, 233 health care system, 113, 119–23, Waterloo station, 6 122 wealth and wealth inequality industrial revolution, 233 in China, 233, 252 infrastructure, 183 and development, 197–98 pollution, 81, 221 and fairness, 75 and special interests, 227 and nonmarket economies, 69 spectrum rights auctions, 159–61, and price sensitivity, 38 165 and taxation, 71–72 taxation, 82 in the US and UK, 89 • 275 • I N D E X West End, London, 17 world economy, 199 Western Europe, 213 World War II, 73 Western society, 68 Wholefoods, 42, 43–44, 114–15 xenophobia, 212 Why Globalization Works (Wolf), 251 Xi’an, China, 245 Wilde, Oscar, 155 Yahoo!

From here on everything is a bonus; maybe you’ll get $310,000, or $320,000, or even $350,000. Who knows? Then the price keeps going up. It hits $320,000. It reaches $350,000. $400,000. $500,000. What’s happening? You can scarcely believe it. This unexpected turn of events is similar to what happened in the UK spectrum auction, except the stakes were ten thousand times higher: not £300,000 but £3 billion. For a week, the bidding went smoothly; the rules about continuous bidding kept the total revenue rising steadily. After about twenty-five rounds of bidding, bidders were committed to around £400 million for each license.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

.): Hazlett has cataloged the cases where favored interests have succeeded in using their power over regulators to resist new technologies;2 as Noam writes, “[I]n the early 1950s, only newspaper companies that had editorially endorsed Eisenhower for President had a chance at getting a TV license.”3 In the third era (now), the right to use spectrum is increasingly allocated through auctions. The government sells the right to the highest bidder (subject to a scad of typically governmentlike, mainly silly, conditions). That bidder uses the spectrum as the auction specifies or, in a small set of cases, the bidder is then free to reassign the right to others. Politicians from the Left and the Right just love auctions. For the Left, auctions promise more money for the government to spend; for the Right, auctions sound like markets, and markets are always good.

Huber is a brilliant polymath who, while working full-time as a lawyer, has written some of the most important policy and academic work about government regulation in general and telecommunications policy in particular.31 In his book Law and Disorder in Cyberspace, Huber describes both the market model for allocating spectrum—where spectrum rights are auctioned off up front—and the commons model for allocating spectrum, promoted most strongly by an ally of Huber's, George Gilder. As I described in chapter 5, Gilder argues strongly that we should allocate spectrum as a commons. Auctions, Gilder argues, will simply entrench existing uses; free or common spectrum would create a strong incentive for new uses. Huber does not reject Gilder's predications. He argues instead that we could get to Gilder's world of spectrum as a commons by first auctioning off all the spectrum and then allowing the market to “reassemble” the rights if that proves efficient.

All agree that the alternative of allowing spectrum to be sold is like “having the old AT&T auction off the right to compete against itself.” Noam, “Beyond Spectrum Auctions,” 473. Noam and Benkler have an even stronger (from a legal perspective) argument against the sale of spectrum. In a world where the control of spectrum was not “necessary,” as the Supreme Court said it was in the NBC case, why was control of spectrum constitutionally permitted? Spectrum is speech, and the regulation of spectrum is the regulation of speech. The constitutional status of spectrum auctions is rendered problematic by the emergence of this alternative technology. Control is not “necessary” anymore, any more than control of newspapers is necessary.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

In terms of the money it raised and the information it revealed about the spectrum’s true value, the auction was a success. What is the government’s role in spectrum allocation now that auctioning is used? It still has its regulatory function, parceling up the spectrum and coordinating its usage. Without a clear definition of property rights, the spectrum, like anything else, would not be used efficiently. What was turned over to the market was the decision—hard for a government official to make well—of who gets the right to use each piece of spectrum. The main beneficiaries of the spectrum auctions were consumers, who got a speedy introduction of new telecommunication services at competitive prices, and taxpayers, through the revenue generated.

“Back at headquarters, people were crunching the numbers.” The auction went on for a week, raising $617 million for ten licenses covering a tiny sliver of spectrum. Several more auctions were subsequently held, for larger chunks of spectrum to be used for mobile telephones, portable fax machines, and wireless computer networks. After the trial run in the Washington hotel, the FCC ran the auctions electronically. As of early 2001 they had fetched a total of $42 billion. A new market was created with the spectrum auctions. Previously, the government had given the spectrum rights to telephone and broadcasting companies. Initially, licenses were assigned by administrative decision.

Every day, thousands of similar scenes recur at internet auction sites—except with a computer program acting as the auctioneer. During the brief history of electronic auctions, from 1994, markets have been created in front of us as entrepreneurs have devised new ways of transacting. The public sector also has turned to using auctions to allocate publicly owned resources like the electromagnetic spectrum. These novel auctions raise some knotty design problems. Economic theory helps us understand how they work, and is being used in designing further new selling mechanisms. Many transactions, such as in a supermarket or a department store, take place at prices fixed by the seller. An auction, by contrast, is interactive: the seller puts the pricing in the hands of the potential buyers and relies on the competition among them to get an acceptable price.


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

It’s important to appreciate how big a break this represents from how things used to be done, when there was a standard toolkit that sellers, whether private or public, used to unload their goods. And within the narrow set of options available, it’s not even clear how much thought went into the decision of whether to use, say, a lottery or an English auction. One oft-cited example of auction theory’s triumph is the wireless spectrum auction of 1995. Previously, the Federal Communications Commission had in fact relied on a lottery: you applied for a cellular license in a particular locale, and if your number came up, you were the proud owner of spectrum somewhere in America. This might have been fair, since everyone had the same shot at getting each license, but it didn’t generate much revenue for the government.

The lottery might leave a spectrum owner with licenses in, say, Albuquerque and Albany, and he’d then have to find some way of swapping his Albany license for one in Santa Fe. (It also created a boon for Washington law firms that created “phone companies” for the sole purpose of bidding on licenses.17) When the FCC opened up the process to proposals from auction theorists, the resulting spectrum auction in 1995 involved a book-length set of rules describing the various contingencies and stipulations of participating in the spectrum sale. But the complications generated a big payday for Uncle Sam. The auction mechanism that Stanford economists Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson proposed generated revenues of more than $7 billion.

The way you regulate payment cards has nothing to do with the way that you regulate intellectual property or railroads. . . . It’s not a one line thing.”12 Tirole also embodies the increasing incursion of economic theory into the functioning of markets economists study as they find themselves advising Silicon Valley companies and designing government health-care exchanges and spectrum auctions. Despite his low profile, Tirole’s advice is much sought after by the companies that are the object of his study: it’s of immense value to businesspeople to talk with someone who can strip a complicated situation down to its bare essentials, whether expressed in algebra or prose. The dense mathematics of his academic papers has served as a basis for regulatory policies on telecommunication networks.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

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

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

There are very many more examples. Clever economics in designing and implementing an auction of 3G spectrum rights to telecommunications companies netted the UK government £22.5bn in a 2000 auction, about 2.5 percent of GDP at the time (Binmore and Klemperer 2002). The US Federal Communications Commission has been running spectrum auctions since the mid-1990s, raising tens of billions of dollars. Across areas of social and economic policy such as education, health care, welfare benefits, housing, pensions, applied economic analysis is the everyday bread and butter of public policy, in Whitehall, Washington, Brussels, and other capitals, in industry regulators, in some think tanks, and in the academic world.

The standard assumption is that the players choose rationally: they will calculate what is in their best interests, given their assumption that everyone else will do the same. This is the Nash equilibrium concept. Nobody can do any better by taking a different course of action. Game theory has been successfully applied in practical contexts ranging from business strategy to spectrum auctions, with excellent results. Ariel Rubinstein has experimented with specific games, or strategic contests, with his students, audiences at his lectures, and respondents to his website surveys, collecting more than 13,000 responses altogether. His conclusion is that people do not behave in life as they are assumed to do in game-theoretic models.

., 90 Boskin Commission, 146–47 Boston Dynamics, 137 Bowles, Sam, 85, 117, 119 Bretton Woods, 192 Brexit, 1, 37, 53, 56, 70, 110, 131, 155, 213 Brown, Dan, 108 Brynjolfsson, Eric, 176 bubbles, 20, 22, 29 Buchanan, James, 33 budget constraints, 177 Bundeskartellamt, 205 Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis, 66 business cycles, 71, 81, 102, 124 calculus, 16, 33, 90, 145 Calculus of Consent, The: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Buchanan and Tullock), 33 Camus, Albert, 87, 108, 111 capitalism: criticism of, 19–20; free market and, 19, 41, 186; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–94, 196, 213; inequality from, 19; progress and, 143, 149; Schumpeter on, 143; twenty-first-century policy and, 186, 190, 195 Capital (Piketty), 131 carbon emissions, 38–40, 180, 187 Carlin, Wendy, 85 Cartlidge, John, 27 Case, Anne, 131 cash for clunkers, 55, 63 causality: bias and, 13, 105; correlation and, 94; deductive approach and, 103; economically establishing, 100; empirical work and, 2, 61, 94–96, 99; feedback and, 11, 94, 96; Leamer on, 102; methodological debate over, 2; models and, 2, 94–95, 102; moral issues and, 96; outsider context and, 94–96, 99–105; progress and, 137; public responsibilities and, 61, 74; randomised control trials (RCTs) and, 93–95, 105, 109–10; reflexivity and, 11, 81; societal statistics and, 61; statistics and, 61, 95, 99, 102; two-way, 94, 96 central banks: independence of, 16; progress and, 149; public responsibilities and, 16, 32, 62, 64, 66–67, 76, 81 central planning: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 184, 186–87; competition and, 38, 41, 124, 182; failure of communist, 40, 182–88, 190; socialist calculation debate and, 182–88, 190, 209 Central Planning Bureau, 66 Chetty, Raj, 86 Chicago School, 24–25, 73, 75, 190, 193–94 Chile, 184 China, 173, 195, 206 Citadel, 27 City of London, 16, 19 climate change, 85, 148, 154 Close the Door campaign, 155–56 cloud computing, 150, 170–72, 184, 197 Coase, Ronald, 57–58, 62, 98–99 codes of conduct, 9, 206 cognitive science, 35–36, 48, 51, 91–92, 118–19, 186 Colander, David, 100 Cold War, 190 Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The (Bell), 67 common sense, 78, 127 communication, 53, 127, 168; bandwidth and, 171; compression and, 171; cost of, 196; 4G platforms and, 195; instant messaging, 171; latency and, 171; price of, 150, 171, 177; servers and, 25–26, 141, 170; smartphones and, 46, 138–39, 164, 171, 173, 177, 195, 198; SMS, 171; social media and, 52, 73, 82, 140–41, 149, 157, 163, 173, 176–77, 195; telephony and, 4, 31, 46, 98, 123, 138–39, 144, 156, 164, 171, 173–74, 177, 184, 195, 198; 3G platforms, 60, 139, 173, 195; transmission speeds and, 171 comparative advantage, 78, 97 competition: behavioural fix and, 45–51; central planning and, 38, 41, 124, 182; Chinese, 173, 195, 206; creative destruction and, 41; digital economy and, 42, 85, 165, 181, 201–6; directory numbers and, 60; empirical work and, 181, 209; envelopment and, 203–4; incumbents and, 41–42; innovation and, 28, 41, 46, 68, 85, 209; monopolies and, 20, 42; network effects and, 202, 205; opportunity cost and, 56, 58, 80, 156; outsider context and, 98, 105; Pareto criterion and, 122–23, 126–27, 129; production and, 12, 41; profit and, 33, 41–42, 105, 204; progress and, 135, 158, 165; public responsibilities and, 28, 33, 38, 41–42, 45–48, 57–69, 74, 77, 79, 85; rationality and, 117; resource, 41, 45, 117, 123, 125; separation protocol and, 120, 123–25; socialist calculation debate and, 182–83; special interest groups and, 64–66; specific studies in, 12; spectrum auctions and, 60–61; SSNIP test and, 204; twenty-first-century policy and, 182, 201–9 Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), 205 computers: AI and, 116 (see also artificial intelligence [AI]); Black-Scholes-Merton model and, 24–25; changing technology and, 169; cloud computing and, 150, 170–72, 184, 197; data sets and, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209; David on, 169; declining price of, 170; empirical work and, 2, 17, 52; exchange locations and, 25; feedback and, 179; Millennium Bug and, 155; Moore’s Law and, 170, 184; power of, 2, 17, 40, 58, 170, 183–84, 188; progress and, 138, 144, 155; rationality and, 116–17; servers and, 25–26, 141, 170; software and, 25, 140, 155, 171, 177–78, 186, 197, 200–201, 203; Solow on, 169; speed and, 25, 184; statistics and, 17, 52, 58, 144, 169; supercomputers, 170; twenty-first-century policy and, 183–84, 186, 188, 214; ultra-high frequency trading (HFT) and, 25–27 conservatism, 30 Consumer Price Index (CPI), 146–47, 172 consumers: bad choices and, 3; behavioural economics and, 22, 59–60, 92, 109; conspicuous consumption and, 42; digital economy and, 42, 137, 172–76, 181, 198, 200–206, 213; empirical work and, 3, 181; income and, 93 (see also income); innovation and, 28, 102, 200; Keynes and, 22; online shopping and, 173, 198; outsider context and, 92, 96, 98, 100–102, 105, 108–9; progress and, 137, 141, 144, 146–47, 151; public responsibilities and, 22, 28, 42, 59–60, 65; rationality and, 116; technology and, 28, 102, 171–76, 181, 200, 213; time spent online, 176–78; twenty-first-century policy and, 184, 198–206; welfare and, 105, 206 Cook, Eli, 150 copyright, 140 CORE’s The Economy, 85–86, 212–13 cost-benefit analysis (CBA), 56–57, 58n12, 125–26, 207 cost of living, 143–47, 172 counterfactuals, 97–98, 158, 161, 198, 208 Covid19 pandemic: body politics and, 163; financial recovery from, 88, 114; GDP growth and, 88, 165; impact of, 3, 10–11, 14, 20, 38, 43, 45, 68, 75, 88, 110, 114, 132–33, 149, 153, 155, 163–66, 181, 194, 213–15; lockdowns and, 3, 43, 45, 88, 114, 163, 198; public opinion and, 165–66 “Creating Humble Economists” (Colander), 100 creative destruction, 41 curriculum issues, 2, 4–5, 83, 85, 88 Daily Telegraph, 159 Darwin, Charles, 48 data centres, 26 data sets, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209 David, Paul, 169 Deaths of Despair (Case and Deaton), 131 Deaton, Angus, 128–29, 131 debt, 76, 101, 153 decision making: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 116, 186–87; bias and, 13, 109, 187, 209; Green Book and, 56, 126; normative economics and, 110, 114, 120; opportunity cost and, 56; outsider context and, 93; production and, 12, 123, 140, 196; progress and, 160, 162; rationality and, 116 (see also rationality); rules of thumb and, 47–48, 90, 117, 212; self knowledge and, 81; separation protocol and, 120 DeepMind, 115–16 Deliveroo, 173 demand management, 31, 191–92 democracy, 33, 67, 69, 79, 193 deregulation, 16, 31, 60, 68, 71, 193–94 derivative markets, 16, 18, 23–25, 28 Desrosières, Alain, 146 Dickens, Charles, 150 digital economy: AI and, 115 (see also artificial intelligence (AI)); changing nature of, 168–81; cloud computing and, 150, 170–72, 184, 197; cogs and, 6, 129, 154, 165, 179; competition and, 42, 85, 165, 181, 201–6; consumers and, 42, 137, 172–76, 181, 198, 200–206, 213; difference of, 168–76; dominance of by giant companies, 133; envelopment and, 203–4; 4G platforms, 195; GAFAM and, 173; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–96, 213; GPTs and, 169; Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and, 113–14; growth and, 129, 132, 140, 143, 194, 202; implications of, 176–78, 211–14; individual and, 6, 13–14, 128–29, 141, 175, 179, 181, 201; innovation and, 169–70; market changes and, 173–76; measuring online value and, 176; monsters and, 6, 154; network effects and, 127, 141, 174, 177, 185, 199–202, 205, 209; new agenda for, 179–81; online shopping and, 173, 198; Phillips machine and, 135–37, 151, 192; populism and, 211; production and, 132, 140, 142, 176, 195–97, 202, 213; progress and, 14, 137–43, 150, 153–54, 164–67; Project CyberSyn and, 184; services and, 176; software and, 25, 140, 155, 171, 177–78, 186, 197, 200–201, 203; statistics and, 113, 150, 164, 170, 172, 212; superstar features and, 173–74; 3G platforms, 60, 139, 173, 195; twenty-first-century policy and, 13, 185–88, 194–210; wealth creation and, 132–33; welfare and, 128, 134, 143, 206, 208, 212 Director, Aaron, 190 directory numbers, 60 discount rates, 147–48 diversity, 6–9, 213–14 Dow Jones, 26 Duflo, Esther, 20–21, 52, 109, 137 eBay, 175 ECO, 11 Economics Job Market Rumors, 8 Economics Observatory (ECO), 214 economies of scale: changing technology and, 174; network effects and, 127, 174, 177, 185, 199–201, 209; progress and, 142 education: derivatives and, 16; growth and, 16–17, 132; interventions and, 12; online, 177; policy on, 60; provision of basic, 30; real-world context and, 88; skills and, 88, 128, 132, 169–70; spread of higher, 151, 153 Efficient Markets Hypothesis, 17, 29 Eichengreen, Barry, 16 electricity: changing economies and, 127, 169, 191–92; progress and, 139, 142, 156, 165, 169, 191–92; regulation and, 65; supply of, 32; twenty-first-century policy and, 191–92, 200–201; warranties on goods and, 105 empirical work: behavioural economics and, 117, 159; causality and, 2, 61, 94–96, 99; competition and, 181, 209; computers and, 2, 17, 52; consumers and, 3, 181; context and, 17, 35, 61, 78, 92; correlation and, 70, 94; counterfactuals and, 97–98, 158, 161, 198, 208; data sets and, 2, 13, 51–52, 60, 101, 161, 177, 201, 209; feedback and, 11, 94–95, 155, 179, 188–89, 203, 205; growth and, 17, 61, 78, 209; macroeconomics and, 74, 100; market structures and, 35; physics envy and, 50; politics and, 3, 76, 78–79, 124, 213; populism and, 77; public responsibilities and, 17, 35, 40, 52, 61, 70, 74–81, 90, 92, 94–102, 110–11; randomised control trials (RCTs) and, 93–95, 105, 109–10; rationality and, 17; separation protocol and, 119, 124, 128; social constructs and, 13; statistics and, 17, 52, 61, 90, 95, 99; taxes and, 3; theory and, 2, 17, 52, 74, 90, 96, 99, 124, 181 endogenous growth theory, 17, 202 Enlightenment, 20 envelopment, 203–4 environmentalists, 126 equilibrium, 31, 38–39, 90–91, 123, 182 ethics, 4, 34, 39, 100, 105, 115, 119–24 Ethics and Society group, 115 ethnicity, 6–7, 9 European Commission, 67, 130, 205 European Steel and Coal Community, 190 European Union (EU), 37, 67, 195, 204 Eurozone, 67, 74 exchange rates, 118, 192 Facebook, 133, 173, 204–5 facial recognition, 165 fairness, 43, 45–46, 166 fake items, 98 Fear Index, The (Harris), 27 feedback: causality and, 11, 94–96; changing technology and, 179; political economy and, 188–89; progress and, 155; twenty-first-century policy and, 203, 205 financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM), 28 Financial Times, 68–69, 97–98 Fisher Ideal index, 144n3 fixed costs, 174, 177, 179, 185–86, 200 forecasting: agent-based modeling and, 102; conditional projections and, 76; financial crises and, 17, 30, 100–101, 112–13; growth and, 37, 61; inflation and, 36; macroeconomics and, 3, 12, 36–37, 76, 101–2, 112; models and, 17, 74, 101–2, 113; self-fulfilling prophecies and, 5, 22–23, 154–55, 157; twenty-first-century policy and, 205; weather, 76 Fourastié, J., 191 4G platforms, 195 framing, 47, 130, 208 Frankenfinance, 18, 21, 25, 51–52, 165 Freakonomics, 108 free market: Brexit and, 213; capitalism and, 19, 41, 186; criticism of, 19; globalisation and, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–94, 196, 213; politics and, 30, 36, 130, 206; public responsibilities and, 19, 30–32, 35–36, 45, 54; separation protocol and, 123–24; twenty-first-century policy and, 182, 186, 191, 193, 195, 207 frictions, 22, 113, 136, 154, 182 Friedman, Ben, 16 Friedman, Milton, 16, 31, 93, 104, 121, 190 Furman, Jason, 86 GAFAM, 173 GameStop, 27 game theory, 48, 90–91, 129, 159–60, 179–80 Gelman, Andrew, 108 gender, 6–9, 93 GenZ, 166 Giavazzi, Francesco, 68 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 48 Gilded Age, 133 Giudici, Claudio, 69 Glaeser, Ed, 92 globalisation, 110, 132, 139, 154, 164, 193–96, 213 Goldman Sachs, 19 Good Economics for Hard Times (Banerjee and Duflo), 109 Goodhart’s Law, 72, 103 Google, 133, 141, 173, 201, 204–5 Gordon, Robert, 142 Gould, Stephen Jay, 49–50 Gove, Michael, 110, 149 Government Economic Service (GES), 53, 83–85 GPT, 169 Great Depression, 3, 10, 17, 20, 74, 191, 213 Great Financial Crisis (GFC): behavioural economics and, 51; consequences of, 1, 3, 11, 213; digital economy and, 113–14; dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and, 31; forecasting, 30, 101, 112–13; Greece and, 56–58, 67; Italy and, 56–58, 67–69; models and, 31, 101, 113; outsider context and, 87–88, 101, 110, 112–14; progress and, 149, 153, 159; public responsibilities and, 16–19, 21, 29–31, 37–38, 50–51, 56, 67–68, 73–74, 79, 84; technology and, 56, 181; twenty-first-century policy and, 194 Great Moderation, 17, 73 Greece, 56, 67–68 greed, 11, 16, 29, 164 Green, Duncan, 95–96 Green Book, 56, 126 Greenspan, Alan, 101 Griliches, Zvi, 198 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 60; Covid19 pandemic and, 88, 165; Fisher Ideal index and, 144n3; FISIM and, 28; flatlining of, 142; free market and, 130; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, 172–73; Gross National Product (GNP) and, 151; growth and, 28, 46, 88, 97, 138, 143–44, 159, 165, 169, 171–72; inflation and, 13, 113, 148; internet and, 97; Laspeyres index and, 144n3; macroeconomics and, 13, 101, 113, 151; progress and, 138, 142–44, 148, 151, 158–59, 165, 172–73; real, 101, 142–44, 169, 173; Sen-Stiglitz-Fitoussi Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and, 151; social welfare and, 134; twenty-first-century policy and, 187; Winter of Discontent and, 158, 192 Gross National Product (GNP), 151 Grove, Andy, 41 growth: changing economies and, 171–72, 212; Covid19 pandemic and, 88, 165; derivatives market and, 16, 23, 28; digital technology and, 129, 132, 140, 143, 194–210; education and, 16–17, 132; empirical work and, 17, 61, 78, 209; endogenous growth theory and, 17, 202; faster, 66, 71, 144, 159; forecasting, 37, 61; Goodhart’s Law and, 72; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, 28, 46, 88, 97, 138, 143–44, 159, 165, 169, 171–72; income, 70, 131, 138, 143, 164–65, 194, 207; inflation and, 12, 66, 73, 178; innovation and, 37, 41, 46, 68, 71, 194, 209; internet and, 97; living standards and, 143–47, 172, 194; outsider context and, 12, 97, 101n1, 111; political economy and, 167, 181, 188–95; progress and, 138, 140, 143–45, 152, 159, 165; public responsibilities and, 16–17, 23, 28, 37, 41, 46, 61, 66, 68–73, 76, 78; recession and, 17, 51, 73, 111, 154, 158–59; slow, 11, 72; spillovers and, 129–30; sustainability and, 11, 20, 111, 148, 152, 166; technology and, 71, 132, 140, 202; twenty-first-century policy and, 187, 191–92, 194, 202, 207, 209; velocity of money and, 71 Guardian, 159 happiness, 70–71, 153 Harberger, A.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

On 5th December 1994, the day John Nash left America for Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize, Vice-President Gore was announcing the ‘greatest auction ever’ – an auction of airwave frequency spectrum licences to be used by mobile phones. Auctions are a type of game, and this auction was carefully designed using the latest game theory. When the auction closed in March 1995, the US government was delighted: it had received more than $7 billion in bids. The spectrum auctions, great revenue-raising successes for government, were hailed as a triumph of applied game theory. Here, at last, was a setting in which truly ‘rational’ players would interact – big corporations competing in an auction, each advised by a team of game theorists – leading to outcomes which could be predicted and tweaked by the game theorists designing the auction, on behalf of the government.

And the final outcome does not suggest hyper-rational corporate players after all. Many successful bidders defaulted on their payments, and the later rise in failures and mergers in the telecoms industry was widely attributed to the burden of excessive auction bids.18 The experience with a British spectrum-licence auction in 2000, also heavily influenced by game theorists, was similar: game theory did not tell the government how best to design the auction, nor did it adequately explain or predict the behaviour of bidders. If game theory has limited use even in situations like these auctions, designed by game theorists as a potentially ideal playground for the theory, then why does it enjoy exalted status in economics today?

Coase could barely conceal his contempt for what he saw as this state-diktat approach, pointing out that it was akin to ‘a commission appointed by the federal government [having] the task of selecting those who were to be allowed to publish newspapers and periodicals in each city, town, and village’.5 Coase proposed that slots on the broadcast spectrum should instead be auctioned off to the highest bidder, something then unthinkable to those working in broadcasting. Today, it is standard practice in many countries. Coase’s central argument was that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) need not procrastinate over the allocation of broadcast spectrum rights.


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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

From 1959, when Ronald Coase first published his critique of this regulatory approach, until the early 1990s, when spectrum auctions began, the terms of the debate over "spectrum policy," or wireless communications regulation, revolved around whether the exclusive right to transmit radio signals in a given geographic area should be granted as a regulatory license or a tradable property right. In the 1990s, with the introduction of auctions, we began to see the adoption of a primitive version of a property-based system through "spectrum auctions." By the early 2000s, this system allowed the new "owners" of these exclusive rights to begin to shift what were initially purely mobile telephony systems to mobile data communications as well. 178 By this time, however, the century-old engineering assumptions that underlay the regulation-versus-property conceptualization of the possibilities open for the institutional framework of wireless communications had been rendered obsolete by new computation and network technologies. 28 The dramatic decline in computation cost and improvements in digital signal processing, network architecture, and antenna systems had fundamentally changed the design space of wireless communications systems.

Eli Noam was the first to point out that, even if one did not buy the idea that computationally intensive radios eliminated scarcity, they still rendered spectrum property rights obsolete, and enabled instead a fluid, dynamic, real-time market in spectrum clearance rights. See Eli Noam, "Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum Auctions: Open Spectrum Access," Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Magazine 33, no. 12 (1995): 66-73; later elaborated in Eli Noam, "Spectrum Auction: Yesterday's Heresy, Today's Orthodoxy, Tomorrow's Anachronism. Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access," Journal of Law and Economics 41 (1998): 765, 778-780. The argument that equipment markets based on a spectrum commons, or free access to frequencies, could replace the role planned for markets in spectrum property rights with computationally intensive equipment and sophisticated network sharing protocols, and would likely be more efficient even assuming that scarcity persists, was made in Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia."

Eli Noam was the first to point out that, even if one did not buy the idea that computationally intensive radios eliminated scarcity, they still rendered spectrum property rights obsolete, and enabled instead a fluid, dynamic, real-time market in spectrum clearance rights. See Eli Noam, "Taking the Next Step Beyond Spectrum Auctions: Open Spectrum Access," Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Magazine 33, no. 12 (1995): 66-73; later elaborated in Eli Noam, "Spectrum Auction: Yesterday's Heresy, Today's Orthodoxy, Tomorrow's Anachronism. Taking the Next Step to Open Spectrum Access," Journal of Law and Economics 41 (1998): 765, 778-780. The argument that equipment markets based on a spectrum commons, or free access to frequencies, could replace the role planned for markets in spectrum property rights with computationally intensive equipment and sophisticated network sharing protocols, and would likely be more efficient even assuming that scarcity persists, was made in Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia."


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Coase, “The Federal Communications Commission,” Journal of Law and Economics (October 1959), pp. 1–40, quoted by John McMillan, “Selling Spectrum Rights,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 1994). 15. Peter C. Cramton, “The PCS Spectrum Auction: An Early Assessment,” The Economist (August 25, 1995). 16. Milgrom, Auction Theory for Privatization, op. cit. 17. Ibid. See also McMillan, “Selling Spectrum Rights,” op. cit., pp. 153–55. 18. Ibid. 19. See, for example, McMillan, “Selling Spectrum Rights,” op. cit.; Paul Milgrom, “Game Theory and Its Use in the PCS Spectrum Auction,” Games ’95, conference, Jerusalem, 9.29.95. 20. Milgrom, Auction Theory for Privatization, op. cit. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23.

Since bidders’ opinions are bound to be wildly divergent, it is possible that license assignment would depend more on bidders’ optimism than on their ability to create a desired service.18 Ideally, an auction design can minimize that problem. As Congress and the FCC inched closer to the notion of auctioning off spectrum rights, Australia and New Zealand both conducted spectrum auctions.19 That they proved to be costly flops and political disasters illustrated that the devil really was in the details. In New Zealand, the government ran a so-called second price auction, and newspapers were full of stories about winners who paid far below their bids. In one case, the high bid was NZ$7 million, the second bid NZ$5,000, and the winner paid the lower price.

According to Milgrom, “Game theory played a central role in the analysis of the rules. Ideas of Nash equilibrium, rationalizability, backward induction, and incomplete information, though rarely named explicitly, were the real basis of daily decisions about the details of the auction process.”23 By late spring 1995, Washington had raised more than $10 billion from spectrum auctions. The press and the politicians were ecstatic. Corporate bidders were largely able to protect themselves from predatory bidding and were able to assemble an economically sensible set of licenses. It was, as John McMillan said, “a triumph for game theory.”24 50 Reawakening Princeton, 1995–97 Mathematics is a young man s game.


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

Mechanism designers then solve for Nash equilibria and compare institutions based on rational behavior. The framework has proved useful. It can be used to find flaws in existing rules and procedures, to explain why institutions succeed or fail, and to predict outcomes. It has also been used to design a variety of institutions, including the spectrum auctions described in Chapter 2, as well as many online markets, governmental voting systems, and even the procedures that allocate space for projects on space shuttle voyages.1 Our treatment consists of six parts. We first describe the mechanism design framework using the Mount-Reiter diagram. In the second part, we study the problem of three people choosing between two alternatives.

Rearranging terms gives r > c(1 + r). 7 See Ledyard, Porter, and Wessen 2000 for a market-based mechanism that produces a better solution to multidimensional payload problems. 8 I borrow the adjective “unreasonable” from physicist Eugene Wigner (1960), who described the mathematical models used in the physical sciences as unreasonably effective. 9 See Ziliak and McCloskey 2008 for a discussion of the ability of social science models to explain variation. 10 See Porter and Smith 2007 for a history on the spectrum auction. 11 See Squicciarini and Voigtländer 2015. See Mokyr 2002 for a full historical account of the importance of knowledge transfer. 12 See www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/Pages/default.aspx. 13 For example, during the mid-1990s, about 60% of the restaurants that opened in Columbus, Ohio, failed.

Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. New York: Gotham. Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1984. “A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 29, no. 2: 357–384. Porter, David, and Vernon Smith. 2007. “FCC Spectrum Auction Design: A 12-Year Experiment.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Policy 3, no. 1: 63–80. Powell, Robert. 1991. “Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory.” American Political Science Review 85, no. 4: 1303–1320. Przeworski, Adam, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Michael E. Alvarez, and Fernando Limongi. 2000.


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Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Bidders reluctant to share their intentions would want to wait until near the end of the auction before bidding, as we saw in chapter 7 when we considered sniping in eBay auctions. But if everyone waited, the information needed to produce an efficient allocation wouldn’t be transmitted. To avoid this, the design for the spectrum auction included activity rules, proposed by my colleagues Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson, to prevent bidders from making late bids unless they had made bids on equivalent numbers of licenses (measured in terms of population served) earlier in the auction. Thus big bidders had to make their bids known early, and all bidders could adjust their bids in light of the competition.

And it’s not just your behavior online. The map software on your smartphone knows not only where you are but where you’re going. Even your cell phone company has to know where you are whenever your phone is turned on, in order to be able to route calls to you, using the local radio spectrum license it bought at auction for that purpose. So it might be, as all this new technology impinges on our privacy, that we’ll want legal restrictions on some kinds of transactions involving our private data. Property rights—who owns what, and what they can do with it—are an important part of market design, and I predict that we’ll be seeing some new efforts to define the property rights to our transaction data.

See also payment systems in auctions, 181–89 discovery of, 185–89 school choice systems and, 151 speed-based competition vs., 85–88 unfair, consumer perception of, 25 privacy, 119–22, 191–92 Prohibition, 197–98, 213 property rights, 192, 222 protected transactions, 198 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 200–201 radio spectrum license auctions, 185–89 real estate markets, 111 easy vs. hard matches in, 47–48 packages in, 186 real estate brokers in, 224–25 Redfin, 225 Rees, Michael, 29–31, 32, 39, 44–46, 49, 147–48 regulation, 222–23 central planning and, 7, 149–50, 166–67 of financial markets, 85 free markets and, 226–28 of legal vs. illegal markets, 207 Oklahoma Land Rush and, 57–59 repugnant markets and, 11–12 of restaurants, 220–22 of unraveling markets, 68 reliability, 116, 118–19 religious freedom, 198 repugnant markets, 6, 11–12, 192, 195–215 banning vs. controlling, 212–15 definition of, 196 demand vs. supply and, 205–7 disgust compared with, 196–97 for horsemeat, 195–97 kidney transplants and, 205–12 legal, 197–98, 208–9 market design and, 205–7 in marriage, 198–99 organ sales as, 6, 12, 46 slavery as, 199–200 technology in creating, 201–2 time and place sensitivity of, 196–97, 198–201, 204–5 reputations, 115–16.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

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

When Barclays’ share price fell as their shareholders became nervous, RBS won the bidding contest, and suffered the winner’s curse and failed in 2008. 17 Perhaps the best-known application of auction theory was in the spectrum auctions, in which the US and European governments derived extraordinarily large amounts of revenue from selling bandwidth to competing mobile phone operators. By this time, a generation of graduate students had developed complex variants on the core models. But disproportionate attention has been devoted to such model elaboration in artificial small worlds rather than to empirical study of how these processes work in actual large worlds. Paul Klemperer, who was involved in the design of spectrum auctions for mobile networks in Britain and other countries, observed that ‘what really matters in auction design . . . is mostly good elementary economics.

., 198 , 201 , 203–4 , 206 , 217 Singell, Larry, 74 , 78 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 214 Sloan, Alfred, 286–7 , 412 small world models: Arrow–Debreu world, 343–5 ; and behavioural economics experiments, 116 , 141–7 ; and classical statistics, 247 ; and engineering, 352–6 ; and framing of problems, 261 , 362 , 398–400 ; and legal reasoning, 203 , 204 ; and machine intelligence, 173–7 , 185 , 263 ; of Malthus and Jevons, 358–62 ; maps as not the territory, 391–4 ; and narratives, 249–61 , 303–4 , 307–10 , 320–1 , 346 , 385 , 397 ; and non-human species, 274 ; as not ‘the world as it really is’, 96 , 100 , 252–5 , 261 , 309–10 , 320 , 342–5 , 346–51 , 352–5 , 376 , 399–400 ; and optimising behaviour, 112–13 , 116 , 129 – 30 , 155 , 166 , 170 , 334 , 382 , 399–400 ; and policy making, 346–9 ; and risk in finance theory, 421 ; and Savage’s analysis, 112–14 , 249 , 309–10 , 345 ; and styles of reasoning, 137–9 smartphones, 30–1 , 344 Smets, Philippe, 78–9 Smith, Adam, 163 , 254 , 343 , 382 , 387 ; The Wealth of Nations , 172 , 190 , 191 , 249 , 253 Smith, Ed, 263–4 Smith, John Maynard, 158 Snow, Dr John, 283 social choice theory, 440 social insurance, 161 , 192 , 427 social media, 351 social relationships: and altruism, 157 , 158 , 159–60 ; cooperation/collective intelligence, 155 , 162 , 176 , 231 , 272–7 , 279–82 , 343 , 412 , 413–17 , 432 ; economic advantages of cooperating, 159 , 160–1 ; and entrepreneurship, 431–2 ; and evolutionary science, 156–65 , 401 ; human capacity for communication/language, 159 , 161 , 162 , 172–3 , 216 , 272–7 , 408 ; mutualisation of risk, 160 , 162 , 192 , 325–6 ; networks of trust/cooperation/coordination, 17 , 155 , 272 , 274–6 , 432 ; process of forming expectations, 350–1 ; reciprocity in, 190–2 , 328 ; round of drinks phenomenon, 189–90 ; social class structure, 324 ; social kinship groups, 156 , 159–62 , 215–16 , 325 , 328–9 , 413–14 ; and trust, 162–3 , 165 social welfare, xiv–xv , 41 Socratic dialogue, 162 Solomon, King, 196 Solow, Robert, 42 Sony, 28 Soros, George, 36 , 319–20 , 336 South Korea, chaebol of, 276 South Sea bubble, 315 Soviet Union, 276 , 279 , 280 , 281 Spanish flu, 57 spectrum auctions, 257 Spence, Michael, 254 Spencer, Herbert, 157–8 Sperber, Dan, 162 , 272 , 415 St Athanasius, 99 St Francis, 116 , 127 , 130 , 167 Stalin, Joseph, 25 , 219 , 292 standard deviation, 234 Stanford, Leland, 48–9 , 427 Stanford University, 49 stationarity (mathematical/statistical term): as assumed in modelling, 333 , 339 , 340–1 , 349 , 350 , 366–7 , 371–2 , 382 ; and astronomical laws, 70 ; China and Japan’s turn inwards, 419–20 , 430 ; economics as ‘non-stationary’, 16 , 35–6 , 45–6 , 102 , 236 , 339–41 , 349 , 350 , 394–6 ; and the environment, 362 ; evolution as ‘non-stationary’, 407 , 428–9 , 430–1 ; financial sector as non-stationary, 16 , 202–3 , 268–9 , 320–1 , 331 , 333 , 339 , 366–8 , 402–3 , 406 ; and frequency distribution, 58 , 69–70 , 87 , 202 , 247 , 327 ; ‘Goodhart’s Law’, 36 ; and insurance underwriting, 327 ; and mortality tables, 57 , 69 ; and natural phenomena, 39 ; and opinion pollsters’ models, 242 ; and planetary motion, 18–19 , 35 , 373–4 , 392 , 394 ; and progress in science, 429–31 ; and reflexivity, 36 , 394 ; and resolvable uncertainties, 37 ; and risk-averse individuals, 306 ; and scientific reasoning, 18–19 , 35 , 236 , 373–4 , 388 , 392 , 429–31 ; and Value at risk models (VaR), 366–8 statistical discrimination, 207–9 , 415 statistics, xiii , xvi ; 25 standard deviation events, 6 , 68 , 235 , 331 , 366 ; bell-shaped ‘normal’ distribution, 57–8 , 233–5 , 237 ; classical statisticians, 58 , 247 ; false stories and bogus statistics, 242–6 ; frequency distribution, 38 , 40 , 57–8 , 69–70 , 72 , 86 , 87 , 202 , 247 ; lognormal distribution, 237 , 238 ; measures of central tendency , 237 ; models ignoring radical uncertainty, 15–16 ; opinion pollsters’ models, 240–2 , 390 ; power laws, 236–9 ; quota sampling, 240–1 ; random sampling, 234 , 239–41 ; ‘randomised controlled trials’ (RCTs), 243–5 ; regression analysis, 351 ; ‘scale invariance’, 238 ; standard deviation, 234 ; statistical distributions, 232–6 ; tails of ‘normal’ distribution, 14 , 40 , 166 , 233 , 234–5 , 401 ; see also probabilistic reasoning; subjective probabilities Stewkley church, 376 Stiglitz, Joseph, 254 Stockdale, Admiral James, 167–8 , 330 stomach ulcers, 284 Stoppard, Tom, Travesties , 89 strategy weekends, 180–3 , 194 , 296 , 407 string theory, 219 , 357 STS-119 space shuttle, 374 subjective probabilities: and 9 /11 terror attacks, 74–6 , 202 ; Appiah’s ‘cognitive angels’, 117–18 ; and belief in emerging scientific truth, 100 ; and Chicago School, 73–4 , 342–3 ; definition of term, 72 ; details of problem specification, 76–8 ; Ellsberg’s ‘ambiguity aversion’, 135 ; expected utility , 111–14 , 115–18 , 124–5 , 127 , 128–30 , 135 , 400 , 435–44 ; and extension of probabilistic reasoning, 71–2 ; Keynes and Knight, 72 ; and linguistic ambiguity, 98 , 100 ; and narrative complexity, 218–19 ; ‘pignistic probability’, 78–84 , 438 ; Ramsey describes, 73 ; ‘rational expectations theory, 342–5 , 346–50 ; small world-large world distinctions, 112–14 , 116 , 129–30 , 137–9 , 141–7 , 155 , 166 , 170 , 171 , 173–7 , 382 , 400 ; see also small world models; triumph over radical uncertainty, 15–16 , 20 , 72–84 , 110–14 ; two-child problem, 76–8 , 81 , 98 , 139 ; see also axiomatic rationality ‘sudden infant death syndrome’ (SIDS), 197–8 , 200–1 , 202 , 204 Suez crisis (1956), 174 Sumerians, 39 Survation, 242 Suter, Johann, 427 Sutter, John, 48–9 Swiss Re, 325–6 Switzerland, 418–19 , 426 , 428 Syrian conflict, 99 , 428 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse (1940), 33 , 341 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 14 , 38–9 , 166 , 422 , 438–9 Tay Bridge disaster (1879), 33 , 341 technological advances, 161 , 258 , 275–6 , 315 , 329 , 362 , 373–4 ; America’s innovative hegemony in, 427–8 ; and evolutionary science, 429 , 430 , 431 Tehran embassy siege (1979), 8 terrorism, 7 , 74–6 , 202 , 220 , 230 , 296 Tetlock, Philip, 21–2 , 221–2 , 294–5 Thaler, Richard, 118 , 148 Thales of Miletus, 303–4 , 319 , 320 , 422 Thames embankments, London, 424–5 Thatcher, Margaret, 290–2 , 412 Theranos, 228–9 Thiel, Peter, 361–2 , 427 The Third Man (film, 1949), 418–19 Thompson, Warren, 359 Thorp, Edward, 38 , 83 Tinbergen, Jan, 134 , 341 , 346 Tolkien, J.


pages: 339 words: 105,938

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

In these fields, economic theory has been applied fairly directly to yield useful insights and policy recommendations, without generating difficult ethical dilemmas. Indeed, the influence of economics goes further: in some cases, economists have not just given advice, but devised the entire framework in which economic activity takes place. The mobile phone spectrum auctions and specially designed carbon trading markets only exist because economists invented them. So it is hardly surprising that economics works well in these contexts.3 They are selfcontained closed systems in which the decision makers involved have the time, ability and financial incentives to act like Homo economicus.

Land Economics 73: 492-507 Index ability to pay 87 absolute consumption 58-59 accountability 199, 205-206, 230 see also audit culture adaptation 23-24, 25, 237 and increasing happiness 66-67, 98, 140-141 to economic growth 55-57, 61-62 addictive consumption 22-24, 98 advertising brand recognition 16 consumer sovereignty 19-21 increased choice 41 restricting 236-237 affluenza 3, 235-238 altruism see unselfish behaviour animal lives 160 Aristotle 134, 135 audit culture 192-198, 202, 204-205 availability 15-16, 122 babies, markets in 181, 209 Baumol’s cost disease 68-74, 78, 237-238 affordability of personal services 74-77, 191 Baumol, William 68, 75, 76, 77 Bayesianism 164-166, 178, 224-225 Bayes, Thomas 164 Becker, Gary 27, 34 behavioural economics 26, 232-233, 234 belief 13 benefit transfer 157 Bentham, Jeremy 120-121, 130-131, 135 best practice 201, 202 Bewley, Truman 229 biodiversity 160 black box economics 1-2, 4 Blanchard, Oliver 48 Blinder, Alan 232 blood donation 33, 197, 217 body shape and weight 42 brand recognition 16, 21 Breyer, Stephen 156 Broome, John 154 Bush, George W. administration 146, 153, 156 capital investment 168 capital punishment 215-216 Caplan, Bryan 226-227 carbon trading markets 222, 223 cars advertising 20 ownership 42-43, 63 catastrophe, precautionary principle 173 charitable giving 27, 28, 33-34 choice 25-26 costs to consumers 39, 191 economic analysis 12-14, 25-26, 43-44 increasing options 39-43, 182-184, 192 inequalities of 43, 189-190, 209-210 ofjobs 101-102 psychologist analysis 14-19 in public services 184-186, 188-192, 205 rational 11-12, 21, 28, 164-165 see also decision making choice advisers 191 citizen’s income 97 citizens’ juries 214, 215 climate change 2, 21, 146, 147-151, 159, 218 precautionary principle 173 valuing the future 161, 162 commodification 179-181, 206-216 alternatives to CBA 213-216 limits to monetary valuation 216-219 meaning of monetary valuation 207-210 rational decision making 211-213 commuters 56, 57 compensation argument for rates of pay 99-103, 105 competitive consumption 24-25, 57-62, 62-63 congestion 60-61 consumers 11-45 addictive consumption 22-24, 98 choice in public services 182-192 competitive consumption 24-25, 57-62, 62-63 preference satisfaction 37-43 rational choice 11-12 self-interest 26-36 shopping 12-19 sovereignty myth 19-22, 25, 156, 158, 225 consumption future 168 see also consumers context-specific valuation of risk 157-158 contingent valuation surveys 152, 157 contracts 203-204 contribution argument for rates of pay 103-108 coordination problem 63 cost-benefit analysis (CBA) 145-178 alternatives to 173-174, 213-216 best practice 201, 202 climate change 2, 146, 147-151, 159 determining preferences 39 of emotions 30-31 limits to monetary quantification 175-178 valuing the future 161-173 valuing human life 147-148, 151-160, 209 valuing nature 160-161 Coyle, Diane 2 cream-skimming 189-190, 210 cultural differences in perception of happiness 118-120 cultural value 207 Damasio, Antonio 44 decision making 174, 175, 176-177, 211-214 see also cost-benefit analysis (CBA) declining discount rates 169-170 democracy and accountability 199, 206, 230 and CBA 172-173, 176-177, 214 economics as 225, 227-228 valuing life 158-159 see also politics deserving what we earn 99-109 desire 13 Dickens, Charles 138 digital TV 41, 42 diminishing marginal utility 95, 158-159 disappointment 41 discounting 149, 166-173, 176, 178, 226, 234 doctors 2, 70, 91, 106-107 decisions on behalf of patients 186-187 drugs 128 earnings 79-80 differences in 99-109 personal services sector 70-71 see also performance-related pay (PRP); taxation economic growth 47-78, 168, 170 adaptation to 55-57, 61-62 affordability of personal services 74-77 alternative form of 236-238 and consumer sovereignty 21-22 and happiness 48-55, 61-62, 66-68, 141-142 meaning and measurement of 64-66 rivalry 57-62, 62-63 self-help 62-64 and taxation 88, 89 and work 235-236 see also Baumol’s cost disease economic imperialism 180, 222-223, 233 ecosystem services 160-161 education as a positional good 60-61, 190 reflected in pay 100, 105, 106 to enable pursuit of a good life 136, 236 education services 69, 237-238 choices 185-186 goals 202 inequality 189 supply and demand 190 efficiency 4-6, 8, 177 personal services 75, 191 taxation 93, 94, 95-98, 111-112, 237 effort 108 Ellsberg Paradox 164-165 emotions and choosing public services 185 and complex choices 40-41, 42 and monetary incentives 197 and prediction of satisfaction 16 and self-interest 30-31 employment 48, 53, 142, 235-236 Environmental Protection Agency (US) (EPA) 151 ethics 7-9, 224-228, 239 consumers 34-36, 37-38, 44 desert 108 and efficiency 5-6, 112 impartiality across generations 166-167, 171-172 limits to monetary valuation 216-219 monetary value for human life 150, 159-160 personal 138 principled disagreement 201-202 for public policy 133-139, 140-141, 142, 177, 234 view of discount rates 170-171 Experience Machine 127 Experience Sampling Method 123,124 fairness and efficiency 94-98 framing effects 14-15, 16, 18, 197 Frank, Robert 56 Freakonomics 1, 31-32, 34, 233 free trade 5-6 Friedman, Milton 7 future generations, discounting 166-167, 168-169, 171-172 future outcomes discounting 149, 166-173 precautionary principle 173-174 see also probabilities gambling games 164 game theory 222, 233 goals happiness 125, 126, 129-133 monetary incentives 200-201 for public services 199, 201-202 self interest 17, 37 Goodhart’s Law 141, 192, 194, 202, 223-224 governments auditing public services 203-204 consumer sovereignty 30, 38, 186 economic growth 47-48, 49, 68 Greatest Happiness principle 137-138 policy and CBA 150, 154, 157, 160, 172-173, 175, 215-216 policy for maximizing happiness 141-143 rights of ownership 81-82, 84-85 setting priorities 210 trust in 230-231 Greatest Happiness principle 127-133, 136-138 growth paths 65, 66 guilt 27, 28, 30-31 habitat destruction 160 Hahn, Robert 163 happiness 113-143 adaptation to material improvement 55-57 defining 114-116, 120-121, 134 and economic growth 48-55, 61-62, 66-68 maximized through extending choice 183 maximized through pay incentives 109 maximized through taxation 94-98 measurement of 53-54, 116-126, 139-140, 141, 224 philosophy of 126-133 and public ethics 133-139 as public policy 140-143 of service providers 191 happiness economics 50-55, 64, 78, 115, 122 alternative form of economic growth 236-237 and politics 137-138, 141-143 happiness treadmill 23, 24, 55 see also satisfaction treadmill Harrod, Sir Roy 59 Hayeck, Friedrich von 27-28 health insurance (US) 189-190 health services 69, 71-72, 237-238 difficulty in choosing 184-185 inequality in 189-190 productivity improvements 70, 74 see also doctors Heckman, James 188 higher pleasures 130-131, 135-136 Hirsch, Fred 59, 63 holiday entitlements 58, 59 holidays 17 Homo economicus 27, 29-36, 44, 111,178 and behavioural economics 232 determining preferences 39 location in brain 225-226 self-fulfilling assumption 224 service providers 187 and trust 230-231 useful context for 222-223 hours of work 91-92, 105, 108 House of Lords (UK) report on climate change 148, 150 human life discounting 168 monetary value of 21, 147-148, 151-160, 207-208 Quality-Adjusted Life Years 176 Hume, David 129 identity 24-25, 42, 154 ignorance 162 incentive to work 89-92, 104, 109 and tax 109-112 see also audit culture; monetary incentives income adaptation to 23-24 and happiness 52-54 relative 57-58, 59-60, 62 see also earnings; taxation income effect 91, 92 income tax see taxation inconspicuous consumption 59 inefficiency see efficiency inequality acceptability of 79-80 and choice in public services 188-190, 209-210 effect on happiness 54 rates of pay 99-109 information for consumers advertising 19-20 complexity in public services 184-185 inheritance 81, 86, 99 genetic 101, 108 in-kind valuations 213—214 intellectual diversity 229 interest rates 167—168, 169 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 147-148, 158 internet 43 interpersonal utility comparisons 49-50 Israeli day-care centres study 32 Japan, economic growth and happiness 52 Jefferson, Thomas 130 Jevons, William Stanley 49 job centre case workers 188, 202 Kahneman, Daniel 25-26, 124 objective happiness 114, 121, 125, 126 Peak-End evaluations 17, 122, 125 Keynes, John Maynard 6, 177, 235 Kyoto Protocol 146, 148 labour costs see Baumol’s cost disease labour market 5, 72, 142 language 87, 239 and reporting happiness 116-117, 118-119 law-breakers 34-35 Layard, Richard 121, 126, 137 alternative form of economic growth 236-237 Greatest Happiness principle 129-130, 132-133 happiness drugs 128 Le Grand, Julian 184, 186, 187, 188-189, 195-198 libertarianism view of taxation 82, 84, 86 widening choice 183, 205 libertarian paternalism 227-228 life expectancy 54 limited edition products 60 Locke, John 84 lost wallets 27, 28, 30 love 27, 208 luck and responsibility 105-106 marginal tax rates 96-97 market imperfections 218 market prices 33, 107 market rates of pay 99 compensation argument 100-101, 102, 103 contribution argument 103, 104, 106-107 putting a value on human life 147-148, 152-155 mental illness 3, 42, 54 Mill, John Stuart 130-131, 135-136, 183 mobile phone spectrum auctions 222 monetary incentives 30, 31-33, 195-198, 217 public services 200-201 see also performance-related pay (PRP) monetary quantification see commodification; cost benefit analysis (CBA) money corrosive effects of 209 see also monetary incentives mood 121-122, 125 moral convictions 217 motivation intrinsic 33, 195, 197, 200-201 public service staff 186-188, 191-198, 199, 200-201, 206 see also self-interest; status seeking national product 64-65, 70 natural talents 99, 101, 102, 105 nature ownership rights 210 putting a value on 160-161, 208, 213-214 neuroscience 50, 115-116, 117-118, 225-226 news media current perceptions of economics 6-7 doctrine of self-interest 34 silence on Baumol’s cost disease 68-69, 77 Nietzche, Friedrich Wilhelm 119 non-economic impacts 7 non-renewable resources 168 Nozick, Robert 127 Nussbaum, Martha 131 objective happiness 114, 121, 125, 126, 127 objective list theories 134-136 optimal tax theory 95-98 optimization 233 options 13-16 increasing 39-43, 182-184, 192 ownership principle 80-87, 218 pay see earnings; performance-related pay (PRP) Peak-End evaluation 17-18, 122, 125-126 perceived happiness 140 perfect preferences 37-39, 43, 135-136 performance-related pay (PRP) 33, 193-194, 195-198, 200, 237 performative contradiction 231 performative economics 223-224 personal services 69-77, 237-238 Peter the plumber 92-93 pleasure 22-23, 130-131, 134, 135 policy entrepreneurs 1-2 political economics 230-231, 233 political forums 214, 215 politics democracy and CBA 172-173, 177, 215 and happiness economics 137-138, 141-143 poll taxes 93-94 positional goods 59-61, 63, 190, 236, 237 post-tax distribution 85—86, 87, 98 precautionary principle 173—174 preferences 13, 14, 135—136, 225 and advertising 19—20 of future generations 168-169 pure time 166-167, 172 revealed by choices 21, 64 risk 156, 159, 176 satisfaction 37-43 pre-tax economic activity 92-93, 94 pre-tax income 80-84 pricelessness 209, 210 principled disagreement 201-202 priorities audit culture 193, 202 government policy 38, 50, 141,142 private property 80-81 probabilities 150, 154, 155, 161-162, 164-166 productivity 65-66 high earners 96-97 personal services 70-72, 73-74, 75-76 and taxation 88, 89, 90 progressive tax systems 96, 97 psychological well-being (PWB) 134-135 psychology 14-19 see also behavioural economics public opinion 214 public perception of risk 153, 155-156 public service ethos 194, 199-201, 205, 210,219 public services 68, 74-75, 180 affordability 74-77, 237-238 and attitudes to taxation 110-111 audit culture 192-198 complexity and importance 184-185 distinctiveness of 198-206, 216-217 ensuring real choice 188-192 implications of choices for others 185-186 motivation of service providers 186-188, 191-198, 199, 200-201, 206 trust 203-206 widening choice 182-184 see also Baumol’s cost disease pure time preference 166-167, 172 qualitative factors 163 Quality-Adjusted Life Years 174 quality of life 3, 236 measurement of 49-50, 50-55 and public ethics 135-139 quantifying the unquantifiable 162-166 targets 193 Ramsey, Frank 167 rational choice 11-12, 21, 28, 164-165 see also decision making Rawls, John 99, 101, 102 redistribution 86, 88, 92-94 maximization of happiness 95-98 Rees, Bill 232 regret 41, 42 relationships, putting a value on 208 relative consumption 58-59, 61 relative income 57-58, 59-60, 62 research objectives and methods 228-230 responsibility 41, 100, 105 rights 82, 83, 181, 210, 218 rigour in research methods 229 risk monetary value of 21, 151-158, 178, 211 versus uncertainty 161-166 rivalry 24-25, 57-62, 62-63, 237 and increasing happiness 66-67, 98 sacrifice 196 satisfaction treadmill 125, 126, 140 see also happiness treadmill scarcity 59-61, 106-107 science and economics 1, 8, 50, 224, 225,227, 228-230 Greatest Happiness principle 131-133 see also neuroscience self-control 18-19 self-help 62-64 self-interest 12, 13, 17-19, 26-36 and consumer sovereignty 21-22 politicians and economists 230-231 public service providers 187, 188 self-fulfilling assumptions of 31-34, 223 self-reported happiness see surveys, happiness Sen, Amartya 132, 136, 234 Shaw, George Bernard 208, 210 shopping 11, 12 addiction and compulsion 22-26 economist perspective 12-14 psychologist perspective 14-19 smiley-face sampling 124, 130 smiling 119-120 Smith, Adam 6 smoking 18-19, 132, 135 spare capacity in public services 190 standard of living 48 state benefits 85-86 statistical lives 151-152, 154, 207-208 status anxiety 24-25 status seeking 58-61, 62-63, 236 Stern Review 148-149, 150, 166 substitution effect 91, 92, 96 subtractive method 117 supply and demand in public services 189, 190 rates of pay 100, 101, 105, 106 surveys 214 contingent valuation 152, 157 happiness 53-54, 114-115, 116-117, 118-124, 130, 137 public services users 182 sustainability 171 sustainable development 173 Sutton, Willie 34 targets see audit culture taxation 76, 79-98 cigarettes 132 effect on work 88-92 evasion 35 incentive to work 109-112 ownership principle 80-87 redistribution 86, 88, 92-94 to maximize happiness 94-98, 237-238 teachers 70 team working 193, 194 technical innovation 65, 70, 73-74 theory and self-fulfillment 223-224 Titmuss, Richard 33 trade-offs 13 complex choices 40-41 economic growth 63-64 life 160, 211 taxation 94, 95, 97 The Truman Show 127 trust 203-206, 230-231 TWA Flight 800 163 ultimatum game 29, 33-34 uncertainty and the precautionary principle 173 and risk 161-166 unselfish behaviour 27-28, 29 reaction to manipulation 31-32 service providers 187-188 utilitarianism 120-121, 126-133, 135,136,138-139, 183 Uttal, William 117 value judgements see ethics value for money 212 veto economics 2-3, 6, 227 Viscusi, Kip 153 volunteers 195 wage differentials 152-153, 157 Weitzman, Martin 169 work and employment 235-236 hours of 91-92, 105, 108 see also incentive to work worker inputs and outputs 104-105 Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgements Chapter One - Introduction: Ethical Economics?


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

It’s not that folks are hogging spectrum, they’re warehousing it—mothballing it away so no one else can use it.”94 What exists is a “false scarcity” wherein AT&T and Verizon “continue to gobble up more and more of the spectrum capacity needed to provide wireless service.”95 Matt Wood of Free Press notes that “Verizon and AT&T have insurmountable advantages in the current system of spectrum allocation, which allows them to outbid everyone else—both in FCC spectrum auctions and on the ‘secondary market’ when other licensees look to sell—and then hoard the spectrum they have without really putting it to good use quickly enough.”96 In 2011, one industry trade publication reported that AT&T had license to $10 billion worth of spectrum that was lying fallow, while it lobbied to have more spectrum diverted to it.97 This guarantees that no alternative can emerge.98 In a sane society, policy debates over spectrum would concern how best to utilize this public resource.

One Forbes writer reflected the growing concern among businesses that America badly lags behind most advanced nations in broadband speed and prices. “This inferiority is almost purely a result of the lack of true competition and pro-consumer regulation in the telecom industry.”102 The President’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in February 2012 calling for more spectrum to be auctioned to improve wireless broadband.103 Later in 2012 a presidential advisory committee, including executives from Microsoft and Google, urged President Obama “to adopt technologies that would use radio spectrum more efficiently.”104 But while some in Washington might wish to see this new spectrum enable a credible challenger to the ISP cartel, the effects would not be felt for five to ten years, and there is no evidence that either political party wants to have a head-on collision with the cartel over what the cartel regards as a matter of life and death: maintaining its vise-like grip on Internet access.

The economist Richard Layard thinks it is a highly desirable policy for other nations to adopt. I agree. See Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005), 161. 47. This figure was created by the staff of former FCC commissioner Michael Copps in consultation with various experts and based upon evaluating the amounts raised during recent spectrum auctions. See “Remarks of Commissioner Michael J. Copps,” National Conference on Media Reform, Memphis, TN, Jan. 12, 2007. 48. See McChesney, Communication Revolution, chap. 3. 49. Cited in Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 45. 50.


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

Two licenses would be issued for each of 51 zones around the country; no bidder could acquire more than one license in any zone. The usual procedure in such auctions is to call for sealed bids and to award the contract to the highest bidders. This time, acting on the advice of Paul Milgrom, a Stanford University professor, the FCC chose to conduct the auction according to game theory, calling it a "Spectrum Auction." First, all bids would be open, so that each contestant would always know what all the others were doing. Second, there would be successive rounds of bidding until no contestant wanted to raise its bid any higher. Third, between rounds, contestants could switch their bid from one zone to another or could bid simultaneously for licenses in adjoining zones; since there is an economic advantage in having licenses in adjoining zones, a particular license might be worth more to one party than it would be to another.

The highest bidder in an auction of this kind often suffers what is known as the Winner's Curse-overpaying out of a determination to win. The Winner's Curse does not need a fancy auction-the same curse may be visited on an investor in a hurry to buy a stock on which someone has provided a hot tip. To avoid the curse, trading sometimes takes place on computer screens in a manner that closely resembles the spectrum auction. The players-usually large financial institutions like pension funds or mutual funds-are anonymous, but all bids and offers are displayed on the screen together with reservation prices above which the investor will not buy and below which the seller will not sell. In January 1995, the publication Pensions and Investments reported on another application of game theory in making investments.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The following year, a new round of auctions for ninety-nine communications licences, hailed by the New York Times as ‘The Greatest Auction Ever’, generated $7 billion. By the end of 1997, insubstantial airwaves had netted a very tangible $20 billion for the US government – more than twice their estimated worth.74 Other countries soon followed the American example. In 2020, just over a quarter of a century after the first US spectrum auctions took place, Milgrom and Wilson would share the Nobel prize themselves. A deluge of Nobels would go to game theorists after Nash, Selten and Harsanyi. Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann picked up the prize in 2005 for their work on conflict and cooperation. In 2012, the eighty-nine-year-old Shapley, who advanced cooperative game theory, got the call from the Nobel committee – and told them he ‘never, never in my life took a course in economics’.

The setup is good for bidders too – they can adjust their bids to collect bundles of licences that complement each other. 74. See e.g. Thomas Hazlett, 2009, ‘U.S. Wireless License Auctions: 1994–2009’, https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Hazlett%2C%20Thomas%20%28Auctions%20Paper%29.pdf, and a complete list of FCC auctions here: https://capcp.la.psu.edu/data-and-software/fcc-spectrum-auction-data. 75. Ostrom was the only woman to win the prize until Esther Duflo in 2019. 76. Derek Wall, 2014, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft, Routledge, London. 77. Elinor Ostrom, ‘Design Principles of Robust Property Rights Institutions: What Have We Learned?’


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Ivan Seidenberg, the CEO of Verizon, disputed Google’s contention that his was a closed system: “Since we think we have the most reliable network, we’ll publish standards and let people connect to any device they want to.” The FCC sided with Google, and in July 2007 ruled that the telephone companies could not control what applications were used on this new spectrum. Soon after the FCC announcement, Google raised the stakes by threatening to bid in the January 2008 spectrum auction, establishing itself as a telephone company. Google had no intention of providing telephone service or producing hardware for a Google phone. They would not say this publicly, however, because by fanning speculation—and the speculation was incendiary—they kept people guessing and increased their leverage over the wireless telephone companies.

In the auction, that commenced in January, all bidders were instructed not to reveal their bids. When it was over, Verizon and AT&T had won, paying a total of $16.2 billion for two wide swatches of spectrum. In an April “all hands” meeting with Google employees, either attending or on a video hookup, Schmidt confessed, “We had the very good fortune of entering the spectrum auction for $4.6 billion, and not winning. We sweated it out!” Both Verizon and AT&T would pledge to open their networks. AT&T announced that it would sell phones with Google’s Android system, and Verizon announced that it was open to consider any Android prototype. (By the summer of 2009, Verizon had yet to submit an Android application; nor had any phone company, save T-Mobile.)


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

That’s the whole proof.… If I design an algorithm that already optimizes for you, there is nothing you can do.” Algorithmic game theory has made huge contributions to a number of practical applications over the past twenty years: helping us understand packet routing on the Internet, improving FCC spectrum auctions that allocate precious (if invisible) public goods, and enhancing the matching algorithms that pair medical students with hospitals, among others. And this is likely just the beginning of a much larger transformation. “We are just scratching the surface,” says Nisan. “Even in the theory we are just starting to understand it.

See also auctions; investment strategies; market behavior bubbles Nash equilibrium and tragedy of commons and Economist Edmonds, Jack educational evaluation Edwards, Ward efficient algorithm efficient or tractable problem, defined Egyptian pharaohs’ reigns electrical memory organ elevator pitch email emotions Engel, Joel Eno, Brian environmental movement epidemiology equality equilibrium Erlang, Agner Krarup Erlang distribution error bars error tradeoff space ethics Evernote eviction policies evolution constraints and expected value Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) explore/exploit tradeoff Exponential Backoff exponential time (O(2n)) Facebook factorial time (O(n!)) fads false positives FBI FCC spectrum auctions FDA feedback fencing filing Finkel, Larry Firefox fire truck problem First-In, First-Out (FIFO) fitness Fitzgerald, F. Scott Flack, Jessica flash memory flat hierarchies Flood, Merrill flow control food fads minimizing rotten overfitting and Forbes forgetting curve forgiveness Forster, E.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

So the simplification thickens the market. The effect is that it guarantees that there’s competition for the top positions.” Veach and Kamangar’s implementation was so impressive that it changed even Milgrom’s way of thinking. “Once I saw this from Google, I began seeing it everywhere,” he says, citing examples in spectrum auctions, diamond markets, and the competition between Kenyan and Rwandan coffee beans. “I’ve begun to realize that Google somehow or other introduced a level of simplification to ad auctions that was not included before.” And it wasn’t just a theoretical advance. “Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting,” he notes.

“There’s an 87 percent chance that Verizon will top this.” (Later he explained his reasoning: “There was no way in hell that Verizon was going to let us walk away with spectrum that would destroy its business model.”) The board okayed the bid, and on Thursday, January 24, 2008, Google’s $4.71 billion bid made the spectrum auction official. At that moment Google owned the valuable C block licenses. It still owned them the next day and through the weekend, as no other bidder emerged. “The realization was growing that ‘My God, maybe we were all wrong,’” says Whitt, who was starting to regret his brash 87 percent prediction.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, 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, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Coase persuaded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to auction off the rights to use the broadcast spectrum instead of giving it away or selling it at a price determined by the government.30 In response, economists Robert Wilson, Paul Milgrom, and Preston McAfee developed Vickrey’s work into an auction design to sell off the spectrum.31 But this design only temporarily solved the monopoly problem. Spectrum auctions occurred infrequently and gave winners the chance to hold onto the spectrum for years or even decades at a time. A company that won an auction for a portion of the spectrum years ago might no longer be its highest-valued owner. If a new company would like to buy that portion, its owner may decide to hold out for an excessively high price, which is precisely what has happened, as we discuss below.

Rather than sell off these assets permanently or lease them for fixed terms, governments could partially sell them under a license that included a COST-based license fee. The government would start by auctioning off the asset. The winning bidder would self-assess a price and pay a tax on that price. Anyone else could subsequently force a sale of the asset at the stated price. Consider the radio spectrum. Since the early 1990s, long-term spectrum licenses have been auctioned off by governments around the world.58 But the monopoly problem has emerged in secondary markets: the companies that acquired the licenses at auction have been reluctant to sell them to higher-valued users. New uses often require a repackaging of the licenses, creating holdout problems like those that inhibit the building of railroads or shopping malls.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

India lost between $8 billion and $20 billion from a badly managed licensing process that benefited corrupt officials and shell companies but left mobile-phone users with worse service, not better. Governments should have open and transparent ways of allocating the public spectrum that encourage ownership diversity. Auctions are straightforward, and special credits for women-owned, minority-owned, and locally owned businesses can increase the diversity of ownership within many sectors that make use of public resources like the broadcast spectrum. When access to the spectrum is publicly auctioned in coordination with programs to improve ownership diversity, the outcome is a transparent process with diverse stakeholders.34 If we buy the argument that a “device tithe” could also go a long way to promoting public access to the internet of things, then perhaps 10 percent of the profits of such auctions should be set aside as a technology fund for public-interest groups.

See also Roman Empire pax technica, xix–xx, xxiv–xxv, 297; Chinese internet rivaling, 191; combating the empire of, 184; consequences of, 146; cyberespionage and, 40; defining, 145–47; democracies in, xxii; as empire, 228; evolution of, 34; promise of, 255–57; stability and, xix–xxii, 147, 214, 223, 230; states in, sharing security knowledge, 41–42; threat to, 162; thriving in, 254–55 Pentland, Sandy, 179, 241 People’s Daily (China), 186 People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, 38–39 periphery, 147 personal identity, 248 Peru, autonomous zones in, 81 Pew Internet and American Life Project, 45 Pfaff, Steve, 110 Philippines: autonomous region in, 81; cybercrime laws in, 165; digital dilemma in, 87; protests in, 127; vigilante groups in, 103–4, 160; working with Anonymous, 43 phone companies, privatization of, 56–57, 74 Piggipedia, 164 piracy, combating, 98 Pirate Bay, 13, 166 Pirate Parties, xx, 166 pirates, 72, 81, 93–94 police, technologies leaking to, 222 political bots, 31, 204–11, 233, 234 political communication, 13 political data, xxi political groups, digital infrastructure and, 135 political information, consumption of, 45 political internet, xiii, 36 political order, 53, 108–10: and relationships between devices, 34; rethinking, 224–25 political power, 16, 233 politics: criminal organizations disrupting, 80; digital engagement with, 9–10; face-to-face contact and, 44; global, 44, 62, 149 Polity IV Project, 92 poor people, global distribution of, 97 Popović, Srđa, 238 Popular Party (Spain), 128 Premise, 142 PRI party (Mexico), 51 privacy groups, 163 privacy violations, 179–80 process tracing, 110 propaganda: bots used for, 205; computational, 29–30; digital media weakening, 124; geotagged, 114–15 prostitution, digital media and, 103 public alert systems, 18–19 public good, 250–51 public opinion, manipulation of, 43 public spectrum, public auctions for, 250 push polling, 209–10, 211 Pussy Riot, 86, 171 Putin, Vladimir, 171, 197, 201 Qtiesh, Anas, 204 Radonski, Henrique, 93 Rassd News Network, 20 reality-based research, 179 Recollections (Tocqueville), 108 Reporters Without Borders, 163 revolutions: histories of, 61; nature of, 108–9 Rheingold, Howard, 85 robocalls, 207 Roh Moo-hyun, 127–28 Rolls-Royce, 212 Roman Empire, 1, 67, 107–8, 146, 231.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

* A bond is a kind of tradable loan: if you buy the bond, you’re getting the right to receive the loan repayments, perhaps from a company, perhaps from a government, or perhaps from some more complex financial process. * Readers of The Undercover Economist may recall Klemperer as one of the designers of the 3G spectrum auctions.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Before long, multicolored teams of South African engineers were filling Lagos' luxury hotels and planning how to cover the country with mobile phone base stations. I remember the buzz that the teams of young engineers brought to the city in 2001. Things were changing, finally. More or less the same happened across the entire African continent as every country organized its own lucrative spectrum auctions. To build out the mobile phone networks, operators dug cables across every country, criss-crossing it with new, high-capacity fiber. In effect, the First Wave built the wiring that would allow the Second Wave. All it required was some upgrades of the cell towers -- Chinese equipment is really so cheap -- and new handsets.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Since 2000 most operators have written down the value of their 3g licences. Some even handed the licences back to the governments from which they bought them, rather than commit themselves to building expensive new 3g networks within strict time limits. (Reselling the licences was forbidden.) The whole episode is now something the industry would rather forget. “The spectrum auction is a nightmare the operators don’t want to remember,” says Mr Cole. “I haven’t heard it mentioned in a long time.” Ready, steady, flop! The pioneering launch of 3g services at the end of 2001 in Japan and South Korea, the world’s two most advanced mobile markets, did little to lighten the mood.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

“Operationalising Hyper Growth Platforms of New Value Creation for a Prosperous and Inclusive India,” chairman’s statement, 39th annual general meeting post IPO, Reliance Industries Limited, September 1, 2016. 37. “Auction Rigged, Cancel Broadband Spectrum Held by Reliance Jio, CAG Report Says,” Times of India, June 30, 2014. 38. “The Spectrum Auction Was Rigged,” Frontline, September 30, 2016. 39. “Union Compliance Communication,” Report No. 20, Comptroller and Auditor General of India, 2015, ch. 3. 40. See, for instance, “Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the year ended March 2015,” Comptroller and Auditor General of India, 2016, ch. 14, p. 103. 41.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

While the answer may be that we should permit a commons to develop alongside proprietary allocations, we will fail to permit that development if we continue to misperceive the choice at hand as one between licensing and exhaustive privatization.83 Benkler used the term “open spectrum” in the summer of 2001, and analyst Kevin Werbach, former counsel for New Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission, publicized it in Esther Dyson’s influential Release 1.0, describing the coalition of technologists, academics, and legal activists emerging around the idea of deregulating spectrum.84 The idea is not to do away with auctions but to mix several ways of allocating spectrum and then see which works best. Big players will be able to buy pieces of spectrum at auction, and other large amounts of spectrum will be held as a commons. The regulatory aspects of WiFi are coming under pressure as Moore’s Law reveals itself in the industry: Over the past thirty months, Intel has increased the communication capacity of its WiFi chip by 5,400 percent and dropped the price by 82 percent.85 Sony is planning to put WiFi chips in every TV set and PC it sells in Japan, and Microsoft is planning a launch in the fall of 2003 for Mira, a wireless computer tablet with a WiFi Internet connection built in.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

Because the dominant tech firms – Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – are using our collective data as the basic fuel for their profit engines, there is a deal to be struck. In return for access to our data, we can either ask them to pay a royalty, a one-off payment, or we could grant a data “licence” for 30 or 40 years in the same way as the digital spectrum was auctioned to mobile phone companies. This could be done at a national level. One possibility would be to invest the proceeds from this licence fee or royalty in the shares of these companies and pay out an equal dividend to everyone who grants them access to their data. That is not something for nothing.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Each new corruption scandal that surfaces in India makes the last one look tame. In the summer of 2011 the 2G spectrum scandal broke. We learned that corporations had siphoned away $40 billion of public money by installing a friendly soul as the minister of communications and information who grossly underpriced the licenses for 2G telecom spectrums and illegally auctioned them to his buddies. The taped telephone conversations leaked to the press showed how a network of industrialists and their front companies, ministers, senior journalists, and a TV anchor were involved in facilitating this daylight robbery. The tapes were just an MRI that confirmed a diagnosis that people had made long ago.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

All rights reserved. 12-Television.Chap Twelve v3.qxd 3/20/06 7:28 AM Page 184 184 C H A P T E R 1 2 Television Disrupted There is a concerted effort being put forth by consumers, municipalities and commercial enterprises to create a nationwide two-way wireless network capable of transporting data using TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the language of the Internet. The goal of these organizations is to create an environment where all of your wireless devices are connected all of the time. They will use spectrum licensed from the FCC, possibly some of the old analog television spectrum being auctioned off during the analog to digital television transition. As this battle unfolds, you are going to see fierce legal fights between all of the companies that have existing infrastructure and all of the companies and municipalities that want to obviate or disintermediate these old distribution platforms in favor of the new, cheaper, more efficient, inherently two-way wireless systems.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In their book, Leighton and López place special emphasis on political entrepreneurship in making policy reform possible.14 For new ideas to overcome vested interests, they write, it must be the case that “entrepreneurs notice and exploit those loose spots in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives.”15 They provide four case studies of this process: spectrum license auctions, airline deregulation, welfare reform, and housing finance. In their words: “[T]he public face of political change may be that of a madman, an intellectual, or an academic scribbler. But whatever form these leaders may take, they are political entrepreneurs—people whose ideas and actions are focused on producing change.”16 As these authors stress, political entrepreneurship can be socially harmful, as when the pursuit of individual rents comes at the expense of overall inefficiency.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

As everything from taxicabs to telephones to televisions to personal digital assistants becomes connected to the network, universal—and microminiature—wireless is the only way to disentangle the communications web. “But there’s not enough wireless bandwidth to go around,” say the skeptics, citing the billions of dollars raised whenever a few slivers of radio spectrum are auctioned off. Baran disagrees. “Tune a spectrum analyzer across a band of UHF frequencies and you encounter a few strong signals. Most of the band at any instant is primarily silence, or a background of weaker signals . . . much of the radio band is empty much of the time! The frequency shortage is caused by thinking solely in terms of dumb transmitters and dumb receivers.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

CT, shares in some of America’s most familiar corporations changed hands at prices utterly divorced from anything resembling fair value. Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and 3M plummeted 10 percent or more, while the iShares Russell 1000 Value Index, a popular exchange-traded fund, fell from $50 to 0.0001 cents. Accenture sold for a solitary cent. At the other end of the spectrum, Apple and auctioneer Sotheby’s both transacted at $100,000 a share, momentarily pushing their valuations into the trillions of dollars. The stock market’s twilight zone would also prove short-lived. As the e-mini continued its bounce back, participants tentatively returned to equities markets and individual shares began trading again at levels close to where they’d been before 1:30 p.m.


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


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

“When I joined the Apple board [in 2006], Steve and I spoke about this [Android], and I said this thing is coming, and we agreed that we would monitor the situation.” Certainly, Google’s other initiatives support Schmidt’s recollection. Android’s success was dependent on its getting the big U.S. carriers to cooperate, but at the end of 2007 Google was, if anything, going out of its way to make them angry. A giant slice of wireless spectrum was up for auction by the government, and Google, with a $4.71 billion bid of its own, tried to drive the price up for wireless carriers. Google didn’t want the spectrum. It just wanted to make sure the government required the winner to play by new, Google-friendly rules. The sanctimoniousness of using money, not to buy spectrum, but to acquire a pulpit from which to lecture carriers on table manners, infuriated them, especially Verizon, the eventual auction winner.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The point is to measure the outcome, and to put any adverse consequences of divergence from the intended outcome on the appropriate parties. Too often, incentives and outcomes are not aligned. For example, government grants mobile phone carriers exclusive licenses to spectrum with the goal of creating reliable and universal access, yet spectrum licenses are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Is this approach giving the right outcome? The quality of mobile services in the United States would suggest otherwise. What if, instead, spectrum licenses were granted based on promises of maximum coverage? Much as Minister Molano Vega did for phone service in Colombia, rebates to customers for failures to live up to coverage promises could potentially create a much more self-regulating system.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product


pages: 299 words: 91,839

pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Or, in today’s parlance, “the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers,” not only because it lacks the vital up-to-the-moment information on value propositions that sellers and buyers bring to the market, but also because government policy makers are subject to influence peddling by special interests. Most economists bought into Coase’s thesis, and eventually the FCC itself began to fall in line with Coase’s argument by allocating spectrum leases through public auctions to the highest bidder.51 The FCC’s decision to auction leases wasn’t entirely devoid of self-interest. The government reasoned that from a purely financial perspective, it made far more sense to sell valuable spectrum leases, which could put billions of dollars into the federal coffers, than to just give it away for free.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

For its chthonic Cloud, data centers are housed under mountains with reliable ice cores; suburban farmland between metropolitan trading centers is redug to lay private cable for algorithmic trading concerns near the old AT&T switches in New Jersey, realizing a new topographic expression of the transport layer of the TCP/IP stack; while the wireless frequency spectrum is subdivided, auctioned, allocated, and bundled into derivatives like any other prized commercial real estate. Whereas the Schmittian “grounded” way of thinking detests dedifferentiated space and the flattening superimposition of multiple maps, valorizing instead the perspectival spatial order of human establishment, the geographies of The Stack go a long way toward collapsing distinctions between the one and the other, as its interlacing of land, sea, and air through networks of recombinant flows realizes the simultaneous physicalization of the virtual and the virtualization of physical forces.


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


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

GSM comes to America In the ’90s, the industry began buzzing about Personal Communications Services, or PCS. PCS boasted, among other things, small communications gadgets crammed with neato-keen features to do all sorts of things. Or that’s what they hoped. The FCC allocated the 1900 MHz band of the EM spectrum for PCS, and auctioned off frequencies. (I often wondered if I could purchase that part of the EM spectrum known as “blue,” or maybe “green;” think of the royalties.) Anyway, certain members of the telecommunications industry recognized GSM as a great technology with which to build upon 94192c12.qxd 6/3/08 3:33 PM Page 429 The Changing of the Telephone the PCS idea.