Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

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pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Stiglitz, “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth,” New York Times, February 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/equal-opportunity-our-national-myth/ (accessed April 12, 2015). 3. Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” March 2014, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 (accessed April 12, 2015). 4. On some of the problems with Piketty’s data on wealth inequality, see Phillip W. Magness and Robert P. Murphy, “Challenging the Empirical Contribution of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Private Enterprise, Spring 2015, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2543012 (accessed April 12, 2015); Malin Sahlén and Salim Furth, “Piketty Is Misleading about the Swedish Case,” Timbro, November 7, 2014, http://timbro.se/en/samhallsekonomi/articles/piketty-is-misleading-about-the-swedish-case (accessed April 12, 2015); Phillip W.

,” Policy Analysis, November 5, 2007, http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-603.pdf (accessed May 28, 2015). 60. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), pp. 247–49. 61. Johnny Munkhammar, “The Swedish Model: It’s the Free-Market Reforms, Stupid!” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104023432243468 (accessed April 13, 2015). 62. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 246. Chapter 5 1. Joseph Stiglitz, “America Is No Longer a Land of Opportunity,” Financial Times, June 25, 2012, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/56c7e518-bc8f-11e1-a111-00144feabdc0.html (accessed April 28, 2015). 2.

Ferdinand Protzman, “East Germany’s Economy Far Sicker Than Expected,” New York Times, September 20, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/20/business/east-germany-s-economy-far-sicker-than-expected.html (accessed April 21, 2015). 46. Thomas Piketty interview with Russell Roberts, “Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” EconTalk, September 22, 2014, http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/09/thomas_piketty.html (accessed May 4, 2015). 47. See, for instance, John Cochrane, “Why and How We Care about Inequality,” The Grumpy Economist, September 29, 2014, http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-and-how-we-care-about-inequality.html (accessed May 28, 2015), and Ayn Rand, “Egalitarianism and Inflation,” reprinted in Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984). 48.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

For a specific discussion of the US trajectory see Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States” (working paper no. 22945, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2016), rev. version published in Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 553–609. 7. On the relation between capital and wealth, see Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 47–49. 8. See particularly Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018, section 4. 9. For a detailed analysis see Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century; Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done?

Nevertheless, there is every reason to suppose that it is in fact possible—for it is actually taking place now. PART ONE The Sources of Unsustainable Development 1 Economic Inequality as a Component of Unsustainability THE RESOUNDING success of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a massive work on the dynamics of inequality, marked a turning point in contemporary economic debate.1 The increase in inequalities of various kinds is now at the center of political debate as well. In 2013, Barack Obama called the rise in income inequality the “defining challenge of our time.”2 Institutions that had not previously been known for their egalitarian sympathies began to warn against the levels of inequality reached in both developed and developing countries.

A future that will be both just and sustainable is not yet an impossibility. NOTES Introduction 1. The term social-ecological state was coined by the economist Éloi Laurent in his book Social-écologie (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 1. Economic Inequality as a Component of Unsustainability 1. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 2. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility,” December 4, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/04/remarks-president-economic-mobility. 3.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

The Ones Without Principals Are,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 3 (2001): 901–32. 57 Scharfstein and Greenwood showed that in most continental European countries the share of finance in the economy either did not grow much in the 1990s and 2000s, or it even declined. Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (2013): 3–28. 58 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 550–51, and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Idea Is Not about Soaking the Rich,” accessed April 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/ocasio-cortez-taxes.html. 59 Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6, no. 1 (2014): 230–71. 60 Maury Brown, “It’s Time to Blowup the Salary Cap Systems in the NFL, NBA, and NHL,” Forbes, March 10, 2015, accessed April 11, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2015/03/10/its-time-to-blowup-the-salary-cap-systems-in-the-nfl-nba-and-nhl/#1e35ced969b3. 61 Our discussion in this section and the next draws heavily on the work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman.

In their wonderfully refreshing book, Banerjee and Duflo delve into impressive areas of new research questioning conventional views about issues ranging from trade to top income taxation and mobility, and offer their own powerful vision of how we can grapple with them. A must-read.” —Thomas Piketty, professor, Paris School of Economics, and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century “A magnificent achievement, and the perfect book for our time. Banerjee and Duflo brilliantly illuminate the largest issues of the day, including immigration, trade, climate change, and inequality. If you read one policy book this year—heck, this decade—read this one.”

Doom: Debating the Future of the US Economy,” debate, Chicago Council of Global Affairs, October 31, 2016. 16 Alvin H. Hansen, “Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth,” American Economic Review 29, no. 1 (1939): 1–15. 17 Angus Maddison, Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2005). 18 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73, table 2.1. The data Piketty uses for long-term growth originally comes from Angus Maddison, and can be found on the Maddison project data base at https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historical development/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018. 19 For the interested reader who decides to peruse this literature, it will be useful to know that economists call well-being “welfare” (by which they are not referring to welfare programs).


The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market by Paul de Grauwe, Anna Asbury

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit motive, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, very high income

The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life (London: Allen Lane, ). . Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, The World Wealth and Income Database (WID), <http://www. wid.world>, and Tony Atkinson and Salvatore Morelli, The Chartbook of Income  NO TE S . . . . . . . . . . . Inequality, VoxEU (), <http://www.voxeu.org/article/chartbook-economicinequality>. See Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (New York: Crown Business, ), and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, ).

Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, – (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, ); Eng. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Odran Bonnet, Pierre-Henri Bono, Guillaume Camille Chapelle, and Étienne Wasmer, ‘Capital is not back: A comment on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the st Century” ’, VoxEU ( June ), <http://www.voxeu.org/article/ housing-capital-and-piketty-s-analysis>. Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji, ‘Panic-driven austerity in the Eurozone and its implications’, VoxEU ( February ), <http://www.voxeu.org/article/panicdriven-austerity-eurozone-and-its-implications>.  INDEX Note: text within tables, figures, and boxes is indicated by t, f, and b following the page number.

This has led Robert Solow, the great American economist who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the theory of economic growth, to the conclusion that the new technologies are visible everywhere except in productivity growth statistics. We see a similar trend in other developed countries, including those of the EU, as represented in Figure .. This is based on Thomas Piketty’s authoritative book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which I will discuss in Chapter . Figure . shows the development of production per capita since the industrial revolution. These figures are not directly comparable with those of Figure ., showing production per hour, which is a better measure of productivity.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

During the last few years, rising inequality in certain countries, notably the United States, has been the subject of or inspiration for several major books—among which it would be difficult to overstate the importance of two recent books by Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, the success of which is a clear sign of the mounting public interest in the issue of inequality.2 While few books address global income inequality directly, with the exception of Branko Milanovic’s Worlds Apart,3 many have analyzed inequalities in development between 2 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3 Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart, Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

For example, lawyers who take part in litigation involving large sums of money will often be compensated directly in proportion to 10 Carola Frydman and Raven Saks, “Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-­Term Perspective, 1936–2005,” Review of Financial Studies 23, no. 5 (2010): 2099–2138. In Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, Thomas Piketty relates the explosion in top executives’ pay to the drop in top marginal income tax rates in the 1980s, the argument being that it was not worth negotiating a high level of compensation when 70% would go to the state. I’ll return to the tax issue later. 90 Chapter 3 the sums in question.

But there are also non-­monetary forms of inequality—some of which can be measured and some of which cannot—that are also socially and economically significant from the point of view of both social justice and the perity in India and China prior to 2002 was estimated by Sanjay Ruparelia et al., Growth, Reforms and Inequality: India and China Since the 1980s, APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, 2010. 11 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century. Are Countries Becoming More Unequal?61 ception that the public may have of the equity of the economy. This is the case, in particular, of the inequality of opportunities. Two individuals or two families whose economic standards of living, measured by income or consumer spending are identical, will not necessarily feel “equal” or be considered equal in the eyes of an observer.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

New York Times, August 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/opinion/sunday/when-will-the-tech-bubble-burst.html. 8 Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003 (New York: Knopf, 2004), 271–75. 9 Scott Galloway, “Silicon Valley’s Tax-Avoiding, Job-Killing, Soul-Sucking Machine,” Esquire, February 8, 2018, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/. 10 Shira Ovide, “Big Tech Has Dug a Moat That Rivals and Regulators Can’t Cross,” Yahoo, July 5, 2019, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-tech-dug 11 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014), 174; “Richest people in the world,” CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/richest-people-in-world-forbes/12/. 12 Carter Coudriet, “13 Under 40: Here Are The Youngest Billionaires On The Forbes 400 2019,” Forbes, October 31, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2019/10/02/forbes-400-youngest-under-40-zuckerberg-spiegel/#7fd35f5a5a0e. 13 Sally French, “China has 9 of the world’s 20 biggest companies,” Market Watch, May 31, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-has-9-of-the-worlds-20-biggest-tech-companies-2018-05-31. 14 Farhad Manjoo, “Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future,” New York Times, January 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/technology/techs-frightful-5-will-dominate-digital-life-for-foreseeable-future.html; Dana Mattioli, “Takeovers Roar to Life as Companies Hear Footsteps From Tech Giants,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/takeovers-roar-to-life-as-companies-hear-footsteps-from-tech-giants-1511200327. 15 “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” Economist, August 30, 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/why-startups-are-leaving-silicon-valley; Rex Crum, “Let’s make a deal: SV150 firms spent $41 billion on acquisitions in 2016,” Mercury News, May 1, 2017, https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/01/lets-make-a-deal-acquisitions-were-all-over-the-sv150-in-2016/; “Too much of a good thing,” Economist, March 26, 2016, https://www.economist.com/brieing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-good-thing. 16 Christopher Mims, “Why Free Is Too High a Price for Facebook and Google,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-is-too-high-a-price-for-facebook-and-google-11559966411; Andy Kessler, “Antitrust Can’t Catch Big Tech,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/antitrust-cant-catch-big-tech-11568577387; David Dayen, “Trump’s Antitrust Cops Fail to Police Big Business—Again,” American Prospect, July 24, 2019, https://prospect.org/power/trump-s-antitrust-cops-fail-police-big-business-again/; Andrew Orlowski, “Google had Obama’s ear during antitrust probe,” Register, August 18, 2016, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/18/google_had_obamas_ear_on_antitrust_probe/. 17 Bryan Clark, “Facebook’s new ‘early bird’ spy tool is just tip of the iceberg,” Next Web, August 10, 2017, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/08/10/facebooks-new-early-bird-spy-tool-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/#; Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups-1502293444. 18 Crunchbase, Google Acquisitions, updated January 15, 2020, https://wwwcrunchbase.com/organization/google/acquisitions/acquisitions_list#section-acquisitions; Ben Popper, “Failure is a feature: how Google stays sharp gobbling up startups,” The Verge, September 17, 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3322854/google-startup-mergers-acquisitions-failure-is-a-feature; Tim Wu and Stuart A.

CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014), 85. 16 VanderMey, “Why Are Young Billionaires So Boring?” 17 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 334. 18 Laura Sydell, “In Google’s Vision of the Future, Computing is Immersive,” NPR, May 20, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/05/20/529146185/in-googles-vision-of-the-future-computing-is-immersive. 19 Jason Pontin, “Silicon Valley’s Immortalists Will Help Us All Stay Healthy,” Wired, December 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valleys-immortalists-will-help-us-all-stay-healthy/; Dom Galeon and Christianna Reedy, “A Google Exec Just Claimed the Singularity Will Happen by 2029,” Science Alert, March 16, 2017, https://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-director-of-engineering-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2029. 20 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980), 158–59; Kevin Carty, “Tech giants are the robber barons of our time,” New York Post, February 3, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/02/03/big-techs-monopolistic-rule-is-hiding-in-plain-sight/; Jia Tolentino, “The End of the Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun from the Internet,” New Yorker, January 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-end-of-the-awl-and-the-vanishing-of-freedom-and-fun-from-the-internet; Andrew Orlowski, “Google, propaganda, and the new New Man,” Register, September 4, 2017, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/04/google_propaganda_and_the_new_new_man; Aaron Renn, “How Apple and Google Are Censoring the Mobile Web,” Real Clear Politics, August 24, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2017/08/24/how_apple_and_google_are_censoring_the_mobile_web_419092.html; Kenneth P.

Cantor, Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 50–51, 69–70, 97, 101. 5 Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (London: Oneworld Publication, 1992), 20–21, 67–69, 81. 6 Adam K. Webb, “Class and Clerisy,” Front Porch Republic, October 19, 2010, https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/10/class-and-Clerisy. 7 Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 1: xcviii; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014), 345. 8 Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Ballantine, 1984), 6–7; John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1993), 413–19. 9 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Books, 1999), 85–87, 99, 151; Fred Siegel, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (New York: Encounter, 2015), 100. 10 Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1967), 58–60; Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 17; Talcott Parsons, “The Distribution of Power in American Society,” in The Power Elite, ed.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

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

Across the Atlantic, in France and the United Kingdom, influential people have noticed the hypertrophy of finance and called for a new economic theory. Several candidates offer policy breakthroughs intended to be as far reaching as the New Deal that supposedly ended the Great Depression. We have already met the Frenchman Thomas Piketty, that cherubic scourge of wealth, bearing credentials from Harvard and MIT, electrifying the crowds with Capital in the Twenty-First Century and its new “laws of capitalism.”1 Piketty warns that a society that stops growing will grow fat on finance and real estate. The accumulated overhang of capital and inheritance will overwhelm the future as entrepreneurs become mere rentiers of old wealth.

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

(London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990). 5.Ametrano, “Hayek Money,” 20. 6.Ametrano, presentation to the Central Bank of Italy, June 9, 2014. 7.George Gilder, Telecosm: The World after Bandwidth Abundance (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 8.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Current FAQs: Informing the Public about the Federal Reserve,” http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/faq.htm. 9.Richard Vigilante, personal communication. 10.Hayek, “A Free-Market Monetary System,” lecture at the Gold and Monetary Conference, New Orleans, LA, November 10, 1977, Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1. 11.Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Bitcoin.org, 2008. 12.George Sammon, speech to CoinAgenda, Las Vegas, October 2014. CHAPTER 9: THE PIKETTY-TURNER THESIS 1.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 2014). 2.“The Scandal of Money,” chapter 12 in George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2013), 113–23. 3.Adair Turner, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 4.Joseph E.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

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

Capital in the Twenty-First Century CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Thomas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved First published as Le capital au XXI siècle, copyright © 2013 Éditions du Seuil Design by Dean Bornstein Jacket design by Graciela Galup The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows Piketty, Thomas, 1971– [Capital au XXIe siècle. English] Capital in the twenty-first century / Thomas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

English] Capital in the twenty-first century / Thomas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer. pages cm Translation of the author’s Le capital au XXIe siècle. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-43000-6 (alk. paper) 1. Capital. 2. Income distribution. 3. Wealth. 4. Labor economics. I. Goldhammer, Arthur, translator. II. Title. HB501.P43613 2014 332'.041—dc23 2013036024 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: Income and Capital 1. Income and Output 2. Growth: Illusions and Realities Part Two: The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio 3. The Metamorphoses of Capital 4.

The Capital-Labor Split in the Twenty-First Century Part Three: The Structure of Inequality 7. Inequality and Concentration: Preliminary Bearings 8. Two Worlds 9. Inequality of Labor Income 10. Inequality of Capital Ownership 11. Merit and Inheritance in the Long Run 12. Global Inequality of Wealth in the Twenty-First Century Part Four: Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century 13. A Social State for the Twenty-First Century 14. Rethinking the Progressive Income Tax 15. A Global Tax on Capital 16. The Question of the Public Debt Conclusion Notes Contents in Detail List of Tables and Illustrations Index Acknowledgments This book is based on fifteen years of research (1998–2013) devoted essentially to understanding the historical dynamics of wealth and income.


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The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Thomas Piketty

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, dematerialisation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, high net worth, income inequality, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, transfer pricing

Tax authorities can verify that taxpayers indeed declare all the financial securities included in the register. Source: Depository Trust Company (USA). A Tax on Capital The world financial register is intimately linked to the proposal for a global wealth tax made by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This proposal has generated a heated controversy, and I don’t want to repeat it here. Quite simply, let’s assume that a tax on wealth might turn out to be desirable in certain places, at certain times, if wealth concentration was to reach extreme levels above which inequality harms growth, innovation, or the well functioning of our democratic institutions.

Index Africa, 31, 32–33, 53 Amazon, 104 Apple, 1, 104 arm’s-length pricing, 103 Austria, 69, 70 automatic exchange of data: EU savings tax directive and, 68, 69; FATCA and, 64–65, 66, 73–74; first international treaty for, 59; on inheritances in France, 57–59; progress toward a global system, 64–65; to end tax fraud, 5 Bahamas, 23, 35, 71, 85 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 39 bank note wealth, 43 Bergier, Jean-François, 13 Bergier commission, 13, 15, 16, 20 Bermuda, 4, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111 Birkenfeld, Bradley, 68 Bretton Woods, 23 British Virgin Islands, 1, 26, 28, 31, 33, 43, 45, 73, 77 BSI, 67 Cahuzac, Jérôme, 62 Caillaux, Joseph, 57, 58 Canada, 21, 53, 85 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 98 Cayman Islands: dominance in hedge funds, 27; financial wealth held in tax havens, 35; role in routine tax fraud, 10–11; role in world’s asset/liability imbalance, 38; trust registration in, 28 Clearstream, 4, 94–95 Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB), 112 Congress of Vienna (1815), 9 Convention IV, 21 cost of offshore tax evasion.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations The Hidden Wealth of Nations The Scourge of Tax Havens Gabriel Zucman Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan With a Foreword by Thomas Piketty The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London GABRIEL ZUCMAN is assistant professor at the London school of economics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago Foreword © 2015 by Thomas Piketty All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24542-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24556-0 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226245560.001.0001 Originally published as La richesse cachée des nations: Enquête sur les paradis fiscaux © Editions du Seuil et la République des Idées, 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zucman, Gabriel, author.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Ironically, their solutions make matters worse for the very people they are intended to help. In the long run, they slow middle- and working-class employment and wage growth. Evidence Shows the 0.1 Percent Earned, Not Unfairly Negotiated, Their Pay Thomas Piketty has spearheaded the attacks on individuals who comprise the 0.1 percent by insisting their growing success is unearned. In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty rejects claims that income inequality results from skill-biased technological change, globalization, low-skilled immigration, or growing returns to skill that have driven up the pay of the most successful Americans.

Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065,” September 28, 2015, http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2015/09/2015-09-28_modern-immigration-wave_REPORT.pdf. Chapter 1: The Causes of Growing Inequality 1. Joseph Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). 2. Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 4. Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel, “CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less,” Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise. 5. Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn Globalization: n.

Chapter 3: The Myth That Incentives Don’t Matter 1. Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 4 (2011): 165–90, http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/diamond-saezJEP11opttax.pdf. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3. Lawrence Summers, “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49, no. 2 (February 24, 2014), http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NABE-speech-Lawrence-H.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017). 77.  In eighty-seven years’ time because 100 × 1.00887 = 200.01, to two decimal places. If the United States were to return to the 2.41 percent growth rate, the same doubling of wealth would take just twenty-nine years: 100 × 1.024129 = 199.50. Thomas Piketty makes a similar point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (London: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 5, noting that “the right way to look at the problem is once again in generational terms. Over a period of thirty years, a growth rate of 1 percent per year corresponds to cumulative growth of more than 35 percent. A growth rate of 1.5 percent per year corresponds to cumulative growth of more than 50 percent.

There are very few exceptions to this…” 11.  See, for instance, Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 266. 12.  These are post-tax and transfer Gini coefficients for 2017, or latest available year. This is an updated version of Figure 1.3 in OECD, “In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All” (2015), using OECD (2019) data; http://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm (accessed April 2019). 13.  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 266. 14.  These are pre-tax income, from Appendix Data FS40 in Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distribution National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 553–609.

Alibaba and Amazon are nominally classified in the “consumer services” category, but both are better thought of as technology companies instead. 41.  Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 244. 42.  Melanie Kramers, “Eight People Own Same Wealth as Half the World,” Oxfam press release, 16 January 2017. 43.  “Are Eight Men as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population?,” Economist, 19 January 2017. 44.  Dabla-Norris, Kochhar, Ricka, et al., “Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality,” p. 16. 45.  Here, “richest” is “richest in wealth”; see Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, table 7.2, pp. 248–49 and 257. 46.  Ibid., p. 257. 47.  Joseph Stiglitz, “Inequality and Economic Growth,” Political Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2016): 134–55. 48.  


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Arthur Kennickell, “Ponds and Streams: Wealth and Income in the US, 1989 to 2007,”Finance and Economics Discussion Series, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, 2009. 7. Thomas Piketty, “On the Long-Run Evolution of Inheritance: France 1820–2050,” Working Paper, Paris School of Economics, 2010. 8. Santiago Budría, Javier Díaz-Giménez, José-Victor Ríos-Rull, and Vincenzo Quadrini, “Updated Facts on the US Distributions of Earnings, Income, and Wealth,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 26 (2002): 2–35. 9. John Langbein, “The Secret Life of the Trust: The Trust as an Instrument of Commerce,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1997): 165–189. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 11.

Cap-Gemini, World Wealth Report. 32. William Robinson, “Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 165. 33. James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas, and Anthony Shorrocks, Global Wealth Report (Zurich: Credit Suisse, 2013). 34. Ibid. 35. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 36. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995). 37. Palan, Murphy, and Chavagneux, Tax Havens, 12. 38. For the $21 trillion figure, see Heather Stewart, “Wealth Doesn’t Trickle Down—It Just Floods Offshore, New Research Reveals,” The Guardian, July 21, 2012.

Emma Duncan, “Your Money, His Life,” Intelligent Life (supplement to The Economist), September 2007, 73–79. 2. George Marcus, “The Fiduciary Role in American Family Dynasties and Their Institutional Legacy,” in George Marcus, ed., Elites: Ethnographic Issues (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 227. 3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Arthur Kennickell, “Ponds and Streams: Wealth and Income in the US, 1989 to 2007,” Federal Reserve Board Finance and Economics Discussion Series, Washington, DC, 2009, www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2009/200913/200913pap.pdf.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Putting all of this together, one reaches a disappointing result: overall inequality, in the way it is conventionally measured (the Gini coefficient, a number ranging from zero, with perfect equality, to one, with perfect inequality), has barely budged. The Piketty Phenomenon The final two articles of this section are, in part, a response to the enormous success of the economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. The success of that book echoed the growing concern about inequality, a concern expressed in Davos by the world’s elite, and consistent with the way my own article “Of the 1 percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent” had gone viral. President Obama had in 2013 declared that inequality would in fact be the focus of his attention for the remaining three years of his office.

They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns. ______________ * New York Times, October 13, 2013. DEMOCRACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY* THE RECEPTION IN THE UNITED STATES, AND IN OTHER advanced economies, of Thomas Piketty’s recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century attests to growing concern about rising inequality. His book lends further weight to the already overwhelming body of evidence concerning the soaring share of income and wealth at the very top. Piketty’s book, moreover, provides a different perspective on the 30 or so years that followed the Great Depression and World War II, viewing this period as a historical anomaly, perhaps caused by the unusual social cohesion that cataclysmic events can stimulate.

. ______________ * Project Syndicate, September 1, 2014. PHONY CAPITALISM* AMERICANS ARE FINALLY BEGINNING TO APPRECIATE THE magnitude of the inequalities in income and wealth that mark our society. Lately, this realization has been helped along by an unexpected source: the French economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the surprise bestseller of the year. Piketty has collected the most extensive evidence available of the increases in economic inequality and inherited wealth over the past forty years, which are creating a new plutocracy. But while Piketty is right about the severity of the problem, he is not completely right about its cause—and how to fix it.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

A robust estate tax helps counter the worries of patrimonial capitalism raised in Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The masterful data collection efforts of this book documented worrisome trends in the role of capital in the economy.2 Left unchecked, high capital-to-income ratios risk creating societies where wealth and political power are too concentrated. ________________________ 1.  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: The Estate Tax,” Report, August 14, 2017. 2.  Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twentyb-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

But many argue that the bargaining process between workers and their managers is affected by tax rates. If tax rates at the top of the distribution decline, this provides more incentive for those at the top to aggressively increase their compensation. Figure 2.17: US Tax Rates and Income Shares for the Top 1 Percent Data sources: World Top Incomes Database; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). The era of increasing income inequality has also corresponded to lower tax rates on capital income, a source of income that is far more concentrated in the hands of high-income households. Capital gains tax rates were over 30 percent for most of the 1970s, fell to between 20 percent and 29 percent during the 1980s and the 1990s, and then fell to about 15 percent for most of this century, before increasing to 25 percent in 2013.40 Dividends were taxed as ordinary income until 2003, but have since been taxed at far lower rates, with a top rate of 15 percent before 2013, and a top rate of 20 percent since then.41 Indeed, high tax rates serve as a brake, or speed limit, on earnings by high-income earners.

American Economic Review 99:1 (2009), 25–48; Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25:4 (2011), 165–190; Emmanuel Farhi, Christopher Sleet, Iván Werning, and Sevin Yeltekin, “Non-Linear Capital Taxation Without Commitment,” The Review of Economic Studies 79:4 (2012), 1469–1493; Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “A Theory of Optimal Capital Taxation,” Working Paper 17989, NBER Working Papers, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012; Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “A Theory of Optimal Inheritance Taxation,” Econometrica 81:5 (2013), 1851–1886. 5. In recent years, there was a large preference for pass-through income relative to corporate income for domestic companies.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Financiers and the corporate supermanagers whom they enrich represent a growing percentage of the nation’s elite precisely because they control the most financial resources. These assets (stocks, bonds, and such) are the dominant form of wealth for the most privileged,51 which actually creates a snowball effect of inequality. As French economist Thomas Piketty explained so thoroughly in his 696-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the returns on financial assets greatly outweigh those from income earned the old-fashioned way: by working for wages.52 Even when you consider the salaries of the modern economy’s supermanagers—the CEOs, bankers, accountants, agents, consultants, and lawyers that groups like Occupy Wall Street rail against—it’s important to remember that somewhere between 30 and 80 percent of their income is awarded not in cash but in incentive stock options and stock shares.

Indeed, finance has become more costly and less efficient as an industry as it deployed new and more advanced tools over time.16 It’s also telling that during the last few decades financiers have earned three times as much as their peers in other industries with similar education and skills.17 As Thomas Piketty put it in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, financiers are, in some ways, like the landowners of old. Instead of controlling labor, they regulate access to things even more important in the modern economy: capital and information. As a result, they represent the largest single group of the richest and most powerful people on earth.

The CEO, who grew up working class in Detroit and worked a welding line for years before going to college on scholarship, has continued to push forward his agenda within Aetna; in 2015 he gave all his top executives something that’s not yet on the typical MBA reading list—a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Companies, says Bertolini, shouldn’t just be moneymaking machines. They also have to invest in people, the real economy, and society as a whole if they want to succeed in the long term. “Capital is the resource that we often manage well, but in my opinion, the scarce resource is a talented and engaged workforce.”


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

But in those early months of 2014, there was enormous prepublication buzz about a forthcoming Harvard book. It was an unlikely blockbuster, to be sure: a 699-page treatise on economics written by a scholar who was hardly a household name even in his own neighborhood in Paris. But Professor Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, thick as a brick and somewhat heavier, rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists as soon as it hit America’s bookstores. A New York Times story on the Frenchman’s U.S. book tour was headlined “Economist Receives Rock Star Treatment.” The reason that an unknown French economist suddenly achieved rock-star stature in the United States was that Piketty’s book focused squarely on an increasingly worrisome issue in the American zeitgeist: the inequality of wealth and income

Whatever changes we eventually make, almost every observer agrees that the current corporate income tax is not working. The corporate income tax, once a key source of funding for the U.S. government, has become just another minor revenue source. There are already many of those. 9. THE SINGLE TAX, THE FAT TAX, THE TINY TAX, THE CARBON TAX—AND NO TAX AT ALL Thomas Piketty’s surprising bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sold nearly a million copies in the year after its publication, a stunning development for a heavyweight economics tome. But Piketty is a piker compared with an earlier author who wrote a similarly hefty volume on the same subject. The newspaperman Henry George’s economic magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, sold more than three million copies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Widespread concern over this trend was the reason Piketty’s heavy economics tome became a number one bestseller in the United States. Still, it was not exactly beach reading. Because you, gentle reader, have been kind enough to read this book, I will repay the favor by providing a summary of the professor’s argument, thus saving you the $40 price of the book and the hours required to read it. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is actually more like three books than one. First, it’s a history of the rich/poor divide, based on three centuries of wealth and income data that Piketty and his colleagues gathered from the United States, the U.K., France, and Sweden. Piketty relies heavily on mathematical models and statistical tables, but he thoughtfully spares his readers all that stuff, sticking it in a “technical appendix” on the Internet.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

In the United States, most of the economic growth since 1980 has gone to the top 10 percent, whose income grew 121 percent; almost none went to bottom half of the population, whose average income (about $16,000) in 2014 was about the same as it was in real terms in 1980. For working-age men, the median income was “the same in 2014 as in 1964, about $35,000. There has been no growth for the median male worker over half a century.” Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts,” pp. 557, 578, 592–93. See also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 297, where Piketty states that from 1977 to 2007, the richest 10 percent absorbed three-quarters of the entire economic growth of the U.S. 32. Americans agree by 77 to 20 percent that “most people can succeed if they are willing to work hard.”

There has been no growth for the median male worker over half a century.” Thomas Piketty, Emmauel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, issue 2 (May 2018), pp. 557, 578, 592–93, available at eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/PSZ2018QJE.pdf ; Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, World Inequality Report 2018 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 3, 83–84. Income distribution data for the U.S. and other countries is also available at the online World Inequality Database, wid.world . See also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 297, where Piketty states that from 1977 to 2007, the richest 10 percent absorbed three-quarters of the entire economic growth of the United States.

60 Throughout much of the twentieth century, parties of the left attracted those with less education, while parties of the right attracted those with more. In the age of meritocracy, this pattern has been reversed. Today, people with more education vote for left-of-center parties, and those with less support parties of the right. The French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that this reversal has unfolded, in striking parallel, in the U.S., the U.K., and France. 61 From the 1940s to the 1970s, those without a university degree voted reliably for the Democratic Party in the United States, the Labour Party in Britain, and the various left-of-center parties in France.


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

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

Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (3): 312–20. doi:10.2307/1926047. Solow, Robert M. 1987. “We’d Better Watch Out.” New York Times Book Review. http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf. ———. 2014. “Thomas Piketty Is Right: Everything You Need to Know about ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century.’ ” New Republic, April 22, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/117429/capital-twenty-first-century-thomas-piketty-reviewed. Song, Jae, David J. Price, Fatih Guvenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Till von Wachter. 2015. Firming Up Inequality. NBER, Working Paper, No. 21199. doi:10.3386/w21199. Soto, Hernando de. 2001.

The same journalist might call a long-term financier like Warren Buffett an “investor” and his short-term rivals “speculators.” Someone considering going to college might be advised that “education is the best investment you can make.” The terms “assets” and “capital” are also used in a confusing variety of ways. In his justly famous Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty (2014) defined capital as “all forms of wealth that individuals . . . can own.” Marxist writers commonly ascribe to “capital” not just an accounting definition, but an entire exploitative system. “Assets” also have different definitions. Many firms think of their business assets as their stock of plant and equipment.

The world’s richest people have done well too. But one big group has not done as well: people between the seventy-fifth and ninety-fifth percentiles of world income—which represents a lot of the traditional working class in developed countries. Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book added another flavor of inequality to the mix: inequality of wealth. One of the many dazzling features of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and the research that underpins it was the light it cast on the wealth of the very rich, which is often hard to measure. It will not come as a huge surprise that this showed that the wealth of the richest in countries like the United States, the UK, and France has increased dramatically in the past few decades.


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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

My New Mexico State University (NMSU) colleague Mark Walker, who was writing a book on the Basic Income Guarantee as I wrote this one, first encouraged me to consider inequality from a historical perspective. The NMSU conference that Mark organized on the Basic Income Guarantee in 2014 introduced me to scholars who have long worked on the philosophy of contemporary inequality. Simultaneously, participation in an ad hoc reading group facilitated by NMSU student Alan Dicker on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped to get my thoughts flowing My NMSU colleagues Lori Keleher, Peter Kopp, and Julie Rice, and my former graduate student Ryan MacLennan, all provided helpful suggestions at crucial moments. In the later stages of the project’s completion, Tim Ketelaar of the psychology department at NMSU gave me the opportunity to present the ideas contained in this book to a wider general audience, allowing me to better focus my message.

The New York Times in 2005 ran a series of articles on class, pointing out for its readership that, contrary to popular belief, the United States is not the most upwardly mobile country in the world.9 A number of recent books question the notion that deregulation, budget cuts to safety nets, free trade promotion, and privatization have promoted growth to benefit all.10 Despite its length and serious subject matter, economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) was widely read and reviewed. Historian Steven Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence (2015) compared the modern American public unfavorably with Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were not afraid to call out class warfare against the working poor when they saw it.11 Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013) reached a wide audience, with an accessible message: the prosperity of the United States hinges on the middle class having an income to spend.

They called for austerity instead, and President Barack Obama lacked the political capital to press the issue.20 The Great Recession thus came and went with no significant steps taken to prevent inequality from causing another economic panic. Many structural features of the modern American economy promote inequality. In his well-received book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), economist Thomas Piketty argued that out-of-control executive compensation has caused much of the growth in inequality across Europe and in the United States. Executives are granted enormous salaries by boards of directors whom the CEOs themselves control, in a direct conflict of interest.21 Executive compensation hides the real inequity in the share of compensation going to labor: “In 2002–2012 the bottom 90 percent of the population saw their average family income … drop by 11 percent, while those in the top .1 to .01 percent saw theirs rise by 30 percent.”


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

These people are wage workers who need to work in order to draw their large salaries.8 But these same people, whether through inheritance or because they have saved enough money through their working lives, also possess large financial assets and draw a significant amount of income from them. The rising share of labor income in the top 1 percent (or even more select groups, like the top 0.1 percent) has been well documented by Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and other authors.9 We shall return to that topic later in the chapter. What is important to realize here is that the presence of high labor income at the top of the income distribution, if associated with high capital income received by the same individuals, deepens inequality.

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raworth, Kate. 2018. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Ray, Debraj. 2014. “Nit-Piketty: A Comment on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Unpublished manuscript, May 25, https://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Papers/Piketty.pdf. Rognlie, Matthew. 2015. “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share: Accumulation or Scarcity?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf.

As countries grow richer, they acquire more wealth from savings and successful investments (just like individuals do). Moreover, the increase in their capital overtakes the increase in their income, and they gradually become more “capital-intensive” or “capital-rich.” This relationship—the ratio between capital and income—was a central feature of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Countries with higher income (GDP per capita) not only have more wealth per person, but their wealth-income ratio (denoted by β) is higher (Table 2.2). Thus in terms of GDP per capita, Switzerland is 53 times better off than India, but it has almost 100 times more wealth per adult than India.


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The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Consequently, the new progressive politics of inequality have become the primary themes of the nation’s political leaders and the Clerisy. Oddly enough, much of the thinking behind this new focus is drawn primarily from European models, even as Europe’s dismal prospects have inspired the lowest levels of political support in several decades.4 In his influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty argues powerfully that the only way to confront increasing inequality and prevent deeper social fracturing is to expand the “social state” that forcibly redistributes wealth. In his mind, economic growth, traditionally a prime source of social uplift, is little more than an “illusory” solution.

Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class: Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier,” report, August 22, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2012/08/pew-social-trends-lost-decade-of-the-middle-class.pdf. 5. Associated Press, “The Future’s NOT So Bright: Americans Predict a Dark Downward Spiral over the Next Four Decades,” Daily Mail, January 3, 2014. 6. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014), pp. 23–24, 192–96, 321–23, 347. 7. Annie Lowrey, “The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery,” Economix (blog), New York Times, September 10, 2013, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/the-rich-get-richer-through-the-recovery. 8.

Braconi, Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York, Inc., “Environmental Regulation and Housing Affordability,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, vol. 2, no. 3 (September 1996): 82–106. 9. Annie Lowrey, “Even Among the Richest of the Rich, Fortunes Diverge,” New York Times, February 11, 2014; Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 173; Ryan Dezember, “Blowout Haul for Buyout Tycoons,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2014; Lawrence Mishel and Natalie Sabadish, “CEO Pay and the Top 1%,” Economic Policy Institute Issue, Issue Brief, no. 331, May 2, 2012, http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent. 10.


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The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

They need to recognize that inequality is a threat to the political consensus in favor of market competition and dynamism. Liberals and progressives have a mirror-image problem. Many on the left rail against unrestrained capitalism’s innate and immoral tendency toward invidious inequality. Thomas Piketty caused a sensation with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by arguing at magisterial length that this tendency reflects the workings of a basic law of economics.12 Because the rate of return on capital (allegedly) outstrips the rate of economic growth, increasing inequality is written into the DNA of capitalism, which means that only massive taxes and transfers are capable of reversing hyper-inequality.

Finally, zoning’s contributions to economic inequality go beyond widening income gaps, whether geographic or socioeconomic in nature. In addition, tightening restrictions on building appear to be the driving force behind rising wealth inequality. At least that is the conclusion of Matt Rognlie, who as a 26-year-old grad student at MIT leaped to prominence with his bold critique of Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty famously argued that there is a fundamental tendency in capitalism toward ever-greater concentration of wealth, a tendency that was checked in the twentieth century only because of global depression and war, and then only temporarily. Specifically, he argued that over the long run, the rate of return on wealth tends to outstrip the rate of economic growth, with the result that the share of national income that compensates owners of capital grows inexorably (and the share that goes to workers shrinks concomitantly).

Moss, Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11.See, e.g., N. Gregory Mankiw, “Defending the One Percent,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 21–34, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.3.21. 12.See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). 13.Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York: MacFadden Books, 1960), p. 23. 14.Interview on National Public Radio, Morning Edition, May 25, 2001. 15.Anna Persson and Bo Rothstein, “It’s My Money: Why Big Government Is Good Government,” Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 2 (January 2015): 231–49. 16.Joseph Stiglitz, Nell Abernathy, Adam Hersh, Susan Holmber, and Mike Konczal, “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” http://rooseveltinstitute.org/rewriting-rules-report/. 17.Frank Levy and Peter Temin, “Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America,” SSRN Working Paper 07-17, June 27, 2007. 18.The connection between excessive governmental informalism and capture by the organized was recognized on the left as far back as Theodore Lowi’s great book, The End of Liberalism (New York: W.


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Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

In making this argument, there is a clear overlap with our findings in Chapter 7 regarding the power of elite universities, all of which are located close to London. London is now a vortex – a voracious and intense space, in which an elite class finds its home. In the early twenty-first century, the very wealthy are subject to increasing attention. The remarkable reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, allied to increasing concern about spiralling remuneration at the top, has made the sociological analysis of the elite essential. But we need to guard against the view that this new, wealth-elite marks a return to the aristocratic, landed and gentlemanly class which held sway in Britain until the later twentieth century.

Subsequent analysis by Sam Friedman, David Laurison and Andrew Miles in ‘Breaking the “Class” Ceiling? Social Mobility into Elite Occupations’, Sociological Review, 63(2), 2015, 259–89 (which compares the GBCS findings with those from the Labour Force Survey on individual incomes), suggests that similar patterns can be found in both sources. 7. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: 2014), p. 116, Figure 3.1. 8. Markus Jäntti, Eva Sierminska and Philippe Van Kerm, ‘The Joint Distribution of Income and Wealth’, in Janet C. Gornick and Markus Jäntti (editors), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (Redwood City, CA: 2013), pp. 312–33. 9.

See Mike Savage, Brigitte Le Roux, Johannes Hjellbrekke and Daniel Laurison, ‘Espace culturel britannique et classes sociales’, in Frédérie Lebaron and Brigitte Le Roux (editors), La méthodologie de Pierre Bourdieu en action: espace culturel, espace social, et analyse des données (paris. 2015). 2. Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1% (London: 2014), Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: 2014). 3. The same general point also applies to gender: but because we asked about household income, gender differences are not well defined when using the GfK sample (since some badly paid women might be living with well-paid men, and vice versa). 4. We repeat our earlier comments about the problems of using the GBCS and the GfK survey to analyse ethnicity in detail.


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The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Josh Constine, “Facebook Now Has 2 Billion Monthly Users … and Responsibility,” Techcrunch, June 27, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/. 29. George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic 3 (May 1946). 5. Economic Stagnation 1. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 72–112. 2. S. N. Broadberry and Bas van Leeuwen, “British Economic Growth and the Business Cycle, 1700–1870: Annual Estimates,” Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, February 2011, CAGE Online Working Paper Series, vol. 2010 (20), http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/events/seminars-schedule/conferences/venice3/programme/british_economic_growth_and_the_business_cycle_1700-1850.pdf. 3.

Keohane, “The Global Politics of Climate Change: Challenge for Political Science,” PS: Political Science & Politics 48, no. 1 (2015): 19–26. 48. There have been many reasons for this, from the Great Recession to Occupy Wall Street. But the book that has catalyzed most of this discussion has undoubtedly been Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 49. On the role of lobbying in politics, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); and Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became More Politicized and Politicians Became More Corporate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

In effect, England had, in the span of a quarter century, gone from the level of income inequality recorded in today’s Iceland to the level of income inequality recorded in today’s India.3 Then another big aberration in human history set in: a period of unprecedented economic equality. Back in 1928, Thomas Piketty shows, the richest 1 percent could expect to capture 15–20 percent of income in European countries like France or the United Kingdom and almost 25 percent of income in the United States. By 1960, the wealth distribution had flattened considerably: In France and the United Kingdom, the richest 1 percent now captured less than 10 percent of income.


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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

Despite the fact that many of the features of the trends in income and wealth inequality date back to the early 1980s, the topic has only started to dominate political discourse across the developed world in the last five to ten years in particular, highlighted by the publication and extraordinary success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Also, it is a very complex area – measurement is extremely difficult, and there is a lot of difference in the trends geographically. I want to stress one of the sources for my caution about the role of inequality as a singular cause behind angrynomics is that anger is a universal feature of politics across the world, but trends in inequality are not.

As such, the rate of capital formation, a core determinant of investment, is slowing as the dependency ratio – the ratio of workers to retirees – is shifting over time, which in turn slows future growth, while still compounding the massive amount of assets that those “top twenty” boomers have accumulated already. ERIC: This is why, at least in part, the economist Thomas Piketty thinks that intergenerational inequality is a necessary part of our future, unless we choose to do something about it. Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is famous for putting inequality back on the political agenda in a serious way. But his book is as much about economic growth as it is inequality. Piketty’s framework for thinking about economic growth allows us to see the long-run consequences of these observations about aging.

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Random House, 2017) is a brilliant rebalancing of how economics should be done, putting true sustainability at its core. For a much less hopeful, but equally plausible account, see Branko Milanovic’s brilliant Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). A huge amount has now been written about inequality. Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) can take a lot of credit for this. But despite being a bestseller, and having influenced both of us in different ways, it is really a book for specialists – and if anything has provoked as much controversy as agreement, at least among economists.


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Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Financial services, slowly but inevitably, become the biggest players in the economy. Between the 1950s and 2006, the percentage of the economy (as measured by GDP) represented by the financial sector more than doubled, from 3 percent to 7.5 percent.13 This is why, as Thomas Piketty demonstrated in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy.14 Money makes money faster than people or companies can create value. The richest people and companies should, therefore, position themselves as far away from working or creating things, and as close to the money spigot, as possible.

Vivek Wadhwa, “The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry,” forbes.com, July 23, 2012. 44. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 45. David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” technologyreview.com, June, 12, 2013. 46. Ibid. 47. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014). 48. Bernard Lietaer, The Mystery of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, 148 [PDF]. 49. Jeff Tyler, “Banks Demolish Foreclosed Homes, Raise Eyebrows,” Marketplace, American Public Media, October 13, 2011. Transcript available at www.marketplace.org/topics/business/banks-demolish-foreclosed-homes-raise-eyebrows/. 50.

Betsy Corcoran, “Blackboard’s Jay Bhatt Strikes Up the Brass Band,” edsurge.com, July 23, 2014. 35. Justin Pope, “E-Learning Firm Sparks Controversy with Software Patent,” washingtonpost.com, October 15, 2006. 36. withknown.com. 37. Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar Press, 2002). 38. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014). 39. Mario Preve, quoted in Ernst & Young and Family Business Network International, “Built to Last: Family Businesses Lead the Way to Sustainable Growth” (n.p.: Ernst & Young Global Limited, 2012), www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-Built-to-last-family-businesses-lead-the-way-to-sustainable-growth/$FILE/EY-Built-to-last-family-businesses-lead-the-way-to-sustainable-growth.pdf. 40.


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The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, 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, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

In New York’s SoHo, the artistic and creative ferment I had observed as a student was giving way to a new kind of homogeneity of wealthy people, high-end restaurants, and luxury shops. Truth be told, the downsides of the urban revival had captured my attention fairly early on. Back in 2003, well before Occupy Wall Street drew attention to the rise of the “one percent,” or Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century opened our eyes to global inequality, I warned that America’s leading creative cities were also the epicenters of economic inequality. My research found that the metros with the highest levels of wage inequality were also those with the most dynamic and successful creative economies—San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Washington, DC, and New York.3 But even as I was documenting these new divides, I had no idea how fast they would metastasize, or how deeply polarized these cities would become.

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 2. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Richard Florida, “The New American Dream,” Washington Monthly, March 2003; Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 4. Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geography/4465. 5.

The correlation between housing cost and creative-class wages left over after paying for housing is positive and significant (0.58). The correlations between housing costs and wages left over after paying for housing are negative and significant for the service class (–0.36) and the working class (–0.20). 31. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Matthew Rognlie, “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Brookings Institution, March 2015, www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring-2015/2015a_rognlie.pdf.


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Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Armine Yalnizyan, The Rise of Canada’s Richest 1% (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, December 2010). 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 252. 11. Thomas A. Hirschl and Mark R. Rank, “The Life Course Dynamics of Affluence,” PLoS ONE, January 28, 2015, p. 5. 12. Ibid. 13. Paul Krugman, “Rich Man’s Recovery,” New York Times, September 13, 2013, p. A25. 14. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,” November 13, 2007, p. 4. 15. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 253, 254. 16. Ibid., p. 278. 17. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,” November 13, 2007, pp. 2, 4. 18.

Transients in the various income brackets are spoken of as if they were continuous residents in those brackets. Time and Turnover Understandable and commendable as it may be to be concerned about the fate of fellow human beings, that is very different from being obsessed with the fate of numbers in abstract categories. To say, as Professor Thomas Piketty does in his much acclaimed book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that “the upper decile is truly a world unto itself”10 is to fly in the face of the fact that most American households— 53 percent— are in the top decile at some point in their lives,11 usually in their older years. For most Americans to envy or resent the top ten percent would be to envy or resent themselves.

Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 529. 24. Martin Feldstein, “Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2014, p. A15; Alan Reynolds, “Why Piketty’s Wealth Data Are Worthless,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2014, p. A11. 25. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 473, 507; Robert A. Wilson, “Personal Exemptions and Individual Income Tax Rates, 1913–2002,” Statistics of Income Bulletin, Spring 2002, p. 219. 26. W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich & Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 16. 27.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Stiglitz, “New Theoretical Perspectives on the Distribution of Income and Wealth among Individuals.” For a discussion of the role of housing, see Matthew Rognlie, “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share: Accumulation or Scarcity?,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 46, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 1–69. See also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 17.The right to obtain a certain rent stream, year after year, has a market value, and this is called the capitalized value of the rents. Thus, owning a monopoly will give the owner profits each year. The owner could sell that stream of profits. The value today of that stream is called the capitalized rents. 18.See Mordecai Kurz, “On the Formation of Capital and Wealth: IT, Monopoly Power and Rising Inequality” (Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Working Paper 17-016, 2017). 19.In mid-twentieth-century capitalism, corporations with market power shared their monopoly rents with their unionized workers.

A quick search of “patent infringement” shows numerous cases, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, between Qualcomm and Apple, Apple and Samsung, and so forth. The only sure winners in all of these suits are the lawyers; the only sure losers are consumers and small firms unable to enter the fray. Such is American-style capitalism in the twenty-first century. Our “innovative” firms do not rest their anticompetitive practices there. They have pioneered new contractual arrangements to leverage their market power. In credit cards, these new contractual forms do not allow, for instance, stores to charge customers who use credit cards with high rewards—and high merchant fees—for the use of these high-cost credit cards.

These insights fly in the face of Reagan-style “supply-side” policies, based on the assumptions that deregulation would free up the economy, lower taxes would incentivize it, and the two together would lead to economic growth. However, after Reagan’s reforms, growth actually slowed. Deregulation, especially of the financial market, brought us the downturns of 1991, 2001, and most grievously, the Great Recession of 2008. And lower taxes did not have the energizing effect that supply-siders claimed. Thomas Piketty and his coauthors have documented that lowering top tax rates has actually been accompanied by unchanged or lower growth around the world.43 As anticipated by the critics of these tax cuts, neither Reagan’s cuts for the rich nor the later cuts enacted under George W. Bush led to increased labor supply or savings44—and accordingly, neither led to faster growth.45 Evidently, there is much less than meets the eye to “supply-side” economics and its faith in the unfettered free market as the path to growth.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Inequality’s modern critics no doubt employ a less systematic method and strike a more moderate tone, but the conventional wisdom to this day pursues a similar style of argument, a variation on Marx’s rentier theme. Critics still commonly connect economic inequality to the familiar political and economic battle between capital and labor, associating the rich with capital and inequality’s increase with capital’s renewed dominance. Thomas Piketty’s formidable book Capital in the Twenty-First Century gives this view its now-canonical statement. Familiar laments about the decline of labor unions, rising market power among large employers, and outsourcing and globalization also share this general attitude. These complaints capture something real. Unions have been systematically dismantled in recent decades.

outright fraud: See, e.g., Russell Sobel, “Crony Capitalism Pays Well for Rent-Seeking CEOs,” Investor’s Business Daily, July 9, 2014, accessed June 14, 2018, www.investors.com/politics/commentary/political-activity-and-connections-dont-make-business-profitable/. a rising oligarchy: See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Hereafter cited as Piketty, Capital. denounce real targets: In addition to Piketty’s work, canonical accounts along these lines include Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W.

., 181, 317nn(18), 330n(67), 335n(87), 337n(93), 341n(104), 351n(127), 352n(130), 355n(134), 364n(166), 365n(171), 366nn(174), 369n(179), 371–72nn(182–83), 375nn(185–87), 383n(220), 396n(267), 401n(282), 402nn(293, 298), burnout, 43 Bush, Barbara, 229 Bush, George W., 68, 197, 198, 224 Bush, Jenna, 229 campaign financing, 52 Cantor, Eric, 57 capital asset pricing model, 237–38 capital deepening, 253–54 capital dominance, 13, 15, 18, 88–89, 92–94 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 88 Cappelli, Peter, 333n(83), 358nn(140–41), 359n(141), 364n(167), 365nn(169–70), 366–67nn(173–74, 176), 368nn(176–77), 370n(180), 371n(182), 379n(203), 392n(248) Carnegie, Andrew, 51 Carnevale, Anthony, 353n(132), 354n(132), 356nn(136), 359nn(141), 372nn (182–83), 374n(183), 403nn(305) carried interest, 91–92 casino lobby, 54 celebrities, 85, 97 Census Bureau, U.S., 314n(3), 316n(13), 318nn(21–23), 319nn(23, 25), 322nn(41), 324n(46), 325nn(48, 50), 334nn(85–86), 339nn(99–100), 340–41nn(102–4), 345n(117), 346nn(118), 349n(125), 350–51n(126–27), 354nn(132–33), 357n(138), 359nn(141–42), 365n(169), 368nn(177–78), 372nn(182), 375n(186), 378n(201), 382nn(216), 393n(251), 401n(292), 402n(293), 403nn(305–6) Center for American Progress, 283 CEOs.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

For an awful lot of people, work has become a less certain and often less remunerative contributor to material security. It is a development that makes political forces of populist outsiders, such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, and bestsellers of wonky economics books, such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,10 an analysis of global inequality published in 2014 that flew off the shelves. Work is not just the means by which we obtain the resources needed to put food on the table. It is also a source of personal identity. It helps give structure to our days and our lives. It offers the possibility of personal fulfilment that comes from being of use to others, and it is a critical part of the glue that holds society together and smoothes its operation.

Authors like Martin Ford, whose 2015 book Rise of the Robots20 described a vision of a post-work world, argue that robots and machine intelligence will create a world wholly different from anything that has come before, and that a techno-socialism of sorts will need to be adopted to keep society functioning. Economist Thomas Piketty’s aforementioned masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, set out a bold theory of inequality and predicted trouble ahead, as did Chris Hayes, whose book Twilight of the Elites21 was an incisive examination of the loss of faith in elite institutions and technocrats, who have struggled to manage recent economic change.

The rising tide didn’t wash away inequities, but it kept both capital and labour satisfied enough to hold the revolution at bay. From 1875 until the eve of the First World War, the world’s industrialized economies were extraordinarily unequal, but rising living standards for workers kept revolutionary fervour in check. Yet societies were not exactly living harmoniously, either. As Thomas Piketty notes, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it took the turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century to undo the inequality that developed in the nineteenth. War, taxation, inflation and economic depression destroyed many of the great fortunes of the industrial era. They ushered in an entirely new state structure, in which extensive taxation was used to fund massive welfare states.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Wilkinson and Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level argues that inequality leads to crime, poor health, and unhappiness not just among the poor but also across society.6 In 2011, the Occupy movement popularised the meme of “The 99%,” highlighting the dichotomy between a rich elite and the population as a whole. And Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought decades of empirical work on wealth inequality to bear on the public debate.7 FIGURE 1.3: Growth by Income Group in the World, 1980–2016. Source: Figure E4 in Alvardero et al. (2020). We observe the material inequality in rich countries both in people’s wealth and in their income.

Intangible investment allows professional services employers to replace egalitarian work cultures, where pay is often based on seniority, with sharply incentivised ones, where workers “eat what they kill.” The rise of intangible investment also has an indirect but powerful effect on wealth inequality. Following the publication of Thomas Piketty’s landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it became clear that a significant proportion of the increased wealth inequality that Piketty observed (almost all of it, according to Matt Rognlie)11 derived from the dizzying increase in property prices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These increases did not arise everywhere.

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Philippon, Thomas. 2019. The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Porta, Rafael La, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny. 1997. “Legal Determinants of External Finance.” Journal of Finance 52 (3): 1131. https://doi.org/10.2307/2329518. Posner, Eric, and E. Glen Weyl. 2018. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

This is why Tinbergen expected the skill premium to go to zero.2 But here too, the very opposite has happened: the skill premium has shown a strong increase in most advanced countries during the past twenty years. Note also that Tinbergen’s theory, like Kuznets’s, holds that inequality should be expected to decrease with development—a conclusion that is unambiguously contradicted by the facts. It was Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book of extraordinary breadth and influence, that presented a theory to effectively displace Kuznets’s. The problem was how to explain both the decrease in inequality in rich countries in the period 1918–1980 and its subsequent increase. Piketty argued that the decrease was a special and unusual event driven by the political forces of wars, taxation to finance the wars, socialist ideology and movements, and economic convergence (which kept the growth rate of wages above the growth rate of income from property).

Inequality as measured by the land rent/wage ratio probably went down in both cases, but not equally.18 Another type of catastrophic event that reduces inequality is war. For modern societies, the argument that war can be a force for equality, if an unwelcome one, recently received much attention in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It was already present in Piketty’s earlier work on French inequality (2001a), which showed how inequality was affected by World War I and its aftermath. War reduces inequality through physical destruction of capital and inflation (creating real losses for creditors), resulting in a general decrease of income received from property.

The traditional one, espoused largely by Kuznets himself, is that it was a product of various economic forces: a gradual end to the structural transformation whereby most of the population moved into urban areas and into manufacturing (thus eliminating the rural/urban gap that is one of the important contributors to inequality); increased schooling, which reduced the education premium (an explanation especially favored by Tinbergen [1975] and Goldin and Katz [2010]); the aging of the population, and thus greater demand for social services (social security, nationalized health), which in turn required greater taxation of the rich; and, possibly in the background, the need for greater social cohesion in the context of wars, including the Cold War, which meant that financing of wars should fall mostly on the rich.35 The second explanation, favored by Piketty, not only in his most recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but also in his earlier book Les Hauts revenus en France, published in 2001, is, unlike Kuznets’s theory, primarily a political theory. According to Piketty, the two world wars not only led to higher taxes but also destroyed property and reduced large fortunes. This was particularly true in France, which provided a template for his later work.36 In his book on France, Piketty shows that the concentration of capital declined after the wars and the largest French fortunes never recovered: around the year 2000, the highest-valued estates were still worth less than before World War I.37 The lower concentration of wealth combined with a lower capital-output ratio (because of the destruction of capital) resulted in a reduction of revenues from capital and a reduction of inequality.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Using the neoliberal UK as its primary focus, this book explores the forms that Western rentier capitalism takes, the factors accounting for its materialization, and the consequences of its ascendancy. In recent years, much has been written about Western rentierism and rentier capitalism by some of the world’s highest-profile commentators on the economy. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, was a catalytic intervention in this regard.1 It is not a book about rent and rentiers per se; its primary focus is inequality. But rent is a pivotal variable in the book and in Piketty’s theorization of capitalism. As is by now well known, Piketty argues that, unless actively checked, wealth inequality tends under capitalism inexorably to rise because of the famous r > g dynamic, where g represents the rate of economic growth and r represents the rate of return on capital, or the rate at which rents can be extracted from the existing stock of assets.

This ideology legitimizes wage deflation, and thus the channelling of income and wealth into the hands of manipulative capitalist rentiers. What is needed above all, then, is a fundamental revaluation of work and of what workers do. Notably, Piketty’s own follow-up to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2020’s Capital and Ideology, treads similar ground.18 Where Capital in the Twenty-First Century examined how and why capitalism creates inequality (giving a starring if abstracted role to rent), Capital and Ideology examines how social elites – capitalist or otherwise – historically have ideologically justified such inequality; and although rent and the rentier barely merit a mention this time, it is indisputably rentier capitalist societies whose ‘inequality regimes’ (his term) Piketty is principally concerned to elucidate.

Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 360. 61. Land Reform Review Group, The Land of Scotland and the Common Good (Edinburgh: Scottish Government, 2014), p. 87. 62. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 115–16. 63. D. Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2014), pp. 139–40. 64. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 395. 65. Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, pp. 355, 298. 66. K. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in T. Carver, ed., Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 31–127, at p. 57. 67.


pages: 295 words: 90,821

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

But the evidence indicates that taxation and regulation did not have a significant effect on the ability of firms to produce real goods and services, and specifically there was no substantial shift in government policies around 2000 that could explain the growth slowdown. 15 Did Inequality Cause the Slowdown? From the Occupy Wall Street movement to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economic inequality has gathered a lot of attention over the previous decade. And given that this coincided with the growth slowdown, it is natural to wonder whether inequality was a material cause of the slowdown in any way. From the perspective of the growth slowdown, though, the best way to view the rise in inequality is as just another symptom of the increasing market power of firms that we’ve already discussed rather than a separate cause in and of itself.

The evidence here shows that much of the increase in inequality came from an increase in the wages earned by the top 1%. This shift toward wage income as a source of top-end inequality represented a distinct change from inequality in the past. The Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data gives us some information on the top 1%, but Thomas Piketty’s data from Capital in the Twenty-First Century provides more extensive insight into the fraction of income that is accounted for by capital (dividends, capital gains), labor (wages), and mixed income for subsets of the top 10%. Figure 15.3 shows wages as a percentage of total income for different groups within the top 10% for both 1929 and 2007.

The real source of that decline in your tomato yield was the drought the year before, which in turn affected your ability to invest. The tomato analogy is oversimplified, but the same principle applies to talking about physical capital accumulation in the economy. Because physical capital depends on our ability to produce real GDP, the drop in the growth rate of physical capital in the twenty-first century may be as much a consequence of the growth slowdown as it is a cause. While arguments could be made that both human capital and the residual suffer from the same issue, they suffer far less than physical capital does. Lower growth in real GDP could, for example, limit the resources available to staff schools or universities, but most of the changes in human capital growth are driven by the demographics of people aging into or out of the labor force.


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

Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2013; Simon Johnson and James Kwak, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You, Vintage Books, New York, 2012; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014; Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can be Done? Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015; Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Public Affairs Press, New York, 2015; Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide, Penguin, London, 2014; J.

Theodore Pelagidis, “Why Internal Devaluation is Not Leading to Export-Led Growth in Greece,” Brookings Online, September 12, 2014, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/09/12-internal-devaluation-export-growth-greece-pelagidis. 10. “Pour l’économiste Thomas Piketty: Macron, c’est ‘l’Europe d’hier’,” Le Point, February 20, 2017, http://www.lepoint.fr/presidentielle/pour-l-economiste-thomas-piketty-macron-c-est-l-europe-d-hier-19-02-2017-2105950_3121.php#section-commentaires. 11. “Emmanuel Macron proposes Nordic economic model for France,” Financial Times, February 23, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/3691a448-fa1d-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65. 12.

During the presidential campaign, he was frequently accused of lacking specifics. To many on the left and the extreme right, he is a neoliberal, with little to distinguish himself from the mainstream policies of austerity that failed Europe and brought it to its current political impasse. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who supported the socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, described Macron as representing “yesterday’s Europe.”10 Many of Macron’s economic plans did indeed have a neoliberal flavor. He has vowed to lower the corporate tax rate from 33.5 percent to 25 percent, cut 120,000 civil service jobs, keep the government deficit below the EU limit of 3 percent of GDP, and increase labor-market flexibility (a euphemism for making it easier for firms to fire workers).


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Voters know that something is rotten in capitalism, and the elite does as well. If voting for political outsiders is what the average person does, then pretending to read weighty books on capitalism is what the elite does. Nothing highlights the search for a diagnosis of our ills more than the extraordinary, puzzling success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A 700-page economics book that is full of data tables and charts is hardly anyone's idea of a bestseller. There were no murder cases like in a Grisham book or any magical spells like in a J.K. Rowling book, yet Piketty's book sold more than 1.5 million copies. Everyone bought and pretended to read the book.

Who cared about hundreds of pages of text when he had such good charts? Figure 10.1 Income Inequality in the United States, 1910–2015 The reviews of the book were ecstatic, even rapturous. The Economist said it was “the economics book that took the world by storm.” According to the Financial Times, “Thomas Piketty's book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, has been the publishing sensation of the year. Its thesis of rising inequality tapped into the zeitgeist and electrified the post-financial crisis public policy debate.” Lawrence Summers's said this research “has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize–worthy contribution.”

In Houston, United has around a 60% market share, in Newark 51%, in Washington Dulles 43%, in San Francisco 38%, and in Chicago 31%.5 This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80% market share in in Atlanta and 77% in Philadelphia, while in Dallas-Fort Worth it has 77%.6 For many routes, you simply have no choice. The episode became a metaphor for American capitalism in the twenty-first century. A highly profitable company had bloodied a consumer, and it didn't matter because consumers have no choice. When consumers see a man bloodied by a big company or see a suffering patient gouged by a hospital, they get the sense that something is profoundly wrong with companies. All around the world, people have an overwhelming sense that something is broken.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

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

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

These data come from World Inequality Database, https:/​/​wid.​world/​data/​ and Office for National Statistics, Effects of taxes and benefits on household income: historical datasets, https:/​/​www.​ons.​gov.​uk/​peoplepopulationandcommunity/​personalandhouseholdfinances/​incomeandwealth/​datasets/​theeffectsoftaxesandbenefitsonhouseholdincomehistoricaldatasets 6 Quoted by Schwab, K. (2018) Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Penguin Radom House: London, p. 23. 7 Kelly, K. (2012) Better than Human: Why Robots Will – and Must – Take Our Jobs, Wired, December 24, 2012, p. 155. 8 Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. (2016) The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress, And Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 157. 9 Ibid., p. 179. 10 Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 11 See “Thomas Piketty’s Capital, Summarised in Four Paragraphs,” The Economist, May 2014, Lawrence Summers, “The Inequality Puzzle, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, No. 33 (Summer 2014; Mervyn King, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty,” review, The Daily Telegraph, May 10, 2014. 12 See M. Feldstein in G. Wood and Steve Hughes, (eds) (2015) The Central Contradiction of Capitalism?

So, globalization and digitization have been two powerful forces operating over the last two decades to drive an increase in inequality. And now into this world of burgeoning inequality there steps a Frenchman bearing (intellectual) gifts. In 2014 Thomas Piketty published a book explaining the trend toward increased inequality in a different and powerful way and forecasting that it would intensify. Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an international publishing sensation. It has proved to be the launching pad for thousands of books, academic papers, and PhD theses.10 Piketty’s thesis is that the distribution of wealth and income is set to become ever more unequal because, quite simply, the return on capital exceeds the economic growth rate.

Third, Chris Giles, the Economics Editor of the Financial Times, has shown that there are serious problems with Piketty’s data at a detailed level, including discrepancies between the data in original sources and Piketty’s reproduction of them, as well as the crude insertion of “assumed” data where there are gaps in the original data. Giles says that: “The conclusions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century do not appear to be backed by the book’s own sources.”14 Theory and evidence Given how devastating these criticisms of Piketty’s data are, you might well think that it is superfluous to comment on the theoretical defects of Piketty’s thesis. Nevertheless, we should briefly consider the theory.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Ross, Life of Adam Smith, p. 302. 26.  Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk IV, ch. 5, Digression concerning the Corn Trade and Corn Laws, para. 43. 2 – David Ricardo: Do Trade Deficits Matter? 1.    John E. King, 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 5. 2.    Ibid., pp. 15–16. 3.    Thomas Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 314–15. 4.    Nicholas Crafts, 2005, ‘The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 3(2/3), pp. 525–34. 5.    David Ricardo, 2011 [1817], The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol.

Myth and Reality’, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science Discussion Paper No. 1246; http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf Pigou, A. C., 1953, Alfred Marshall and Current Thought, London: Macmillan Pigou, A. C., ed., 1925, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, London: Macmillan Piketty, Thomas, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Ranelagh, John, 1991, Thatcher’s People: An Insider’s Account of the Politics, the Power and the Personalities, London: HarperCollins Reagan, Ronald, 1986, ‘The President’s News Conference’, 12 August; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37733 ________, 1986, ‘Remarks to State Chairpersons of the National White House Conference on Small Business’, 15 August; www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speeches/1986/081586e.html Reich, Robert, 2012, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It, New York: Vintage Books Ricardo, David, 2011 [1817], On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: John Murray Robinson, Joan, 1932, Economics is a Serious Subject: The Apologia of an Economist to the Mathematician, the Scientist and the Plain Man, Cambridge: Heffer ________, 1962, Economic Philosophy, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books ________, 1969 [1933], The Economics of Imperfect Competition, London: Palgrave Macmillan ________, 1974, Reflections on the Theory of International Trade: Lectures Given in the University of Manchester, Manchester: Manchester University Press ________, 1980, ‘Marx, Marshall, and Keynes’, Collected Economic Papers, vols.

How would Marshall have viewed inequalities that have burgeoned as the benefits of a growing economy disproportionately accrue to the top 1 per cent? There’s no doubt that inequality is high on the policy agenda, a reminder that we must consider the quality and not just the speed of economic growth. A best-selling book on the topic of inequality is by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Its popularity reflects a widespread concern that inequality is as high now in America as the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. A recent economics Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, has even pointed to inequality as one of the causes of the slow recovery after the Great Recession. So, how would Marshall view the worsening of income inequality which is often perceived as an indictment of capitalism?


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Ross, Life of Adam Smith, p. 302. 26. Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk IV, ch. 5, Digression concerning the Corn Trade and Corn Laws, para. 43. Chapter 2 – David Ricardo: Do Trade Deficits Matter? 1. John E. King, 2013, David Ricardo, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 5. 2. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 3. Thomas Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 314–15. 4. Nicholas Crafts, 2005, ‘The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 3(2/3), pp. 525–34. 5. David Ricardo, 2011 [1817], The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol.

Myth and Reality’, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science Discussion Paper No. 1246; http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf Pigou, A. C., 1953, Alfred Marshall and Current Thought, London: Macmillan Pigou, A. C., ed., 1925, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, London: Macmillan Piketty, Thomas, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Ranelagh, John, 1991, Thatcher’s People: An Insider’s Account of the Politics, the Power and the Personalities, London: HarperCollins Reagan, Ronald, 1986, ‘The President’s News Conference’, 12 August; www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37733 ———, 1986, ‘Remarks to State Chairpersons of the National White House Conference on Small Business’, 15 August; www.reaganlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/archives/speeches/1986/081586e.htm Reich, Robert, 2012, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It, New York: Vintage Books Ricardo, David, 2011 [1817], On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, London: John Murray Robinson, Joan, 1932, Economics is a Serious Subject: The Apologia of an Economist to the Mathematician, the Scientist and the Plain Man, Cambridge: Heffer ———, 1962, Economic Philosophy, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books ———, 1969 [1933], The Economics of Imperfect Competition, London: Palgrave Macmillan ———, 1974, Reflections on the Theory of International Trade: Lectures Given in the University of Manchester, Manchester: Manchester University Press ———, 1980, ‘Marx, Marshall, and Keynes’, Collected Economic Papers, vols.

How would Marshall have viewed inequalities that have burgeoned as the benefits of a growing economy disproportionately accrue to the top 1 per cent? There’s no doubt that inequality is high on the policy agenda, a reminder that we must consider the quality and not just the speed of economic growth. A best-selling book on the topic of inequality is by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Its popularity reflects a widespread concern that inequality is as high now in America as the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. A recent economics Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, has even pointed to inequality as one of the causes of the slow recovery after the Great Recession. So, how would Marshall view the worsening of income inequality which is often perceived as an indictment of capitalism?


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

Adam Swift, “Justice, Luck, and the Family: The Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Advantage from a Normative Perspective,” in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, edited by Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 267. 2. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 419. 3. William Mosher, Jo Jones, and Joyce Abma, Intended and Unintended Births in the United States: 1982–2010, National Health Statistics Report 55 (Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, July 24, 2012) (www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr055.pdf). 4.

Producing another volume about class and inequality might then seem redundant. But I think some of the most popular efforts to date have diagnosed the class fracture incorrectly. Some analysts have let the upper middle class off the hook (yes, that would be you) by pointing at the “super-rich” or “top 1 percent.” Take the new rock star of economic history, Thomas Piketty. For him, inequality is pretty much all about the top 1 percent. Others have looked through a slightly wider lens. In Coming Apart, Charles Murray describes an isolated “New Upper Class,” comprised of the most successful adults (and their spouses), working in managerial positions, the professions, or with senior jobs in the media.

But he adds: “What one’s children are like is not.”1 Children raised in upper middle-class families do well in life. As a result, there is a lot of intergenerational “stickiness” at the top of the American income distribution—more, in fact, than at the bottom—with upper middle-class status passed down from one generation to the next, as I’ll show in the next chapter. As Thomas Piketty writes in Capital: “A society structured by the hierarchy of wealth has been replaced by a society whose structure relies almost entirely on the hierarchy of labor and human capital.”2 Piketty cites American TV shows (House, Bones, The West Wing) as evidence of a belief in the moral virtue of learning, brains, and hard work.


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Thus we might have a discussion about the cross-country linkages at an informal, journalistic level but no attempt to weave together a systematic theoretical account. But evidence of long cycles can still be seen in data even when we analyze single countries. Recently Thomas Piketty has analyzed the long-run trends in inequality in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He finds evidence of long cycles of 40 to 50 years. Thus the share of labor income in Britain peaks in 1920 and again in 1970. In France the wage share exhibits a 40-year cycle with peaks in 1900, 1940 and 1980. In the US, Piketty’s data show a fall in income inequality from a peak in 1940 which is regained in the mid-1990s.1 Given the average length of 40 to 50 years, there can only have been about four or five cycles since the Industrial Revolution.

See also Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, with a new epilogue (Penguin, New York, 2008). 7.Financial Services Authority, The Turner Review: A Regulatory Response to the Global Banking Crisis (Financial Services Authority, London, 2009), p. 39. 8.The case for the Keynesians is argued by Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (Penguin, London, 2009). 9.Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1963). 10.For the background to the euro, see David Marsh, The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009). 7 The Search for an Answer 1.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), see figure 6.1, p. 200; figure 6.2, p. 201; figure 8.5, p. 291. 2.Meghnad Desai, “An Econometric Model of the Share of Wages in National Income: UK 1855–1965” (1984), republished in The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai, vol. 1: Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1995). 3.Andrew Glyn and Robert Sutcliffe, “The Collapse of UK Profits,” New Left Review, 66 (Mar.

See also Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, with a new epilogue (Penguin, New York, 2008). 7.Financial Services Authority, The Turner Review: A Regulatory Response to the Global Banking Crisis (Financial Services Authority, London, 2009), p. 39. 8.The case for the Keynesians is argued by Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master (Penguin, London, 2009). 9.Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1963). 10.For the background to the euro, see David Marsh, The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2009). 7 The Search for an Answer 1.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014), see figure 6.1, p. 200; figure 6.2, p. 201; figure 8.5, p. 291. 2.Meghnad Desai, “An Econometric Model of the Share of Wages in National Income: UK 1855–1965” (1984), republished in The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai, vol. 1: Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1995). 3.Andrew Glyn and Robert Sutcliffe, “The Collapse of UK Profits,” New Left Review, 66 (Mar.–Apr. 1971). 4.Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, “The Crisis of the Early 21st Century: Marxian Perspectives,” in R. Bellofiore and G. Vertova, eds, The Great Recession and the Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2014). 5.Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, ch. 5. 6.Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009). 7.Lawrence Summers, “Why Stagnation May Prove to Be the New Normal,” Financial Times, Dec. 15, 2013. 8.Julia Leung, The Tides of Capital: How Asia Surmounted the Crisis and Is Now Guiding World Recovery (Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, London, 2015). 9.Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), trans.


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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

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

Lesson Nine: The World Is Becoming Bipolar 187 “failed state”: George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State,” Atlantic, June 2020. 187 “secular stagnation”: Lawrence H. Summers, “Reflections on Secular Stagnation,” February 19, 2015, remarks at Princeton University’s Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance. 187 highlighted rising inequality: See, inter alia, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 187 “deaths of despair”: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 188 Fintan O’Toole: Fintan O’Toole, “Donald Trump Has Destroyed the Country He Promised to Make Great Again,” Irish Times, April 25, 2020.

Lesson Seven: Inequality Will Get Worse 147 “death is democratic”: Adriana Gomez Licon, “Mexican Day of Dead ‘Skeleton Lady’ Spreads Look,” Associated Press, October 31, 2013. 147 La Catrina: Simon Ingram, “La Catrina: The Dark History of Day of the Dead’s Immortal Icon,” National Geographic, October 18, 2019. 147 The Skull of Morbid Cholera: José Guadalupe Posada, La calavera del cólera morbo (1910), accessed via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/99615954/. 148 “a very big problem”: Richard Wike, “The Global Consensus: Inequality Is a Major Problem,” Pew Research, November 15, 2013, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/11/15/the-global-consensus-inequality-is-a-major-problem/. 148 narrowing over the same period: Taking on Inequality: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016, The World Bank Group, 9, 81, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/25078/9781464809583.pdf. 149 forty-two saw rises: “Table 4.1: Trends in the Within-Country Gini Index, 1993–2013,” Taking on Inequality: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016, The World Bank Group, 86, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/25078/9781464809583.pdf. 149 two where it fell: Ibid, 88. 149 twelve of the sixteen: Ibid. 149 gap has widened dramatically: Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “World Inequality Report 2018,” 46, https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report-english.pdf. 150 highest level since 1928: Markus P. A. Schneider and Daniele Tavani, “Tale of Two Ginis in the United States, 1921–2012,” Levy Institute Working Paper (January 2015), http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_826.pdf; see also Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics, excerpted figures and tables, Table 1.1, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014FiguresTables.pdf. 150 “defining challenge”: Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, December 4, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/04/remarks-president-economic-mobility. 151 five years ahead of schedule: United Nations, “Millennium Development Goals Report 2015,” 15, https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20rev%20(July%201).pdf. 151 to 650 million: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty. 151 mortality rate for young children dropped 59%: “Under-Five Mortality,” Global Health Observatory (GHO) data, WHO, https://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/mortality_under_five_text/en/#:~:text=Trends,1%20in%2026%20in%202018. 151 just 14% of the world’s known deaths from Covid-19: Philip Schelle­kens and Diego Sourrouille, “Tracking COVID-19 as Cause of Death: Global Estimates of Relative Severity,” Brookings Institution, May 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Tracking_COVID-19_as_-Cause_of_Death-Global_Estimates_of_Severity.pdf. 151 Heat may have some effect: Islam et al., “Temperature, Humidity, and Wind Speed Are Associated with Lower COVID-19 Incidence,” 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.27.20045658, cited in: Rapid Expert Consultation on SARS-CoV-2 Survival in Relation to Temperature and Humidity and Potential for Seasonality for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 7, 2020), National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, https://www.nap.edu/read/25771/chapter/1. 152 170 million in 2019: “Chinese Tourists Made 169 Million Outbound Trips in 2019: Report,” China Global Television Network, February 29, 2020, citing China’s National Bureau of Statistics, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020–02–29/Chinese-tourists-made-169-million-outbound-trips-in-2019-report-OtIYWsZmOQ/index.html. 152 thirty times: “Dharavi slum has a population density almost 30 times greater than New York—about 280,000 people per square kilometer”: Vedika Sud, Helen Regen, and Esha Mitra, Mercury News, citing CNN, April 4, 2020, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/03/doctors-india-must-prepare-for-onslaught-of-coronavirus/. 152 two-thirds of people live in congested slums: According to Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing, as of 2019: Paul Wallace and Tope Alake, “Lagos Building Luxury Homes in Face of Affordable Housing Crisis,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2019. 152 eight hospital beds for every 10,000 people: World Bank DataBank, “Hospital Beds (Per 1,000 People)—Bangladesh, European Union, United States,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?

A study looking at college admissions from 1999 to 2013 found a staggering result—the top 1% of earners are seventy-seven times more likely to have a child attend Ivy League or other elite schools, compared to poorer children from families in the bottom 20% of earners. Meanwhile, as the economist Thomas Piketty and others have noted, investment income is growing faster than wages. And as we have seen, routine work—at first blue-collar and now increasingly white-collar—can be done by someone in a low-wage country or a computer. The premium that labor could once command simply does not exist in a postindustrial world.


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The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf

air freight, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fragmentation, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, very high income, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

On the forces driving inequality and their consequences, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: OECD, 2011), Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future (New York and London: Norton, 2012), and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, and London, England, 2014). 59. See, in particular, a remarkable paper by Christoph Lakner and Branco Milanovic of the World Bank, ‘Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession’, World Bank Research Working Paper 6719, December 2013, http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2013/12/11/000158349_20131211100152/Rendered/PDF/WPS6719.pdf. 60.

Mervyn King, ‘Banking from Bagehot to Basel, and Back Again’, 25 October 2010, The Second Bagehot Lecture, Buttonwood Gathering, New York City, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2010/speech455.pdf, p. 18. 4. Luc Laeven and Fabian Valencia, ‘Systemic Crises Database: An Update’, International Monetary Fund Working Paper, WP/12/163, June 2102, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12163.pdf. 5. This proposition is supported by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2014). 6. For a detailed discussion of the evolution of real interest rates, see International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2014, ch. 3, http://www.imf.org/external/Pubs/ft/weo/2014/01/. 7.

A fully worked out plan for such a reform is in Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson, Modernising Money: Why our Monetary System is Broken and How it Can be Fixed (London: Positive Money, 2013). 17. See Andrew Smithers, The Road to Recovery: How and Why Economic Policy Must Change (London: Wiley, 2013). 18. See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Part Four. 19. For elements of the new Eurozone policy system, see ‘Stability and Growth Pact’, http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/economic_governance/sgp/index_en.htm; ‘Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure’, http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/economic_governance/macroeconomic_imbalance_procedure/index_en.htm; ‘Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance’ (also known as the Fiscal Compact), http://european-council.europa.eu/media/639235/st00tscg26_en12.pdf; ‘European Semester’, http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/making-it-happen; ‘Euro Plus Pact’, http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/pdf/euro_plus_pact_background_december_2011_en.pdf; and ‘European Stability Mechanism’, http://www.esm.europa.eu/index.htm; ‘European Financial Supervision’, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/finances/committees; and ‘Banking Union’, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/finances/banking-union. 20.


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The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The lines in figure 1 were horizontal before 1970, but they are continuing their movements after 2014. Figure 1 shows that the income share lost by the middle class went to people earning more than double the median income. In short, the rich got richer, the poor did not disappear, and the middle class shrank sharply. We know from the work of Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that inequality has been increasing since 1970.2 Now we see that the income distribution is hollowing out. We are on our way to become a nation of the rich and the poor with only a few people in the middle. Figure 1 Percent of aggregate U.S. household income. Note: The assignment to income tiers is based on size-adjusted household incomes in the year prior to the survey year.

John Edwards, a presidential candidate, observed in 2004, “We shouldn’t have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck.”1 Where did the rest of the national product go? Not to the lower group shown in figure 1. It went instead to the upper group as shown in figure 3. This well-known graph comes from Thomas Piketty, author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, and his colleagues who have developed data for the richest 1 percent of the population for many countries as far back as the data allow. The top group in figure 1 contains 20 percent of the population, and the path of what is called the “one percent” shows the pattern.

Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013; Ferguson 1995; Hacker and Pierson 2010; Gilens and Page 2014. 5. Autor 2015; Feinstein 1998. 6. Dewey 1935, 62; Piketty 2014, 481. 7. Heckman, Pinto, and Savelyev 2013. 8. Kremer 1993. 9. Dewey 1935, 66; Rawls 1999. Appendix: Models of Inequality The big book about inequality around the world is Thomas Piketty’s classic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty worked mainly with tax data from various countries, and his sample was restricted to those developed countries that had good records extending back into history. In terms of figure 7, he focused on the growth of the global elite. And to show that politics matter, he contrasted the experiences of France and the United States.


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How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

For example, a 2018 paper: Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina, “Expertise in Journalism: Factors Shaping a Cognitive and Culturally Elite Profession,” Journal of Expertise 1, no. 1 (June 2018): 57–78. Some of the most important work: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Piketty’s 2018 article “Brahmin”: Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict,” WID.world Working Paper 7, 2018. the paper found that income: “Educated Voters’ Leftward Shift Is Surprisingly Old and International,” The Economist, May 29, 2021, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/29/educated-voters-leftward-shift-is-surprisingly-old-and-international.

To understand where we are, it’s essential to understand the rise of educational polarization as a defining factor—perhaps the defining factor for the more politically educated and engaged—in contemporary American political life. Education polarization refers to the way that the education level of a certain group predicts their ideological and political affiliation. Some of the most important work on educational polarization has been conducted by Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose bestselling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argued that wealth inequality rises over time due to the structural relationship between interest and growth. The book caused a sensation, a remarkable feat for a dry academic text of economic history. Following its success, Piketty aimed to explain why traditional divides in ideological coalitions appeared to be changing—why the left, so long the political vehicle of the common man, was becoming associated with elitism.

., 110 Biden, Joe, 41, 42, 50, 197 Black Americans and “Black bodies,” 201 classes among, 65 current status of, 47 education of, 47, 66 as liberal Democrats, 136 as moderate Democrats, 64 non-police violence against, 59–63 police presence desired by, 57–58, 64 police violence against, 47–49, 55–57, 199–200 professional-managerial class of, 54–68 and racial politics, 74–76 unjustified killing of, 37, 45–46, 55–57 violence within community of, 37, 59–62 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 45–77, 213 achievements of, 67–68 and defunding police, 38, 51–54 and Floyd’s murder, 6 lack of coherent demands of, 43 money donated to, 70–71 organizational difficulties in, 43 perceived criticisms of, 34, 35 profiteering from, 70–72 and racial violence, 47–51 responses to, 68–77 riots with, 94 those who speak for, 64–67 violence at protests of, 81 and voices for racial justice, 53–64 Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, 71 Bland, Sandra, 46 bobos, 137–139, 142 Bobos in Paradise (Brooks), 137 Bond, Lisa, 72 “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right” (Piketty), 145 Bridgespan Group, 102 Bright, Liam Kofi, 63, 70 British NHS pamphlet, 202, 203 Brookings Institution, 167–168 Brooks, David, 137, 138, 142 Brown, Michael, 46 Bush, Cori, 52 Bush, George W., 14, 16, 25, 189 Campbell, David, 146 canceling, 132 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 144–145 capitalism, 52, 91–92, 135, 140–141 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 76, 77 Castro, Fidel, 93 “centering,” 176 Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), 3 Central Park Karen, 56 Chait, Jonathan, 25, 34 Charity Navigator, 101, 103 Chauvin, Derek, 5, 14, 39 civil rights movement, 69–70, 75, 182 class(es) Black, 65 and Occupy movement, 19 organizing along lines of, 194–197 revolutionary, 215 upper-middle, 150–151 class-first leftism, 164–192 advantages of, 174–183 both/and arguments in, 187–192 class reductionist view vs., 168–174 as pejorative term, 164–165 problems with, 196–197 and right-wing identity politics, 183–187 salience of, 168 class reductionists, 168–174 Clinton, Bill, 27, 28 Clinton, Hillary, 27–31, 152, 165–168, 186 Clough, Alina, 100–101 Coffey, Clare, 140–141 Cohn, Nate, 145–146, 148 Common Dreams, 106 communism, 29, 152, 190 Community Justice Action Fund, 60 Confederate statues, 81–82 Conference on College Composition and Communication, 67 Connecticut United for Peace (CutUP), 2 consensus decision-making, 23–24 conservatism, 114 conservatives as “classical liberals,” 134 Clinton obsession of, 27 Democrats identifying as, 136 focus of, 203 fundamental message of, 186 home field advantage of, 43 King presented as pacifist by, 85 and meritocratic system, 142 Obama as, 17 Republicans identifying as, 136 self-professed, 210–211 and violence among and toward Black people, 37 consistency, in justice, 123–125 conspiracy theories, 204 Cosby, Bill, 120 Cotton, Tom, 56 Covid-19 pandemic, 5, 13–14, 32, 41 crime, 37, 59–62 criminal justice reforms, 7, 49–54 Cuba, 88, 92, 93 Cuomo, Andrew, 122–123 D’Arcy, Stephen, 69 Davis, Angela, 51 Debs, Eugene, 9 decision-making, 19, 21–24 deep state, 114–115 deference politics, 155–163 defunding police, 38, 51–54, 58, 62–64 demands carefully developed and expressed, 117 coherent, 19–20, 43, 172 essential purpose of, 20 following Floyd murder, 38–39 framing of, 181–182 from #MeToo movement, 132 for political violence, 78–79 democracy, American, 92 Democratic National Committee, 41 Democratic Party as center-right party, 78 and education polarization, 148–149 leftist complaints about, 11 as left-leaning party, 135–136 liberals in, 136, 137 (see also liberals) messaging around economic issues in, 197 nonprofits as vehicles for, 107 and Obama’s cult of personality, 17 as overwhelmingly white, 136 as party of elites, 31 Perez appointment influenced by, 41 and political action, 207–209 Sanders’ impact on, 29 2016 primaries of, 27–29, 165–168 in 2020 election, 11, 40–42 2008 primaries of, 27 voters’ disillusionment with, 28 youth in, 79 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 29–30, 168, 177–179 Democrats center-left, analyses of, 134–135 and George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 39 and labor unions, 195 liberals’ votes for, 135 moderates and liberals, 64 and police funding, 52 political positions of, 136, 189, 190 technocratic liberal voice of, 25 denunciation, 154 Depp, Johnny, 40, 120–121 DiAngelo, Robin, 71 direct democracy system, 21, 23–24 disabled people, 173, 178–180, 205–206 Dream Hoarders (Reeves), 150–151 Du Bois, W.


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The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The idea that, despite rising incomes and prosperity, the rich were getting an exaggeratedly large piece of the pie during this period is borne out by the statistics: the Gilded Age was one in which income and wealth inequality skyrocketed, and it was only the triple shocks of the two world wars and the Great Depression that brought down inequality to more acceptable levels (Figures 6.1-6.2). French economist Thomas Piketty, in his landmark study of inequality Capital in the Twenty-First Century (as well as his earlier work with Emmanuel Saez), showed just how the accumulation of wealth by the top 1% in the US and Europe fell dramatically during this time, reverting the “endless inegalitarian spiral” that occurs when the return on capital outpaces economic growth.2 Piketty summarized this relationship with the now famous equation r > g.

The authors are open about the many caveats regarding accurate income data before 1950. 58 “Corn Laws”, UK Parliament Historic Hansard, HL Deb 02 April 1840 vol 53 cc398-404, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1840/apr/02/corn-laws Chapter Six: And Justice for All 1 Pilon, M., “Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality”, Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/ 2 Piketty, T., Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014), pg. 8. 3 Jordà, O. et al., “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870-2015”, NBER Working Paper Series, 24112, May 2019, https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112 4 Milton Friedman himself stated that it would be the “least bad tax”. The Economist also tacitly supported it in a 2015 piece even if remaining skeptical about its implementation: “Why Henry George had a point”, Economist, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-value-tax 5 Sheidel, W., The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), pg. 94 6 A 1997 study showed that as many as 8% of CEOs were directly interlocked.

A Literature Review”, Institute for Global Prosperity. 2019, https://ubs-hub.org/litreview2019/ 38 “Our Common Wealth: A Citizen’s Wealth Fund for the UK”, IPPR, Mar. 2018, https://www.ippr.org/files/2018-04/cej-our-common-wealth-march-2018.pdf 39 It has not been published in English at time of writing. Information on his proposals is from Elliott, L. “Thomas Piketty’s new War and Peace-sized book published on Thursday”, Guardian, 9 Sep. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/09/thomas-pikettys-new-magnum-opus-published-on-thursday 40 Graeber, D., Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster, 2018), pg. 23 41 Brady-Turner, C., “The Relentless Misery of Working Inside an Amazon Warehouse”, OneZero, 11 Mar. 2019, https://onezero.medium.com/relentless-com-life-as-a-cog-in-amazons-e-tail-machine-d46b3ef05eb8 42 An excellent recent account of the authoritarian personality is Milburn, M.A. and Conrad, S.D., Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism (MIT Press, 2016) 43 “Was the EU Referendum Advisory?”


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

The content and goal of this new social and economic order can no longer be the capitalistic pursuit of power and profit; it must lie in the welfare of our people.’ 9Ironically, it was in the aftermath of the two great wars of the twentieth century, in 1918 and 1945, respectively, that the working classes under capitalism made their most effective advances in the capitalist political economy (Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century). 10I have sketched out this dynamic in Buying Time. 11Merkel, ‘Is Capitalism Compatible with Democracy?’, p. 126. 12Mair, Representative versus Responsible Government. 13See ‘Jürgen Habermas im Gespräch: Europa wird direkt ins Herz getroffen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 May 2014. One interesting irony is that Juncker ascended to the presidency shortly after the publication of Thomas Piketty’s now famous book in which he demands a general wealth tax to correct the long-term and inherent increase in inequality under capitalism (Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century).

‘SAC Starts to Balk over Insider Trading Inquiry’, New York Times, 17 May 2013, dealbook.nytimes.com, last accessed 30 November 2015. 45A fascinating example is the Koch brothers’ nurturing, over several decades, of James Buchanan’s Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. See Nancy MacLean, Forget Chicago, It’s Coming from Virginia: The 1970s Genesis of Today’s Attack on Democracy, Unpublished Manuscript 2015. 46Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2014. 47An exception is David A. Stockman, ‘State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America’, New York Times, 31 March 2013, who may be considered particularly knowledgeable on the subject. 48‘Vernunft durch Strafen in Milliardenhöhe’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 June 2015, faz.net, last accessed 2 December 2015.

One interesting irony is that Juncker ascended to the presidency shortly after the publication of Thomas Piketty’s now famous book in which he demands a general wealth tax to correct the long-term and inherent increase in inequality under capitalism (Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century). On the farce of last year’s ‘European election’ see Susan Watkins, ‘The Political State of the Union’. 14Merkel, ‘Is Capitalism Compatible with Democracy?’, p. 126. 15Mair, Ruling the Void. 16The project to give the European Union a constitution began in 2001 with a resolution to this effect by the then member states of the EU. Two years later a Convention appointed by the national governments went to work, and in 2004 the member states signed the document it had produced. What was billed as a ‘European Constitution’ was essentially a compilation of the existing treaties and consisted of a book of 160,000 words.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Measuring Capital for the 21st Century’, Washington, DC, World Bank, 2006, at web.worldbank.org. 50. J. B. Stewart, ‘Calculated Deal in a Rate-Rigging Inquiry’, New York Times, 13 July 2012. 51. E. Logutenkova, ‘UBS, Barclays Dodge $4.3 Billion EU Fines for Rate Rigging’, Bloomberg News, 4 December 2013, at bloomberg.com. 52. T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 515–17. 53. Ipsos MORI, ‘General Concern About the Economy Continues to Fall as Concern Shifts to Poverty/Inequality and the Personal Economy’, Economist/Ipsos MORI, 29 November 2013, at ipsos-mori.com. 54. P. Diamond, ‘Labour’s Economic Path to Power’, Policy Network, 2 December 2013, at policy-network.net. 55.

A financial chasm is opening up between them and the best-off of the rest – the best-off of the 99 per cent. It is because this chasm is now so large that those at the bottom of the 1 per cent more often look up to see how small they are in comparison to the giants above them. Above them they see what Thomas Piketty has termed ‘meritocratic extremism’, people who try to justify huge incomes in terms of what is required to match the wealth of those who inherit the most.26 They are out of touch with the dwarfs of the 99 per cent. But they need to look down, because if they don’t they too will soon be in trouble.

In 2012 Barclays ‘secured a non-prosecution agreement and agreed to pay a penalty of more than $450 million, a comparatively paltry sum for a bank that had more than £32 billion ($50 billion) in revenue in 2011’.50 But in 2013 Barclays was forced to begin to reveal more of its activities in order to avoid paying part of a $4.3 billion EU antitrust penalty.51 The 1 per cent is finding it progressively harder to hide its money and its corruption. Many people argue that concerted political action, including much more effective banking regulation, is needed to address the problem of increasing inequality. A global tax on capital was seriously proposed in 2014 by Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s leading economists, and a best-selling author in the US and UK that year.52 But successful social movements in the past, rather like the victors in wars, wrote their own history, and may have overstated the importance of overt politics. Campaigners want to say why they mattered; academics want to try to influence policy, and so look for evidence of their personal impact.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, p.444ff. 10. Ibid., p.31. 11. Ibid., pp.435–9. 12. Robert Arnott, William Bernstein & Lillian Wu, ‘The myth of dynastic wealth: The rich get poorer’, Cato Journal, vol.35, no.3, 2015. 13. William McBride, ‘Thomas Piketty’s false depiction of wealth in America’, Tax Foundation Special Report no.223, July 2014. Chris Edwards & Ryan Bourne, ‘Exploring Wealth Inequality’, Policy Analysis, no.881, Cato Institute, 5 November 2019. 14.

The 1 per cent But how many of the super-rich are like Gates and Kamprad? Aren’t they more often people who sit on large inheritances and passive incomes? The French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that income from interest and gains on capital grow faster than growth (r > g) and that inherited properties just grow and grow until a small elite has almost everything. In the acclaimed Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty therefore advocates what he himself calls ‘confiscatory taxes’ to squeeze the rich. He has no illusion that these taxes would generate large revenues. The important thing is that they end the big incomes.

INDEX NB Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations Afghanistan, 160–61, 256 Africa, 30–35, 70, 267, 282 colonisation, 31 independence, 31–4 Sub-Saharan Africa, 30–31 AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), 170 Albania, 50 Algeria, 251 Alphabet, 179 AltaVista, 169, 174 Amazon, 169–72, 178–9 Amazon Prime, 179 Andersson, Magdalena, 8 Angola, 239 Annan, Kofi, 3 Ant Group, 227 AOL (America Online), 169–71, 174 Apple, 107–8, 159, 163, 169–73, 179 Apple TV, 179 Arab Spring, 215 Aristophanes, 73 Aristotle, 70 ARPA, 183–6 ARPANET, 184–5 Asia, 267, 282 Asp, Anette, 287 Attac, 2–3, 6 Australia, 11, 258, 267, 282, 285 Ayittey, George, 31 Bangladesh, 235 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 144 Bankman-Fried, Sam, 153 Bao Tong, 212 Baran, Paul, 184, 186–7 Bastiat, Frédéric, 114 Beijing, China, 209 Belgium, 285 Berggren, Niclas, 62 Bergh, Andreas, 56, 103 Bezos, Jeff, 127 Biden, Joe, 76, 217 big companies, 141, 146–50, 176–7, 292 BioNTech, 177 biotechnology, 195 Björk, Nina, 263, 265, 272, 274–5, 278 BlackBerry, 174 Blair, Tony, 170 Blockbuster, 151 Blue Origin, 202 Bolivia, 47 Bolt, Beranek and Newman, 184 Bono, 4, 170 Botswana, 34–5 Boudreaux, Donald, 125 Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Lerner), 190 Brazil, 11, 29, 239, 258 Brexit, 116–18 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Graeber), 86, 98–9 business regulation, 139–41 Callaghan, James, 10 Canada, 102, 267, 283 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 128 capital income, 130–31 Carbon Engineering, 255 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 29 Carlson, Tucker, 146 cars, 158 Carter, Jimmy, 10 Case Deaton, Anne, 108–11, 136 Castillo, Pedro, 30 Chávez, Hugo, 43, 135 child labour, 20 child mortality, 19–20, 20 Chile, 11, 29–30 China, 5, 7, 11, 19, 24–5, 76, 78–80, 83–4, 104–7, 204–29, 239, 258 agricultural productivity, 206–7, 209 Communist Party, 182, 204–9, 211–12, 215–18, 221–3, 226–8 deindustrialization, 84 economic development, 205–29 environmental issues, 251–3, 257 exports, 209–10 industrial policy, 205, 212–13, 217, 223–4, 296 innovation strategy, 182, 192 innovation, 226–8 poverty, 213, 214 Reform and Opening Up programme, 212 state-owned companies, 208 WTO and, 205, 209, 211 China’s Leaders (Shambaugh), 215 Chirac, Jacques, 191 Chomsky, Noam, 49 Christianity, 264–5 Churchill, Winston, 135 Clark, Daniel, 87 climate change, 5–7, 230–60, 293 carbon border tariffs, 258 carbon tax, 256–7, 259 energy supplies, 233–5, 253–6, 259 greenhouse gas emissions, 231, 233–5, 238, 240–41, 244, 253–9 see also environmental issues Climeworks, 255 Clinton, Hillary, 140 Coase, Ronald, 206 Cohen, Linda, 189 communism, 2, 25–6, 241–3, 290–91 Communist Manifesto, The, 1848, 2 community, 267 Compaq, 174 Concorde, 191 Confucianism, 22, 25 Congo-Brazzaville, 30 Congo, 239 consumer culture, 160–62, 287–8 Cook, Tim, 173 cooperation, 278–9 Coopersmith, Jonathan, 188–9 Corbyn, Jeremy, 43 coronavirus see Covid-19 pandemic Council of Economic Advisers, 147, 152 Covid-19 pandemic, 8, 21, 76–81, 223, 232–3, 270 Cowen, Tyler, 154 Credit Suisse, 132–3 crony capitalism, 139–40, 291 culture wars, 12–13 Czechoslovakia, 26 Dalits, 63–4 dating profiles, 154 ‘deaths of despair’, 7, 108–10, 136, 271, 293 Deaths of Despair (Deaton and Case Deaton), 136 Deaton, Angus, 19, 108–119, 136 DeepMind, 177 degrowth, 232–5, 254–5 ‘deindustrialization’, 83–5 democracies, 26, 37, 46 Deneen, Patrick, 262–5 Deng Xiaoping, 24, 46, 205, 212–13 Denmark, 91, 285 ‘dependency theory’, 27–8 Detroit, Michigan, 87–8 dictatorships, 11, 24, 29, 32, 42–8 Digital Equipment Corporation, 174 disability-adjusted life years (DALY), 237 dishonesty, 153–6 Disney, 178 Dominican Republic, 225 Easterlin, Richard, 279 ‘Easterlin paradox’, 279–80 Easterly, William, 39 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes), 73 Economic Freedom of the World index, 35–7 economic freedom, 35–42, 36, 57, 58–62, 58, 77–8 Economist, The, 179, 192 education, 20, 94 Energiewende, 191, 192–3 Engels, Friedrich, 2, 277, 290–91 Enlightenment, 73 entrepreneurship, 123–4, 128–9, 152–4 ‘welfare entrepreneurs’, 197 environmental issues, 236–41, 245–52, 293 agriculture, 239–40 air pollution, 237–8 biodiversity, 238–9, 249–50 deforestation, 239 health and, 236–8, 237 plastics, 247–8 prosperity and, 245–52, 249 transportation, 250–51, 254–5 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), 248, 252 Estonia, 26 Ethiopia, 277 Europe, 22, 239, 267, 282 European Centre for International Political Economy, 79 European Union (EU), 4, 68, 79, 116, 164, 258–9 Everybody Lies (Stephens-Davidowitz), 155 Facebook, 163, 167–75, 179–80 Fallon, Brad, 192 famine, 29 Fanjul, Alfonso and José, 140 fascism, 75 Federal Communications Decency Act (USA), 174 Feldt, Kjell-Olof, 11 feudalism, 73, 75 Financial Fiasco (Norberg), 142 financial markets, 141–3 Financial Times, 8, 267 Finland, 76, 78, 268, 285 Foodora, 102 Forbes’ list, 129–30 forced technology transfers, 211 Foroohar, Rana, 8 Fortune 500 list, 151 Fortune magazine, 169 France, 79–80, 97, 159, 192, 281, 285 Fraser Institute, 35 free markets, 2–4, 6, 23, 58–62, 65–82, 83, 290–97 happiness and, 279–89, 282, 284, 286 human values and, 261–89 Friedman, Thomas, 204 ‘friendshoring’, 79 Friendster, 170 GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), 169–70 Gallup World Poll, 267 Gandhi, Indira, 245 Gapminder, 18 Gates, Bill, 124–7, 274 GDP (Gross Domestic Product), 5, 23, 26, 33, 35, 49–56 General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), 164 generosity, 274–7 Georgia, 26, 215 Germany, 26, 84, 97, 101, 192–3, 196, 268 gig economy, 101–3 Gingrich, Newt, 191–2 Gini coefficient, 132 global financial crisis, 2008, 4–5, 142–3 global supply chains, 41–2, 58–61, 76, 81 Global Thermostat, 255 global warming see climate change globalization, 3–8, 17, 19, 80, 103–10, 117 Google, 163, 169–73, 179–80 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 215 Graeber, David, 86, 98–9 Grafström, Jonas, 240 Greece, 26, 254 Green Revolution, 239–40 green technology, 243, 251–5 Greider, Göran, 50, 241 growth, 49–57 degrowth, 232–5, 254–5 government and, 55–6 health and, 52–3 poverty and, 53–4 Guangdong, China, 207–8 Guardian, 3, 169 Halldorf, Joel, 262, 265 happiness, 279–89, 282, 284, 286 Hawkins Family Farm, 140 Hawkins, Zach, 140 Hayden, Brian, 161 Hayek, Friedrich, 66 Helm, Dieter, 193 Henrekson, Magnus, 56 Hertz, Noreena, 261, 262, 265, 268, 272, 274–5, 278 Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 87 Hinduism, 22, 25 Hong Kong, 23, 205, 207 Horwitz, Steven, 294 housing market, 131, 142–3, 208–9 How China Became Capitalist (Wang and Coase), 206 How Innovation Works (Ridley), 188 Hsieh, Chang-Tai, 148–9 Hu Jintao, 215–16 Hugo, Victor, 25 Hume, David, 284 Hungary, 26, 283 IBM, 151 Iceland, 285 IKEA, 119, 141, 147 illiteracy, 20, 20 ‘import substitution’, 27–8 In Defence of Global Capitalism (Norberg), 3, 17, 33, 38, 42, 146, 151, 156, 169, 204, 214, 230–31 income, 22, 55, 88–96, 95, 134–5, 285, 291 low-income earners, 136–8 minimum wage, 90 wage stagnation, 89, 92–3 see also inequality India, 11, 24–5, 63–4, 70, 234, 239, 251, 258 caste system, 63–4 Indonesia, 239 industrial policy, 182, 188–203 Industrial Revolution, 22 inequality, 7, 27, 42, 54–5, 110, 131–8, 133, 285–7 happiness inequality, 131–2 income, 285–7 life expectancy and, 136–8 infant mortality, 19–20, 235, 291 Infineon, 196 inflation, 8, 10–11, 69 innovation, 65–6, 122–3, 125, 151, 181–203 government policy and, 181–203 innovation shadow, 169, 176 prizes and, 199 research, 199–200 subsidies and grants, 196–7 Instagram, 168, 177 integrity, 164 intellectual property, 41, 210–11 International Disaster Database, 235 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 238 internet, 162–8, 183–7 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 231 iPhone, 107–8, 156, 159 Iran, 220 Iraq, 251 Ireland, 285 Italy, 97, 285 Jackson, Jesse, 43 Jacobs, A.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Mark McClish and Patrick Olivelle, eds., The Arthasastra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2012), sections 1.4.13–15, Kindle. 7. Ibid., sections 1.4.1–1.4.4, 1.5.1. 8. Ibid., section 2.36.3. 9. Ibid., section 2.35.4. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 270, and see page 258, table 7.2. Chapter 10. On the Verge of Today’s World 1. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 2009), loc. 756–79, Kindle. 2.

But so huge was the increase in energy and wealth that, for the first time in human history, consumption levels began to rise for a growing global middle class of billions of people, far more people than the entire population of the world at the end of the agrarian era. Thomas Piketty estimates that in modern European countries, 40 percent of the population controls between 45 percent and 25 percent of national wealth. The appearance of this middle class was a new phenomenon in human history. And more and more people are joining the new middle class as the numbers living in extreme poverty fall. Paradoxically, increasing wealth also means increasing inequality, and even as the numbers living above subsistence are rising, the numbers living in extreme poverty remain higher than ever before in human history. Thomas Piketty estimates that in most modern countries, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population controls between 25 percent and 60 percent of national wealth, while the bottom 50 percent controls no more than 15 percent to 30 percent.

But after all these other outlays, there was little left to raise the living standards of the rest of the population. That is why all the evidence we have suggests that, though people surely enjoyed occasional luxuries, most of the time, most of them lived close to subsistence level throughout the agrarian era. The French economist Thomas Piketty has estimated that in most European countries as late as 1900, 1 percent of the population owned about 50 percent of national wealth, and 10 percent of the population accounted for 90 percent of national wealth. The other 90 percent of the population made do with just 10 percent of national wealth.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993). 11.Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit; Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 9. 12.Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, 288; Lichtenstein, State of the Union. 13.Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, chapters 7 and 8; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 14.Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 46–47. 15.The turn toward government as a key facilitator of personal freedom was an instance of what the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin would later the label the shift from “negative liberty” to “positive liberty.”

But It’s Helped Transform the American Left,” Vox, April 30, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/23/18284303/occupy-wall-street-bernie-sanders-dsa-socialism, accessed April 29, 2021. 60.Dissent (https://www.dissentmagazine.org) started publishing in 1954, N + 1 (https://nplusonemag.com) in 2004, and Jacobin (https://jacobinmag.com) in 2011. A middle-aged left/liberal magazine, The American Prospect, also revived at this time, staving off bankruptcy in 2012, and then flourished across a second life from 2014 forward: https://prospect.org/. And The Nation, of course, remained the left standard-bearer. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) (originally published in French in 2013); Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Fourth Estate, 2010); David Graeber, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (London: Minor Compositions, 2011); Katharine Q.

This high rate of taxation, in combination with the wage concessions that employers made to unionized workforces, resulted in a significant redistribution of resources from the rich to the working and middle classes of America. Economic inequality fell in the 1940s to its lowest point in the twentieth century, and it stayed there as long the New Deal order prevailed.13 Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and other economists have labeled this fall in inequality the “great compression.”14 This fall was not a function of impersonal economic forces (which is what the term “great compression” is interpreted by some to mean) but of political struggle that yielded a class compromise between capital and labor.


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

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

But since the birth of modern, capitalist economies other uses have become predominant: first as the site of industrial production, and later as the site of service provision and domestic housing. Today, it is in the housing market that the economic function of land is most visible, as the value of residential property has overtaken the value of land used for other purposes, as the economist Thomas Piketty (2014) makes clear in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For this reason, much of the book focuses on housing as the main economic use of land. Land has several unique features that differentiate it from the other ‘factors of production’ that form the central focus of the economics discipline: capital and labour.

It has also increased considerably faster than national income in the UK, in particular since the 1990s, as discussed in Chapter 5. Indeed, in advanced economies generally, it is the increase in housing wealth that has been driving the trends that have been observed in the recent work of French economist Thomas Piketty (2014). Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century contains data on what he calls the ‘capital to income ratio’ for the UK since the year 1700. In the book Piketty uses the terms capital and wealth interchangeably, as if they were perfectly synonymous, and does not attempt to separate capital from land and natural resources.

Perugini, Cristiano, Jens Hölscher, and Simon Collie. 2015. ‘Inequality, Credit and Financial Crises’. Cambridge Journal of Economics. doi:10.1093/cje/beu075. Pierson, Christopher. 2013. Just Property: A History in the Latin West. Volume One: Wealth, Virtue, and the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. 2013. ‘Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700–2010’. http://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2013BookRevQJE.pdf Pollock, Frederick, and Frederic William Maitland. 1899. The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I.


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The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

‘Main Street,’ wrote PIMCO’s ‘Bond King’ Bill Gross, ‘has failed to keep up with Wall Street and corporate America in the race to see who can benefit more from lower yields.’122 Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager whose own fortune in 2018 was estimated at nearly $17 billion, noted that ‘Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and … revolutions of one sort or another.’123 Tech billionaire Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon, penned an alarmist article for Politico entitled ‘The Pitchforks are Coming … for Us Plutocrats’. Hanauer warned that the United States was becoming less capitalist and more feudal, ‘and so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.’124 Piketty’s Error Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an overnight publishing sensation when it appeared in English translation in the spring of 2014 – more bought than read, but much discussed.125 Piketty rejected conventional explanations for inequality based on education and technology.126 Instead, he proposed a fundamental law: inequality rises whenever the return on capital (comprising profits, interest, dividends and rents) exceeds the growth rate of an economy.

Morris Silver, ‘Modern Ancients’, in Commerce and Monetary Systems in the Ancient World: Means of Transmission and Cultural Interaction, eds. R. Rollinger and C. Ulf (Stuttgart, 2004). 49. Leemans, ‘Rate of Interest’; Silver, Economic Structures of Antiquity, p. 105. 50. Thomas Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 September 2016. 51. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard, 2014), p. 80. 52. David Hume, ‘Of Interest’, Selected Essays (Oxford, 1993), p. 181. See Chapter 9. 53. Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 38. 54. As Hume himself records, citing Dio Cassius (Selected Essays, p. 186). Hume maintains the effect was only temporary and that by the reign of Tiberius interest had returned to 6 per cent. 55.

Warren Buffett, ‘Letter to Shareholders’, Berkshire Hathaway, February 2016. ‘For 240 years,’ Buffett writes, ‘it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start.’ 9. Lukasz Rachel and Thomas D. Smith, ‘Secular Drivers of the Global Real Interest Rate’, Bank of England, December 2015. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 80. 11. This point is made in ‘Long-Term Interest Rates: A Survey’, Council of Economic Advisers, July 2015. 12. See Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, The Great Demographic Reversal (Cham, Switzerland, 2020); also, Mikael Juselius et al., ‘Can Demography Affect Inflation and Monetary Policy?’


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

And in chapters 6 and 7, we looked at ways to utilize the productivity of capitalism to generate more GNH and GNF. So, we have plenty of motivation to think about the future of capitalism. Seemingly relevant in this connection is Thomas Piketty’s recent and much discussed Capital in the Twenty-first Century. From the title, one might think the book was mostly forward-looking into the prospects of capital and capitalism in the twenty-first century; however, the book is mostly historical. Picketty does a marvelous job tracing the ebb and flow of the accumulation of capital over the past two centuries. He argues on the basis of historical enquiry that income and capital inequalities are the most important economic problems facing us in the twenty-first century.

US Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey,” US Census Bureau, January 14, 2013, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/ cpstables/032011/perinc/new01_001.htm. The New York Times, “Effective Income Tax Rates,” 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/18/us/effective-incometax-rates.html?_r=2&. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014). Allan Sheahen (1932–2013) was a longtime proponent of BIG. We follow here Sheahen’s last major proposal: Sheahen, Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security. Many of Sheahen’s calculations can be found in Appendix A (153–160).

Roediger and Philip Sheldon Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (London: Verso, 1989). 17. Edward P. Lazear and James R. Spletzer, The United States Labor Market: Status Quo or a New Normal? (National Bureau of Economic Research,2 012). 18. Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No,1 05. 19. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 217. 20. Andrew Hind, “Brrrr! History of the Ice Industry,” History Magazine, 2010, 39–42. 21. Rebecca Weber, “The Travel Agent Is Dying, but It’s Not yet Dead—CNN.com,” CNN, accessed May 18, 2015, http://www. cnn.com/2013/10/03/travel/travel-agent-survival/index.html. 22.


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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

Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker, aptly describes this as “something approaching a zero-sum game between financial wealth-holders and the rest of America.” Zero-sum games don’t end well. “The one percent in America right now is still a bit lower than the one percent in pre-revolutionary France but is getting closer,” says French economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Lazonick believes his research demonstrates that this trend “is in large part responsible for a national economy characterized by income inequity, employment instability, and diminished innovative capability—or the opposite of what I have called ‘sustainable prosperity.’”

Louis; https://fred. stlouisfed.org/series/CP, April 2, 2017; Gross Domestic Product (GDP), retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed. org/series/GDP, April 2, 2017. 246 “something approaching a zero-sum game”: Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers (New York: Crown, 2016), 18. 246 “the one percent in pre-revolutionary France”: Rana Foroohar, “Thomas Piketty: Marx 2.0,” Time, May 9, 2014, http://time.com/92087/thomas-piketty-marx-2-0/. Retrieved April 2, 2017, http://piketty. pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/Time%20-%20Capital%20in%20the %20Twenty-First%20Century.pdf. 247 “‘sustainable prosperity’”: Lazonick, “Stock Buybacks,” 2. 247 more of the compensation moved to stock: Foroohar, Makers and Takers, 280. 247 options had to be disclosed, but not valued: Hal Varian, “Economic Scene,” New York Times, April 8, 2004, retrieved April 2, 2017, http://people.ischool.berkeley. edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2004-04-08.html. 248 “profit extracted through harm to others”: Umair Haque, “The Value Every Business Needs to Create Now,” Harvard Business Review, July 31, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/07/the-value-every-business-needs. 248 disinformation firms used by the tobacco industry: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011). 249 “left holding the bag”: George Akerlof and Paul Romer, “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1993), http://pages.stern.nyu. edu/~promer/Looting.pdf. 250 “The customer is the foundation of a business”: Peter F.

A financial transactions tax calibrated to eliminate all the benefits of front-running and other forms of high-speed market manipulation would be a good place to start, but we could go much further in taxing financial speculation while rewarding productive investment with lower rates. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, suggests that at a minimum, long-term capital gains treatment should begin at three years rather than one, with a declining rate for each additional year that an asset is held. We could even institute a wealth tax such as that proposed by Thomas Piketty. And if we were to tax carbon rather than labor, rather than starting by substituting a carbon tax for income taxes, it might be better to substitute a carbon tax for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes. These rule changes might be costly to some capital owners but might well benefit society overall.


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Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

For a review of the evidence on the link between inequality and growth in Europe, see Catherine Mathieu and Henri Sterdyniak, “Growth and Inequality in the European Union,” OFCE le Blog, Sept. 12, 2017, https://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/blog/growth-and-inequality-in-the-european-union/; and Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos Tsangarides, Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth (IMF Staff Discussion Note, SDN/14/02, International Monetary Fund, Feb. 2014), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf; for a discussion of the link between inequality and political stability, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 2. Brian Blackstone, Matthew Karnitschnig, and Robert Thomson, “Europe’s Banker Talks Tough,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 24, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203960804577241221244896782. 3. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Joseph E.

For a detailed discussion of the reform needs and options for European tax systems from a gender perspective, see Åsa Gunnarsson, Ulrike Spangenberg, and Margit Schratzenstaller, Gender Equality and Taxation in the European Union, Study for the FEMM Committee (Brussels: Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Apr. 2017), http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2017/583138/IPOL_STU(2017)583138_EN.pdf. 6. Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6, no. 1 (2014): 230–71; and Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Taxing the 1%: Why the Top Tax Rate Could Be Over 80%,” VoxEU, Dec. 2011, https://voxeu.org/article/taxing-1-why-top-tax-rate-could-be-over-80; Danny Yagan, Tax Progressivity and Top Incomes: Evidence from Tax Reforms (CEPR Discussion Paper no. 11936, Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2015). 7.

See Bert Brys, Sarah Perret, Alastair Thomas, and Pierce O’Reilly, Tax Design for Inclusive Economic Growth (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Taxation Working Papers no. 26, Paris: OECD Publishing, July 2016), https://doi.org/10.1787/5jlv74ggk0g7-en; Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, World Inequality Report 2018 (Paris: Paris School of Economics, 2017). 3. Brian Sloan, Günther Ebling, Martin Becker, Luis Peragon Lorenzo, and Antonella Caiumi, eds., Taxation Trends in the European Union (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2018), https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/taxation_trends_report_2018.pdf. 4.


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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

What’s also clear is that the economic forces that have been causing the spread and intensification of winner-take-all markets have by no means run their course. We can expect continued growth in the intensity of competition on the buyers’ side for the best talent, and on the sellers’ side for the top positions. In his widely discussed 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty suggested yet another reason for rising inequality, which is the historical tendency for the rate of return on invested capital to exceed the overall growth rate for the economy.10 When that happens, he argues, wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of those who own the most capital.

Quarterly Journal of Economics 123.1 (2008): 49–100. 8. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chap. 10. 9. The Conference Board, “Departing CEO Age and Tenure,” June 13, 2014, https://www.conference-board.org/retrievefile.cfm?filename=TCB-CW-019.pdf&type=subsite. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. CHAPTER 4: WHY THE BIGGEST WINNERS ARE ALMOST ALWAYS LUCKY 1. High School Baseball Web, “Inside the Numbers,” http://www.hsbaseballweb.com/inside_the_numbers.htm. 2. See Wikipedia, List of World Records in Athletics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_athletics#Men and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_record_progressions. 3.

., 73 Alou brothers, 33 American Dream, the, 4, 145 American Economic Association, 25 American Economic Review, 28, 126, 133, 171 American Enterprise Institute, 127, 171 American Society of Civil Engineers, 87 Anderson, Chris, 47 antlers in bull elk, 116–18, 118 Apotheker, Léo, 53 Apple, 44, 49, 132 Arab Spring, 107 Archilla, Gustavo, 106 artificial intelligence, 70 attention scarcity, 48–49 attribution theory, 77 austerity policies, 134 availability heuristic, 79, 80 baby boomer retirements, 97, 127, 167 Baker Library, 36 Bartlett, Bruce, 90 Bartlett, Monica, 101 Baumeister, Roy, 75 Beatty, Warren, 23 behavioral economics, 69, 70, 96 Bernanke, Ben, 133–35 best seller, xiii, 45 Betamax, 44, 45 birth order effects, 32 birth-date effects: in hockey, 38; in the workplace, 38 Blackstone, 103 Blockbusters, 48 Bloomberg Business, 132 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 7 Boudreaux, Donald, 122 Breaking Bad, 24, 31, 68 British accent, 4 Broderick, Matthew, 24, 68 Brooklyn Dodgers, 142 Brooks, David, 83, 84 Buffett, Warren, 12, 39 Bush, George H. W., 90 Bush, George W., 90 Caan, James, 23 Cabrera, Miguel, 63 Calvino, Italo, 128 Campanella, Roy, 142 Canada, 20, 88, 106 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 55 Carroll, Robert, 127 Casablanca, 87 Cayuga Lake, 6 CEO pay, 49–51 character assessment, 129–31 Clinton, Bill, 126 Clotfelter, Charles, 72 Congressional Budget Office, 90 conservatives, xi, 17, 83, 171 context and quality assessment, 122, 123; a formal model of, 123 Cook, Philip, 9, 41, 42, 72 Cook, Tim, 133 Coppola, Francis Ford, 23 Corleone, Michael, 23 Corleone, Vito, 23 Cornell University, 4, 25–29, 59, 67, 125, 143 CP/M (computer operating system), 35 Cranston, Bryan, 24, 68 Cusack, John, 24, 68 da Vinci, Leonardo, 22 Dalai Lama, 29 Darwin, Charles, 73, 115, 116, 121 Darwin Economy, The, 117 Davidai, Shai, 81 Delaplane, VA, 60 dentists, 51 Department of Motor Vehicles, 17–19 depressive realism, 73 DeSteno, David, 98–101 Detroit Tigers, 63 DeWall, Nathan, 103 Dickens, Charles, 102 Dickens, Mamie, 102 Digdon, Nancy, 102 Digital Research, 34, 35 divine intervention, 2 Domenici, Pete, 126 Econometrica, 28 economic pie, 16 Educational Longitudinal Survey, 144, 145 Edwards, Mike, 2 Elberse, Anita, 48 Electric Light Orchestra, 2 Emmons, Robert, 102 environment, xvi, 8, 13, 115, 119, 123, 143, 144 envy, 112, 122, 132 estate taxation, 166, 167 expenditure cascades, 112, 113, 121, 165, 169 expertise, 77 Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 134 Ferrari, 15, 16, 91, 119 52 Metro, 30 Fitzgerald, F.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The rest of the value gets siphoned upward to the few and wealthy. More than pleasing customers, more than creating jobs, business keeps getting better at serving the single-minded goal of maximizing shareholder value—the rewards for those who already have excess to invest. Economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century argued that the returns to investors are careening the world into a new feudalism; his most celebrated critic, twenty-six-year-old MIT graduate student Matthew Rognlie, differed only in stressing that the major share of the phenomenon was in real estate.4 An uptick in the minimum wage isn’t going to fix this.

Black Lives Matter, 15, 165, 190, 199, 205–206 black power, 194–195, 199 blockchain, 107, 109, 111–114, 153, 157 Bluestone Farm, 33 Boggs, Grace Lee, 74–75, 92, 225 Boggs, Jimmy, 74, 78 Book of Acts, 21–22 Bookchin, Murray, 207 Botsman, Rachel, 91 Boulder Community Housing Association, 98, 100 Boulder Neighborhood Alliance, 98 Bradford, Mark, 81 Brain, Marshall, 222–223 Britain, co-op legislation in, 7, 50 British Cooperative Wholesale Society, 42–43 Bronec, Jasen, 173 Brown, Michael, 191 Brown-Davis, Della, 177, 179 “Building Global Community” (Zuckerberg), 219 Buni, Abdi, 85–86, 89 Buterin, Vitalik, 111–112, 114, 130 #BuyTwitter, 165–167 Byck, Maria Juliana, 28 Caesar, Julius, 21 Calafou, 124 Calvinists, 38 capital credits, 180 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 77 capitalism, 14–15, 75, 199, 203 co-op businesses compared to, 14–15 as feudal lord, 46–47 feudalism and, 212 Capra, Robert, 35 Carmichael, Stokely, 199 Carter, Jimmy, 171 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 35 Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC), 117, 121–127, 131 Aurea Social assembly of, 127–128, 128 (photo) Economic Commission of, 124–125 projects and budget of, 123 Catalan Supply Center, 122 (photo), 123 Catholicism, 24, 59–65, 232 Chaplin, Charlie, 35 Charter of the Forest, 38 Chartism, 48 Chavez, Chris, 32–34 Chesterton, G.

Here Concept from Peter Turchin, “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,” Cliodynamica (blog) (June 21, 2013), peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/strange-disappearance. Data from Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), 54, and Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 3–20. Notes Introduction: Equitable Pioneers 1. LeRoy Croissant, Ancestors and Descendants of Fred Henry Croissant (1791–2001), private family history (2001); the cassette tapes were made as part of Croissant’s research for the book, recorded January 14 and 15, 1989. 2.


pages: 165 words: 45,129

The Economics of Inequality by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

affirmative action, basic income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, Gini coefficient, income inequality, low skilled workers, means of production, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Simon Kuznets, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, very high income, working-age population

The large historical variations in top income shares also receive insufficient treatment in the present book, because the corresponding research became fully available only recently. Readers interested in a detailed account of that more recent research and the lessons that can be drawn from it are advised to consult the World Top Incomes Database (available online) and my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014). Introduction The question of inequality and redistribution is central to political conflict. Caricaturing only slightly, two positions have traditionally been opposed. The right-wing free-market position is that, in the long run, market forces, individual initiative, and productivity growth are the sole determinants of the distribution of income and standard of living, in particular of the least well-off members of society; hence government efforts to redistribute wealth should be limited and should rely on instruments that interfere as little as possible with the virtuous mechanisms of the market—instruments such as Milton Friedman’s negative income tax (1962).

THE ECONOMICS OF INEQUALITY Thomas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved First published as L’économie des inégalités copyright © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 1997, 2008, 2014 Jacket design by Graciela Galup 978-0-674-50480-6 (hardcover) 978-0-674-91558-9 (EPUB) 978-0-674-91557-2 (MOBI) 978-0-674-91556-5 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Piketty, Thomas, 1971– [L’économie des inégalités.

THE ECONOMICS OF INEQUALITY Thomas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved First published as L’économie des inégalités copyright © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 1997, 2008, 2014 Jacket design by Graciela Galup 978-0-674-50480-6 (hardcover) 978-0-674-91558-9 (EPUB) 978-0-674-91557-2 (MOBI) 978-0-674-91556-5 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Piketty, Thomas, 1971– [L’économie des inégalités. English] The economics of inequality / Thomas Piketty ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Income distribution. 2. Equality—Economic aspects. I. Title. HB523.P54713 2015 339.2'2—dc23 2015008813 Book design by Dean Bornstein Contents Note to the Reader Introduction 1. The Measurement of Inequality and Its Evolution 2. Capital-Labor Inequality 3. Inequality of Labor Income 4. Instruments of Redistribution References Contents in Detail Index Note to the Reader This book was written and first published in 1997.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

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

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

They are now back at their 1970s starting point and seem stable. The causes of these varied changes in income equality are many and complex. While this has been a topic in seminar rooms for many years, it burst into the open with the 99 Percent movement; the Occupy Wall Street movement; and Thomas Piketty’s transformative 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The explanations range from government deregulation and the rise of monopoly capitalism to the decline of labor unions and skill-biased technology progress. Technology surely played a role. Many elements of the ICT impulse tended to boost income and wealth inequality.

Inequality fell quite dramatically in the UK as industrial growth got its second wind from the cluster of new industries. The income share of the top 5 percent dropped from 40 percent down to under 20 percent by the 1970s. Since then it’s been rising, but that’s a story for the next chapter. It is not easy to say exactly what causes these waves of inequality. It is the subject of much debate, as Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capitalism in the 21st Century points out. By its very nature, inequality involves almost every aspect of the economic system—ranging from education, technology, and globalization to urbanization, voting rights, and imperialism. Most of these are interrelated. Figure 2.1 Income Inequality in the Great Transformation, 1688–2009.

Lindert, “When Did Inequality Rise in Britain and America?,” Journal of Income Distribution 9 (2000): 11–25, and Anthony B. Atkinson, “The Distribution of Top Incomes in the United Kingdom 1908–2000,” in Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries, ed. Anthony B. Atkinson and Thomas Piketty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 4. 9. The data is from Robert C. Allen, “Engel’s Pause: A Pessimists Guide to the British Industrial Revolution,” Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series no. 315, University of Oxford, April 2007. 10. Quoted in Carl Wittke, “The German Forty-Eighters in America: A Centennial Appraisal.”


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 6 (2014), https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%2520Files/kiatpongsan%2520norton%25202014_f02b004a-c2de-4358-9811-ea273d372af7.pdf. Thomas Piketty estimated that roughly 60 percent: This wealth comes in the form of savings, houses, and investment, that “people with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole.” Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). At the same time, Americans think their odds of success: Sweden, the home of copious social welfare, nonetheless has pessimistic citizens.

The group United for a Fair Economy found in 2012 that over 60 percent of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans were already well-off when they began their careers. They might have had an upper-class upbringing and then the gift of start-up capital from a wealthy family member. Around the same time, French economist Thomas Piketty estimated that roughly 60 percent of America’s private wealth was inherited rather than the result of the much-ballyhooed hard work. At the same time, Americans think their odds of success, and of rising from the bottom to the top, are much higher than they are, and they have greater expectations based on more slender reeds than those relied on by their European counterparts.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

A Jesuit priest and political science professor named Matthew Carnes, with whom Cohen would soon work on a philanthropic project, told the newspaper that longtime critics of inequality on campus felt “vindicated” by the pope. And in the summer before Cohen’s senior year, Black Lives Matter was born, drawing many of her classmates into one of the more trenchant critiques of inequality in modern American history. As Cohen’s graduation neared, a little-known French economist named Thomas Piketty published the surprise bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century—a two-and-a-half-pound, 704-page assault on inequality. Piketty and some colleagues would later publish a paper containing a startling fact about 2014, the year of Cohen’s graduation and debut as a self-supporting earner. The study showed that a college graduate like Cohen, on the safe assumption that she ended up in the top 10 percent of earners, would be making more than twice as much before taxes as a similarly situated person in 1980.

I am no less grateful to all those other subjects whom I did not know but who answered my emails and calls anyway, and took me up on sharing their stories and beliefs about making change. In a small handful of cases I have changed names to protect privacy. I am indebted to two professors. As I read Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I came upon a line that brought the purpose of my own book into focus. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable,” Piketty writes, “depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.”

On trust in government, see “Public Trust in Government Remains Near Historic Lows as Partisan Attitudes Shift” (Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017). On the uneven spread of the “fruits of change,” see “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States,” by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 22945, December 2016). On the changing realities of social mobility and the “opportunity to get ahead,” see “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940,” by Raj Chetty et al. (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 22910, December 2016).


pages: 593 words: 183,240

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

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

Bradford DeLong, “Private Accounts: Add-on, Not Carve-Out,” Grasping Reality, May 3, 2005, https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/private_account.html. 25. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf. 26. Takashi Negishi, “Welfare Economics and Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy,” Metroeconomica 12 (June 1960): 92–97. 27. Jeremiah 7:18. 28. “Globalization over Five Centuries, World,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/globalization-over-5-centuries?country=~OWID_WRL. 29. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 30.

Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, New York: New Press, 1996, xxxiii. Note that Sassoon does not especially like this transformation of the revolutionary idea into a celebration of the wonders of technology. 11. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, 24; Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Novel of Today, Boone, IA: Library of America, 2002 [1873]. 12. On the lives of America’s industrial working class around 1900, see Margaret Frances Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910. 13.

A successful middle-class American in the age of neoliberalism would meet Bain CEO and future Massachusetts governor and US senator (R-UT) Mitt Romney and know that he had seven houses, some of them mansions, scattered around the country and, well, I do not know what models of cars he has driven, but I have been told that the house in La Jolla, California, near the beach, has a car elevator. Even when people have more material wealth at their disposal in absolute terms than their parents did, a proportional gulf that large that is growing that rapidly can make them feel small. French economist Thomas Piketty popularized an understanding of the striking differences between how the economy had functioned in the global north before World War I and how it functioned after World War II.29 In the First Gilded Age, before World War I, wealth was predominantly inherited, the rich dominated politics, and economic (as well as race and gender) inequality were extreme.


pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

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

To put that into perspective, back then the total annual value of all wages, salaries and employee benefits paid each year was worth perhaps 60% of GDP. So for every £1 earned in the labour market per year, 33p was received in inheritance. Society, therefore, was built around the idea that you needed to marry into the right family, thus assuring yourself a decent inheritance. Just read a Jane Austen novel (or Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). Death duties in the mid-19th century were insignificant; it would have been too controversial to implement tough ones. Economists such as Condorcet, meanwhile, offered arguments against inheritance tax based on the idea of natural rights. But Mill hated the idea that people could simply sit there, wait for a loved one to die, and then cash in.

Donald Winch puts it another way: “A secular upward trend in the price of wage or subsistence goods… became the main proposition dividing Smith’s world from that of Malthus, Ricardo, and all those who followed in their footsteps.” Now, does Ricardo’s theory hold in the real world? Clearly not. Look at data for Britain. Grain prices have not gone up and up over time–actually, food has got a lot cheaper since Ricardo wrote his tracts. Owners of land have not got richer and richer. In fact the opposite has happened. As Thomas Piketty’s calculations show, the value of agricultural land, relative to overall wealth, has plummeted as capitalist economies have advanced. The declining value of agricultural land, relative to the overall economy, is in part because during the 19th century, Britain flung open its ports to foreign trade.

So just as for workers, the bare minimum profit rate is also the maximum profit rate. But what about landowners? According to Riley, “Mill reaffirms Ricardo’s conclusion that… economic growth tends to enrich the owners of resources without improving the lot of workers or capitalists.” Land is fixed but economic growth is not. So as Thomas Piketty puts it, “[t]he law of supply and demand then implies that the price of land will rise continuously, as will the rents paid to landlords.” With more people about, food prices will rise. That is great news for owners of land. Mill’s own words provide the best summary of the argument: “The economical progress of a society constituted of landlords, capitalists, and labourers, tends to the progressive enrichment of the landlord class; while the cost of the labourer’s subsistence tends on the whole to increase, and profits to fall [to the bare minimum level, in both cases].”


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

This has little to do with the process that Glass or even Lees describe, which saw capital invested in gentrifying parts of the city at a much slower rate, over generations rather than a few years: as such, it is crucial that the impact of global capital and foreign investment is scrutinized for its local effects. The title of this book is a nod to Thomas Piketty’s landmark study, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which investigates the consequences for inequality when the rate of return on rent is greater than the rate of economic growth. I hope to expose the lie that the housing crisis is a market question of supply and demand. Governments of all stripes have argued that we simply need to loosen planning restrictions and build more homes for sale.

In Barcelona and Berlin the city government has banned renting out whole properties through Airbnb, and at the time of writing the company was embroiled in a battle in New York over the same issue. But while regulation is being introduced, it is a notoriously hard business to regulate and raises contentious issues in a city such as Barcelona where it has become an important source of income for people on modest salaries. The success of the model fits perfectly into Thomas Piketty’s thesis that income from rent now far exceeds economic growth, let alone wages. As such, it is likely to remain a key feature of the contemporary property market. The bedroom tax presents a mirror image of Airbnb. In a society where the ideal of public housing has collapsed, a financial penalty is imposed on people in social housing with a spare room, while those who are lucky enough to own a house with one find themselves with an additional source of revenue.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Here’s what the G7 leaders: “G7 Ise-Shima Leaders’ Declaration / G7 Ise-Shima Summit, 26–27 May 2016,” G7 Ise-Shima Summit, May 27, 2016, accessed August 7, 2016, www.mofa.go.jp/files/000160266.pdf, 6–7. In particular, Piketty advanced the thesis: French economist Thomas Piketty advanced the thesis that high tax rates have been associated with strong economic growth and equitable income distribution, while low tax rates have been associated with weaker growth and extremes of income inequality. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Henry Kissinger offers a brilliant overview: For an in-depth history and analysis of the Westphalian state system, other historical forms of world order, and implications for policy today, see Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. Palley, Thomas I. From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics, 1st edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, The Spell of Plato. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1971. ———. The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

The IMF, OECD, and G20 have all endorsed these efforts and have added their own calls for international information collection and information sharing. The G20 final communiqué from the November 2014 meeting in Brisbane, Australia, included technical papers describing an implementation program for data collection. Prominent economists including Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty have joined the chorus calling for global taxation. In particular, Piketty advanced the thesis that high tax rates are not an impediment to growth. His thesis is riddled with flaws, but attracted a following among global elites nonetheless. Piketty recognizes that high tax rates will not achieve his redistribution goals if collections are thwarted by tax avoidance.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Liberal critics: See Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin, 2012), 3. “We are on the road”: Paul Krugman, speaking in an interview with Bill Moyers about Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. “What the 1% Don’t Want Us to Know,” BillMoyers.com, April 18, 2014. “Wealth begets power”: Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011. Thomas Piketty: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014). “disconnect themselves”: Mike Lofgren, “Revolt of the Rich,” American Conservative, Aug. 27, 2012.

In the new millennium, however, this consensus was beginning to fray. A growing number of academics studying the nexus of politics and wealth regarded the accelerating inequality in America as a threat not only to the economy but to democracy. Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without aggressive government intervention economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere was likely to rise inexorably, to the point where the small portion of the population that currently held a growing slice of the world’s wealth would in the foreseeable future own not just a quarter, or a third, but perhaps half of the globe’s wealth, or more.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

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

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

Stephen Rose, a labor economist at the Urban Institute: Stephen Rose, “The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class” (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2016). The most-talked-about serious book… bore the subhead: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). “the simplest and most powerful measure” of inequality: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Inequality in the Long Run,” Science, May 23, 2014. Piketty’s 2013 tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century was received: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). for the typical middle-class family, the value of federal benefits exceeds: “Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2013” (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office).

That it is also the simplest does not make it correct; height is the simplest measure of a basketball player, but choosing up a team based solely on height would not be wise. No one in the United States or Europe runs a family on pretax income alone. Tax rates, government benefits, consumer prices, and household size must be taken into account too. Piketty’s 2013 tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century was received by many editorialists and academics as having proven that rising inequality in pretax income means the Western economy is in an emergency situation. The book travels 704 pages without assessing how taxes, government benefits, and consumer prices impact the average people Piketty seeks to champion.

THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER METRIC for gauging the extent of the middle class took into account pretax income only. Citing income numbers alone is the approach employed by Senators Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who are the left wing’s most notable declinists, trafficking in anger and negativity. Income-only is the approach employed by Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, who were favorite economists of the Obama White House. Piketty and Saez produced voluminous charts and graphs showing that because returns on capital exceed increases in wage income, the system is structured such that those at the top, who own the most equity (primarily as stock shares), will make out better than average people.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Most of this change is due not to any educational deficits; on the contrary, the younger you are, the more likely you are to have a college degree. Rather, the bulk of this change is due to an unequal distribution of economic growth. In his magisterial history of economic inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Piketty concludes that among a number of possible factors underlying income disparity, “the educational factor does not seem to be the right one to focus on.” Of the many ways we Americans manifest our boundless optimism, a commitment to universal education ranks near the top.

Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); also my own interview with Dr. Goldin. “being squeezed out of white collar work” Paul Douglas, “What Ever Happened to the White-Collar Job Market,” System: The Magazine of Business 49 (December 1926): 719. inequality declined Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). an “educational slowdown” Goldin and Katz, Race, 7. the nation’s “poorly educated” workforce See, for example, David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (New York: Perseus, 1995), 133.

The authors write, “The evidence indicates that…[the] net effect [of educational systems] is not to reduce the relationship between parental SES [socioeconomic status] and child achievement, but to maintain or strengthen patterns of differences in outcomes already evident at younger ages.” “the educational factor” Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 315. CHAPTER 8 “there is little to be gained from increasing potential supply” Lawrence Summers, “The Jobs Crisis,” Reuters, June 13, 2011, https://www.reuters.com/​article/​column-usjobs-summers/​rpt-column-the-jobs-crisis-lawrence-summers-idUSN1­2279957201­10613.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

If the link to labor share is real, this will prompt a further reduction in the share of income accruing to workers, while it enriches investors and banks. Concerns about the shrinking role of labor, and the shift in income distribution, have already caused alarm in many corners, from economists such as Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a stinging critique of capitalism, became a global best seller, to populist movements (such as those led by Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump) that promise to eradicate the plight of the displaced worker. And two sets of relatively conventional ideas, one distributive and the other participatory, are being advanced by policy makers and debated in many nations as a response to this troubling trend.

., Mark Graham, Isis Hjorth, and Vili Lehdonvirta, “Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods,” Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, March 16, 2017, http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/3FMTvCNPJ4SkhW9tgpWP/full. shrinking role of labor: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). not necessarily to tax the economy more: See Ryan Abbott and Bret N. Bogenschneider, “Should Robots Pay Taxes? Tax Policy in the Age of Automation,” forthcoming in Harvard Law and Policy Review (March 13, 2017), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2932483.

See Daimler; Ford Motor Company; General Motors; Tesla Autopilot, 78 Autor, David, 195 Avant, 151 Bacon, Francis, 223 Baidu, 30, 151 Bank La Roche, 136 banks, 11, 12, 137, 138–140, 146–156 capital share of, 185, 186 central, 134–135, 149 choice expansion in, 215–216 cost cutting in, 146–148 crisis facing, 134–136 government loans to, 134 investment planning by, 150, 154–155 Italian merchant families in, 91 lending by, 150–151 payment businesses competing with, 146–147 poor insight of, 154 regulations affecting, 139–140 reinvention of from within, 146, 149–156 traditional role of, 138–139 Barclays, 215 Bardi family, 91 Barkai, Simcha, 194, 195 barter economy, 45 Bastani, Aaron, 221 Bauer, Florian, 55 Bear Stearns, 155 Beer, Staffors, 175–176 Bethlehem Steel, 95 Betterment, 151, 153 Bezos, Jeff, 68, 88, 89, 96, 106, 107, 130 Big Data, 77, 213, 219, 222 See also data-rich markets Bitcoin, 48, 147 BlaBlaCar, 3, 9, 65 blockchain, 147, 148 BMW, 120 book value, 172 bookkeeping, 92–93 bounded rationality, 104 Brezhnev, Leonid, 221 Bridgewater Associates, 114–115 Brookings Institution, 186 Brown, John Seely, 31 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 184, 220 Buick Motor Company, 98 cacao beans (as currency), 48 Canada, 191–192 capital, 15, 133–156 abundance of, 142–143, 194 banks’ shift from, 134–136, 138–140, 146–156 future role of, 11–12, 141 problems caused by decline of, 141–144 signaling with, 141–143 steady value of predicted, 144 See also money; price capital gains tax, 187 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 186 capital share, 185–186, 193–195, 197, 198 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), 60 Case, Bob, 133–134 castells, 17–20 cell phones. See mobile phones central banks, 134–135, 149 centralization, 13, 90, 95, 100 cognitive limitations and, 103 of communicative coordination, 28–30 matching and, 74 Champagne fairs, 160 Charles Schwab, 146 Charlotte, Queen, 94 checklists, 100–101 Chichén Itzá, 21 Chile, 175–179 Chilean Production Development Corporation, 175 China, 147, 196 communicative coordination in, 30–32 fintechs in, 151, 152 firms in, 28 labor market of, 184 choice, 6, 207–223 in banking and financial sector, 215–216 in education sector, 214 in energy markets, 213 in health care sector, 213–214 historical constraints on, 13–14 human error and, 14–15 questions about, 219–220 relinquishing some, 85 in retail sector, 207–212 about time management, 221–222 Chongqing Province (China), 31–32, 33 Cisco, 7 Claudico (machine learning system), 60 Coconut, 147 cognitive bias and constraints, 5, 62 automation and, 79, 80, 81 firms and, 102–104 markets and, 169–170 persistence of, 14–15 Colson, Eric, 209 command-and-control management, 29–30, 88, 120 Commerzbank, 136 communicative coordination, 10, 17–33 castell example, 17–20 effectiveness as measure of, 24–25 firms and, 26, 28–33, 90, 102 importance of, 20–23 markets and, 26–28, 30–33 price hampering of, 63 societal institutions and, 23–24 competition, 165–167, 202–203 comprehensive cost accounting, 94–95 concentrated markets, 161–169, 171, 217 Condorcet, Marquis de, 50 confirmation bias, 103 Confused.com, 52 conglomerates, 30 Consumer Reports, 51 Contix, 155 coordination.


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Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

And those combining the incomes of both spouses—whatever the education of either—enjoyed incomes that were that high or higher. 150more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Knopf, 2015); John Ehrenreich, Third Wave Capitalism: How Money, Power, and the Pursuit of Self-Interest Have Imperiled the American Dream (Ithaca and London: ILR Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2016); Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, 2007 Average Incomes, U.S. 1980–2012 (in real 2014 dollars). Also see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014). Thomas Piketty and his French-American colleague, Emmanuel Saez, base this distribution on income individuals hold in the absence of government activity—so it’s what people have if they neither pay taxes nor receive government distributions (e.g., Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, or earned income tax credits).

“Calcasieu, Cameron Areas ‘on Bubble’ with EPA for Air Quality.” American Press (July 11, 2014). http://www.americanpress.com/news/local/Air-quality. Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. 2007 Average Incomes, U.S. 1980–2012 (in real 2014 dollars). The World Top Incomes Database. http://topincomes.g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.edu. Porter, Michael, and C. Van der Linde. “Toward a New Conception of the Environment–Competitiveness Relationship.”


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Ben Austen, “The YouTube Laugh Factory: A Studio System for Viral Video,” 260 NOTES TO PAGES 86–90 Wired, December 16, 2011, http://www.wired.com /magazine/2011/12/ff_you tube/all /. 159. On the barriers to organization of digital labor, see Scholz, Digital Labor. 160. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 128. 161. James Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008), xix. 162. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014): 571. 163. Turow, The Daily You. 164. Jerry Kang, “Race.Net Neutrality,” Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law 6 (2007): 9–10. 165. Ibid. See also Jack Balkin, “Media Access: A Question of Design,” George Washington Law Review 76 (2008): 933. 166.

For the strange career of neoliberal approaches to antitrust law, see Robert Van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “Reinventing Monopoly,” in The Road from Mount Pèlerin, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 219 ff. 96. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). First published 1956. 97. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 574. 98. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (Apostolic Exhortation), November 24, 2013, para. 55. Available at http://w2.vatican.va /content /francesco/en /apost _exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124 _evangelii -gaudium.html.

This allows them to offer data-driven targeting to advertisers, with whose handsome payments they can buy content, apps, and other enticements (the fruits of other people’s ingenuity) that draw a bigger audience still, and so on. The well-realized technological vision that attracts the initial user base deserves recompense. But it does not entitle present corporate leaders to endlessly leverage past success into future dominance. What Thomas Piketty said of unlimited capital accumulation applies as well to untrammeled tech giants: “the past devours the future.”162 The data advantage of the Silicon Valley giants may owe as much to fortuitous timing as to anything inherent in the firms themselves. Social theorist David Grewal has explained the “network power” of English as a lingua franca; it’s not “better” than other languages; it’s not easier to learn, or any more expressive.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. What had once been the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market had become, in spirit, something more like a private viewing of a stolen work of art.15 In his deeply pessimistic work on income equality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty analysed the increasing disparities in wealth between a minority of very rich people, and everyone else. In the United States, in 2014, the richest 0.01 per cent, comprising just 16,000 families, controlled 11.2 per cent of total wealth – a situation comparable to 1916, the time of greatest inequality on record.

., ‘Banks start to drain Barclays dark pool’, Financial Times, June 26, 2014, ft.com. 10.Care Quality Commission, Hillingdon Hospital report, 2015, cqc.org.uk/location/RAS01. 11.Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, London: William Heinemann, 1952. 12.Correspondence with Hillingdon Hospital NHS Trust, 2017, whatdotheyknow.com/request/hillingdon_hospital_structure_us. 13.Chloe Mayer, ‘England’s NHS hospitals and ambulance trusts have £700million deficit’, Sun, May 23, 2017, thesun.co.uk. 14.Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. 15.Ibid. 16.‘Forget the 1%’, Economist, November 6, 2014, economist.com. 17.Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 18.Jordan Golson, ‘Uber is using in-app podcasts to dissuade Seattle drivers from unionizing’, Verge, March 14, 2017, theverge.com. 19.Carla Green and Sam Levin, ‘Homeless, assaulted, broke: drivers left behind as Uber promises change at the top’, Guardian, June 17, 2017, theguardian.com. 20.Ben Kentish, ‘Hard-pressed Amazon workers in Scotland sleeping in tents near warehouse to save money’, Independent, December 10, 2016, independent.co.uk. 21.Kate Knibbs, ‘Uber Is Faking Us Out With “Ghost Cabs” on Its Passenger Map’, Gizmodo, July 28, 2015, gizmodo.com. 22.Kashmir Hill, ‘“God View”: Uber Allegedly Stalked Users For Party-Goers’ Viewing Pleasure’, Forbes, October 3, 2014, forbes.com. 23.Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Greyball: how Uber used secret software to dodge the law’, Guardian, March 4, 2017, theguardian.com. 24.Russell Hotten, ‘Volkswagen: The scandal explained’, BBC, December 10, 2015, bbc.com. 25.Guillaume P.

., 176 Bush, Vannevar ‘As We May Think,’ 23–4 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 on hypertext, 79 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 Byron “Darkness,” 201–2 C Cadwalladr, Carole, 236 calculating machines, 27 calculation p-hacking, 89–91 raw computing, 82–3 replicability, 88–9 translation algorithms, 84 Cambridge Analytica, 236 Campbell, Duncan, 189 ‘Can We Survive Technology?’ (von Neumann), 28 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 112 carbon dioxide, 75 Catch-22 (Heller), 187–8 ‘cautious regulator’ theory, 94–5 CCTV, 181–2 centaur chess, 159 Chanarin, Oliver, 143 chaotic storage, 115–6 Chargaff, Erwin, 96–7 Charlie Hebdo attacks, 212 chemtrails, 192–5, 206–8, 214 children’s television, 216–7 children’s YouTube, 219, 238 Cirrus homogenitus, 196, 197 Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), 161–2 clear-air turbulence, 68 climate carbon dioxide, 75 global warming, 73, 193, 214 permafrost, 47–9, 56–7 seed banks, 52–6 turbulence, 65–9 climate change patterns disrupted by, 72–3 resilience against, 59 climate crisis, 56 Clinton, Bill, 243 Clinton, Hillary, 207, 232–3 cloning, 86–8 closed-circuit television, 181–2 cloud(s), 6–7, 8, 17, 195–6 ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal-Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power’ report, 64 ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ 9 cloudy thinking, 9 coal deposits, discovery of, 52 coastal installations, 62 Cocks, Clifford, 167 code/spaces, 37–9 code words, 175 cognition about, 135–6 artificial intelligence (AI), 139 facial recognition, 141 image recognition, 139–40 machine translation, 147 ‘predictive policing’ systems, 144–6 collectivism, totalitarianism vs., 139 Commission on Government Secrecy, 169 complex systems about, 2–3 aggregation of, 40 high-frequency trading, 14, 106–7, 108, 122, 124 complicity computational logic, 184–5 Freedom of Information, 161–2, 165, 192 global mass surveillance, 179–80 Glomar response, 165, 186 public key cryptography, 167–8 computation calculating machines, 27 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 27, 27–30, 33 flight trackers, 35–6, 36 IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 opaqueness of, 40 computational logic, 184–5 computational thinking about, 4 evolution of, 248 importance of, 44–5 Concorde, 69, 70, 71 conspiracy chemtrails, 192–5, 206–8, 214 conspiracy theories, 195, 198–9, 205 contrails, 196–8, 197, 214 global warming, 73, 193, 214 9/11 terrorist attacks, 203–4, 206 ‘Conspiracy as Governance’ (Assange), 183 contrails, 196–8, 197, 214 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15), 199 Cowen, Deborah, 132 Credit Suisse, 109 cryptocurrency, 63 Cumulus homogenitus, 195–6 cyborg chess, 159 D Dabiq (online magazine), 212 Dallaire, Roméo, 243 darkness, 11–2 “Darkness” (poem), 201–2 dark pools, 108–9 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 33 Darwin, Charles, 78 data abundance of, 83–4, 131 big, 84 importance of, 245–6 realistic accounting of, 247 thirst for, 246 data dredging, 90–1 Debord, Guy, 103 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), 33 Decyben SAS, 110 Deep Blue, 148–9, 157–60 DeepDream, 153, 154–5 DeepFace software, 140 defeat devices, 120 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 33 de Solla Price, Derek, 91–2, 93 Diffie-Hellman key exchange, 167 digital culture, 64–5 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 33 digital networks, mapping, 104 digitisation, 108 ‘Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control’ lecture, 26 diurnal temperature range (DTR), 204 DNA sequencing, 93 D-Notices, 179 domain name system, 79 doomsday vault, 52–3 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 121–2 drones, 161–2 drug discovery/research, 94–5 DTR (diurnal temperature range), 204 Duffy, Carol Ann, 201 Dunne, Carey, 194–5 E Elberling, Bo, 57 electromagnetic networks, 104 Electronic Computer Project, 27 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 177 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 27, 27–30, 33 Elements of Chemistry (Lavoisier), 208–9 Elkins, Caroline, 183–4 Ellis, James, 167 encoded biases, 142 ‘End of Theory’ (Anderson), 83–4, 146 Engelbart, Douglas, 79 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), 27, 27–30, 33 Enlightenment, 10 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 119–20 EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), 119–20 Epagogix, 130 epidemic type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model, 145–6 Epimetheus, 132–4 Equinix LD4, 104 Eroom’s law, 86, 93–6 ETAS (epidemic type aftershock sequence) model, 145–6 Euronext Data Center, 104, 105, 106 Evangelismos Hospital, 130–1 evolution, theory of, 78 exploitation, 229–30 Eyjafjallajökull, eruption of, 200–1, 202 F Facebook, 39–40, 156–7 facial recognition, 141 Fairchild Semiconductor, 80 Farage, Nigel, 194 Fat Man bomb, 25 Fermi, Enrico, 250 Ferranti Mark I, 78 fiat anima, 19–20 fiat lux, 19–20 Finger Family, 221–2, 224, 227 ‘Five Eyes,’ 174 Flash Boys (Lewis), 111–2 flash crash, 121–2, 130–1 FlightRadar24, 36, 189, 191 flight trackers, 35–6, 36 ‘Fourteen Eyes,’ 174 Fowler, R.H., 45 Frankenstein (Shelley), 201 fraud, 86–8, 91 Freedom of Information, 161–2, 165, 192 Friends’ Ambulance Unit, 20 Fuller, Buckminster, 71 Futurama exhibit, 30–1 ‘Future Uses of High Speed Computing in Meteorology’ lecture, 26 G Gail, William B., 72–3 Galton, Francis, 140 game developers, 130 Gates’s law, 83 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), 167, 174, 176–9, 189 genocide, 243 ghost cars (Uber), 118–9 G-INFO, 190 global mass surveillance, 179–80 Global Positioning System (GPS), 36–7, 42–3 Global Seed Vault, 54 global warming, 73, 193, 214 Glomar response, 165, 186 Godard, Jean-Luc, 143 Google, 84, 139, 230, 242 Google Alerts, 190 Google Brain project, 139, 148, 149, 156 Google Earth, 35–6 Google Home, 128–9 Google Maps, 177 Google Translate, 147–8, 156 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 167, 174, 176–9, 189 GPS (Global Positioning System), 36–7, 42–3 Graves, Robert, 159 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 128 gray zone, 212–4 Great Nōbi Earthquake, 145 Greenland, 57–8 Green Revolution, 53 Greyball programme, 119, 120 guardianship, 251–2 H Hankins, Thomas, 102 Haraway, Donna, 12 Harvard Mark I machine, 30 Hayek, Friedrich, 156–7 The Road to Serfdom, 139 The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 138–9 HealthyFoodHouse.com (website), 231–2 Heller, Joseph Catch-22, 187–8 Hermes, 134 Hersh, Seymour, 164 Hewlett-Packard, 143 hidden technological processes, 120 high-frequency trading, 14, 106–7, 108, 122, 124 high-throughput screening (HTS), 95–6 Hillingdon Hospital, 110–1, 111 Hippo programme, 32 Hofstadter, Douglas, 205–6 Hola Massacre, 170 homogenitus, 195, 196 Horn, Roni, 50, 201 How-Old.net facial recognition programme, 141 ‘How the World Wide Web Just Happened’ lecture, 78 HTS (high-throughput screening), 95–6 Hughes, Howard, 163 Hughes Glomar Explorer, 163–5 human genome project, 93 Human Interference Task Force, 251 human violence, 202 Humby, Clive, 245, 246 Hwang Woo-suk, 86–8 hyperobjects, 73, 75, 76, 194 hypertext, 79 I IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation), 68 ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), 53–4, 55 ICT, 60–2 image recognition, 139–40 Infinite Fun Space, 149–50, 156 information networks, 62 information superhighway, 10 Infowars (Jones), 207 In Place of Fear (Bevan), 110 Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, 26 integrated circuits, 79, 80 Intel, 80 International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), 53–4, 55 International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), 68 International Cloud Atlas, 195 Internet Research Agency, 235, 237 Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, 199 The Invisibles (Morrison), 196–7 Isaksen, Ketil, 54 ISIL, 212–3 J Jameson, Fredric, 205 Jelinek, Frederick, 146–7 Jones, Alex Infowars, 207 Joshi, Manoj, 68–9 journalism, automated, 123–4 just-in-time manufacturing, 117 K K-129, 162–3 Karma Police operation, 175 Kasparov, Garry, 148–9, 157–8 Keeling Curve, 74, 74 Kennedy, John F., 169–70 Kinder Eggs, 215–6 Kiva robots, 114 Klein, Mark, 176–7 Kodak, 143 Krakatoa, eruption of, 202 Kunuk, Zacharias, 199, 200 Kuznets curve, 113 L Large Hadron Collider, 93 Lavoisier, Antoine, 78 Elements of Chemistry, 208–9 Lawson, Robert, 175–6 LD4, 104, 105 Leave Campaign, 194 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 78 Levy, David, 158, 159 Lewis, Michael Flash Boys, 111–2 LifeSphere, 125 literacy in systems, 3–4 Lockheed Ocean Systems, 163 Logan, Walt (pseudonym), 165 Lombroso, Cesare, 140 London Stock Exchange, 110–1 Lovecraft, H.P., 11, 249 ‘low-hanging fruit,’ 93–4 M Macedonia, 233–4 machine learning algorithms, 222 machine thought, 146 machine translation, 147 magnetism, 77 Malaysian Airlines, 66 manganese noodles, 163–4 Manhattan Project, 24–30, 248 Mara, Jane Muthoni, 170 Mark I Perceptron, 136–8, 137 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 128–9 Matthews, James Tilly, 208–10, 209 Mauro, Ian, 199 McCarthy, Joe, 205 McGovern, Thomas, 57–8 McKay Brothers, 107, 110 memex, 24 Mercer, Robert, 236 Merkel, Angela, 174 metalanguage, 3, 5 middens, 56 migrated archive, 170–1 Minds, 150 miniaturisation principle, 81 Mirai, 129 mobile phones, 126 The Modern Prometheus (Shelley), 201 monoculture, 55–6 Moore, Gordon, 80, 80, 83 Moore’s law, 80–3, 92–4 Mordvintsev, Alexander, 154 Morgellons, 211, 214 Morrison, Grant The Invisibles, 196–7 Morton, Timothy, 73, 194 Mount Tambora, eruption of, 201 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 169 Munch, Edvard The Scream, 202 Mutua, Ndiku, 170 N NarusInsight, 177 NASA Ames Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator, 42 Natanz Nuclear Facility, 129 National Centre for Atmospheric Science, 68–9 National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 243 National Health Service (NHS), 110 National Mining Association, 64 National Reconnaissance Office, 168, 243 National Security Agency (NSA), 167, 174, 177–8, 183, 242–3, 249–50 National Security Strategy, 59 natural gas, 48 neoliberalism, 138–9 network, 5, 9 networks, 249 Newton, Isaac, 78 NewYorkTimesPolitics.com, 221 New York World’s Fair, 30–1 NHS (National Health Service), 110 9/11 terrorist attacks, 203–4, 206 ‘Nine Eyes,’ 174 1984 (Orwell), 242 NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), 33 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), 33 ‘The Nor’ project, 104 Not Aviation, 190–1 NSA (National Security Agency), 167, 174, 177–8, 183, 242–3, 249–50 nuclear fusion, 97–8, 100 nuclear warfare, 28 Numerical Prediction (Richardson), 45 Nyingi, Wambugu Wa, 170 Nzili, Paulo Muoka, 170 O Obama, Barack, 180, 206, 231 Official Secrets Act, 189 Omori, Fusakichi, 145 Omori’s Law, 145 Operation Castle, 97 Operation Legacy, 171–2 Optic Nerve programme, 174 Optometrist Algorithm, 99–101, 160 O’Reilly, James, 185–6 Orwell, George 1984, 242 ‘Outline of Weather Proposal’ (Zworykin), 25–6 P Paglen, Trevor, 144 ‘paranoid style,’ 205–6 Patriot Act, 178 Penrose, Roger, 20 Perceptron, 136–8, 137 permafrost, 47–9, 56–7 p-hacking, 89–91 Phillippi, Harriet Ann, 165 photophone, 19–20 Pichai, Sundar, 139 Piketty, Thomas Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 112 Pincher, Chapman, 175–6 Pitt, William, 208 Plague-Cloud, 195, 202 Poitras, Laura, 175 Polaroid, 143 ‘predictive policing’ systems, 144–6 PredPol software, 144, 146 Priestley, Joseph, 78, 208, 209 prion diseases, 50, 50–1 PRISM operation, 173 product spam, 125–6 Project Echelon, 190 Prometheus, 132–4, 198 psychogeography, 103 public key cryptography, 167–8 pure language, 156 Putin, Vladimir, 235 Pynchon, Thomas Gravity’s Rainbow, 128 Q Qajaa, 56, 57 quality control failure of, 92–3 in science, 91 Quidsi, 113–4 R racial profiling, 143–4 racism, 143–4 ‘radiation cats,’ 251 raw computing, 82–3 Reagan, Ronald, 36–7 Reed, Harry, 29 refractive index of the atmosphere, 62 Regin malware, 175 replicability, 88–9 Reproducibility Project, 89 resistance, modes of, 120 Reuter, Paul, 107 Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, 181 Richardson, Lewis Fry, 20–1, 29, 68 Numerical Prediction, 45 Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, 21–3 Richardson number, 68 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 139 Robinson, Kim Stanley Aurora, 128 robots, workers vs., 116 ‘Rogeting,’ 88 Romney, Mitt, 206–7 Rosenblatt, Frank, 137 Roy, Arundhati, 250 Royal Aircraft Establishment, 188–9 Ruskin, John, 17–20, 195, 202 Rwanda, 243, 244, 245 S Sabetta, 48 SABRE (Semi-Automated Business Research Environment), 35, 38 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), 33, 34, 35 Samsung, 127 Scheele, Carl Wilhelm, 78 Schmidt, Eric, 241–5 The Scream (Munch), 202 Sedol, Lee, 149, 157–8 seed banks, 52–6 Seed Vault, 55 seismic sensors, 48 self-excitation, 145 ‘semantic analyser,’ 177 Semi-Automated Business Research Environment (SABRE), 35, 38 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 33, 34, 35 semiconductors, 82 The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Hayek), 138–9 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 201 The Modern Prometheus, 201 SIGINT Seniors Europe, 174 simulation, conflating approximation with, 34–5 Singapore Exchange, 122–3 smart products, 127–8, 131 Smith, Robert Elliott, 152 smoking gun, 183–4, 186 Snowden, Edward, 173–5, 178 software about, 82–3 AlphaGo, 149, 156–8 Assistant, 152 AutoAwesome, 152 DeepFace, 140 Greyball programme, 119, 120 Hippo programme, 32 How-Old.net facial recognition programme, 141 Optic Nerve programme, 174 PredPol, 144, 146 Translate, 146 Solnit, Rebecca, 11–2 solutionism, 4 space telescopes, 168–9 speed of light, 107 Spread Networks, 107 SSEC (IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator), 30, 30–2, 31, 146 Stapel, Diederik, 87–8 Stapledon, Olaf, 20 steam engines, 77 Stellar Wind, 176 Stewart, Elizabeth ‘Betsy,’ 30–1, 31 Steyerl, Hito, 126 stock exchanges, 108 ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ lecture series, 17–9 Stratus homogenitus, 195–6 studios, 130 Stuxnet, 129–30 surveillance about, 243–4 complicity in, 185 computational excesses of, 180–1 devices for, 104 Svalbard archipelago, 51–2, 54 Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 52–3 Svalbard Treaty (1920), 52 Swiss National Bank, 123 Syed, Omar, 158–9 systemic literacy, 5–6 T Taimyr Peninsula, 47–8 Targeted Individuals, 210–1 The Task of the Translator (Benjamin), 147, 155–6 TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), 79 technology acceleration of, 2 complex, 2–3 opacity of, 119 Teletubbies, 217 television, children’s, 216–7 Tesco Clubcard, 245 thalidomide, 95 Thatcher, Margaret, 177 theory of evolution, 78 thermal power plants, 196 Three Guineas (Woolf), 12 Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov), 157 Tillmans, Wolfgang, 71 tools, 13–4 To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light exhibition, 143 totalitarianism, collectivism vs., 139 Toy Freaks, 225–6 transistors, 79, 80 Translate software, 146 translation algorithms, 84 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), 79 Tri Alpha Energy, 98–101 Trinity test, 25 trolling, 231 Trump, Donald, 169–70, 194–5, 206, 207, 236 trust, science and, 91 trusted source, 220 Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, 49 turbulence, 65–9 tyranny of techne, 132 U Uber, 117–9, 127 UberEats app, 120–1 unboxing videos, 216, 219 United Airlines, 66–7 Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act), 178 USA FREEDOM Act (2015), 178 US Drug Efficacy Amendment (1962), 95 V van Helden, Albert, 102 Veles, objectification of, 235 Verizon, 173 VHF omnidirectional radio range (VOR) installations, 104 Vigilant Telecom, 110–1 Volkswagen, 119–20 von Neumann, John about, 25 ‘Can We Survive Technology?


pages: 775 words: 208,604

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

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

About a decade ago, Steve Friesen made me think harder about ancient income distributions, and Emmanuel Saez further piqued my interest in inequality during a shared year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. My perspective and argument have been inspired in no small measure by Thomas Piketty’s work. For several years before his provocative book on capital in the twenty-first century introduced his ideas to a wider audience, I had read his work and pondered its relevance beyond the last couple of centuries (also known as the “short term” to an ancient historian such as myself). The appearance of his magnum opus provided much-needed impetus for me to move from mere contemplation to the writing of my own study.

Machin, Stephen. 2008. “An appraisal of economic research on changes in wage inequality.” Labour 22: 7–26. Maddison project. “Maddison project.” http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm. Magness, Phillip W., and Murphy, Robert P. 2015. “Challenging the empirical contribution of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first century.” Journal of Private Enterprise 30: 1–34. Mahler, Vincent A. 2010. “Government inequality reduction in comparative perspective: a cross-national study of the developed world.” Polity 42: 511–541. Maisels, Charles K. 1990. The emergence of civilization: from hunting and gathering to agriculture, cities, and the state in the Near East.

Quarterly Journal of Economics 126: 1071–1131. Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Le capital au XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2015a. “Vers une économie politique et historique: réflexions sur le capital au XXIe siècle.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 125–138. Piketty, Thomas. 2015b. “Putting distribution back at the center of economics: reflections on Capital in the twenty-first century.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29: 67–88. Piketty, Thomas, Postel-Vinay, Gilles, and Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent. 2006.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The age of stagnation, in this theory, is the fruit of what Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Institute and Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University describe as a “captured economy,” in which everything from land-use rules, to exclusionary zoning, to occupational licensing, to ever-expanding intellectual-property protections, to corporate subsidies and tax breaks all converge to create an system that’s basically the worst of socialism and the worst of capitalism conjoined—plutocratic and sclerotic, overregulated and undertaxed, with an upper class enriching itself off rents rather than innovation and a service class that can’t advance beyond its station. The overlap between this more libertarian argument and the left-wing critique of neoliberalism is apparent in one of the urtexts of the post–financial crisis left: French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which mined centuries’ worth of statistics to argue that capitalism inherently makes the rich richer (because returns on capital will always be higher than simple economic growth) unless some powerful force intervenes. The forces that intervened in the twentieth century were the Great Depression and two world wars, which not only provided the impetus for massive government interventions in the economy but also destroyed outright a great deal of capitalist wealth, leading to a temporary golden age for the Western middle classes.

A 2017 paper found that companies in younger labor markets are more innovative; a 2018 report found that the aging of society helped explain the growth of monopolies and the declining rate of start-ups. Another paper in the same year found “a clear relationship between an older workforce and lower productivity,” suggesting a demographic explanation for the persistent decline of productivity growth. The empty cradle helps explain the growth of inequality as well. In Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, his vision of the permanent triumph of the one percent depends heavily on the assumption that slow population growth will inevitably lead to slower growth overall—and, more subtly, on the fact that fewer children means fewer heirs to divide up family wealth. The narrowing of family trees ensures that fortunes will grow ever more concentrated instead of diffusing with each successive generation, as they would in a society where more wealthy people had more than just two kids.

.), 155, 156, 160 Bentham, Jeremy, 144 Bernanke, Ben, 84 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 165 Between the World and Me (Coates), 97 Bezos, Jeff, 213 bipartisanship, 68, 76–77, 82, 171 birthrates, 202 in Africa, 197, 198, 207 of American Jews, 222 in Israel, 50, 54, 217 birthrates, decline in, 27, 46, 47–65, 166–67, 180, 236 contributing factors in, 50–56 in dystopian fiction of Atwood and James, 47–50 economic consequences of, 56–58 innovation and, 57–58 in Islamic world, 161 mass immigration as solution to economic problems of, 62–65 psychological consequences of, 61–62 recessions and, 51 replacement rate and, 50, 53–54, 58, 63 shrinking families and, 58–62 welfare states and, 51, 52 Black Death, 190 Black Panther (film), 209–10 Blade Runner: 2049 (film), 94 Bloom, Allan, 97 Bloom, Harold, 224 Bloomberg, Michael, 143 Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 43 Bork, Robert, 78 brain drain, 171 Brave New World (Huxley), 127–28, 151, 184–85 Brazil, economic growth in, 166–67 Brexit, 63, 64, 85, 114, 172, 193 Great Recession and, 193 immigration and, 196 Brookings Institution, 71 Brown, Peter, 223 Brown, Scott, 67 Buckley, William F., 97 Buddhism, 225 Bundy, Ted, 119, 120 Bush, George H. W., 71 Bush, George W., 71, 80 Byzantium, 201 Caldwell, Christopher, 84 Canada, birthrate in, 50 cancer, 211 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 30–31, 57–58 capitalism, 32, 181, 218 neo-Marxist critique of, 219–21 Piketty’s theory of, 30–31 rentier class and, 26, 30–31, 46 captured economies, 30 Carr, Nicholas, 107 Carter, Jimmy, 24 Carter presidency, 25–26 catastrophe, 189–203 climate change scenario for, 195–97, 200 economic scenario for, 191–95, 200 mass migration scenario for, 197–99, 200 unforeseen, 189–91, 202 Catholics, Catholicism, 103, 156, 183, 227 decline in church attendance by, 100 lapsed, 218 liberal, 110 traditionalist, 206–7, 208 Vendée massacre of, 206 Cavafy, C.


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

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

., From Austerity to Affluence: The Transformation of the Socio-Economic Structure of Western Europe and Japan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 68–72; Takenori Inoki, “From Rapid Growth to the End of Full Employment in Japan,” in Griffiths and Tachibanaki, eds., From Austerity to Affluence, 87. 5. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 6. Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012, US Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–245 (September 2013), Table A-4; Atkinson and Morelli, “Chartbook of Economic Inequality.”

In some cases, national union leaders even bargained with the heads of business organizations and government officials to set the share of national income that would be paid out in workers’ wages and the share that would be paid out in profits, evening out the distribution of income by limiting the amount that could go to corporate shareholders or the owners of small businesses.4 But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, one of the most significant causes of greater equality in the postwar world had less to do with economic policy than with tragedy. World War II destroyed massive amounts of capital: apartments, shops, office blocks, and factories were blown to bits, along with production machinery and household furnishings.

In Japan, the Gini coefficient, a measure that would equal 0 if each household had an equal share of the nation’s income and 1 if all income belonged to a single household, fell from around 0.3 before the war to 0.04 in 1953, indicating a very high degree of equality. See T. Mizoguchi, “Long-run Fluctuations in Income Distribution in Japan,” Economic Review 37 (1986): 152–158, cited in Toshiaki Tachibanaki, Confronting Income Inequality in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 59. 4. Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “The Top 1% in International and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (2013): 7; Richard T. Griffiths, “Economic Growth and Overfull Employment in Western Europe,” in Richard T. Griffiths and Toshiaki Tachibanaki, eds., From Austerity to Affluence: The Transformation of the Socio-Economic Structure of Western Europe and Japan (New York: St.


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The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“Table 326.10,” Digest of Education Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, accessed August 7, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_326.10.asp. 31. See Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–41; Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 1 (2011): 3–71; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). 32. Piketty, Capital. 33. Tobias Buck, “German Inheritance Wave Stokes Fears over Inequality,” Financial Times, May 2, 2018. https://www.ft.com/content/894689c2-4933-11e8-8ee8-cae73aab7ccb; “Taxing inheritances is falling out of favour,” The Economist, November 23, 2017, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2017/11/23/taxing-inheritances-is-falling-out-of-favour?

With higher-than-warranted demand for job candidates with degrees and lower-than-desirable demand for candidates with high school diplomas, it is less surprising that the wage premium in the United States is higher than elsewhere despite the high average years of education. THE ONE PERCENT AND THE WINNER-TAKE-MOST EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY While incomes for those with a bachelor’s degree, especially in technology and engineering, have grown relative to the rest, incomes at the very top have truly exploded in a number of countries. As economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have documented in various studies, in the United States, the top 1 percent of earners took only 8 percent of total income in 1970, but this grew to 18 percent by 2010.31 In the United Kingdom, starting from similar shares in 1970, the top 1 percent earned about 15 percent of total income by 2010.


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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

., the rest of the population—quickly became shorthand for the income gap in America. Inequality in America is getting starker over time: while typical household income grew by less than 40 percent between 1979 and 2007, the income of the richest 1 percent grew by 275 percent in that same time period. The French economist Thomas Piketty, who gained international fame for his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has suggested that the level of income inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” This can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1 percent to feel powerless, but this focus neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has.

In an effort to avoid technical vocabulary whenever possible, throughout this book I use “typical” to refer to “median,” and “average” to refer to “mean.” while typical household income: Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007, October 2011, http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/10-25-HouseholdIncome_0.pdf. “probably higher than in any other society”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 265. Consider this graph of global income distribution: The data on world income distribution is drawn from several sources. The figures for between the richest 1 percent and the richest 21 percent are based on microdata from national household surveys carried out in 2008, kindly provided by Branko Milanovic.


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Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Socialising finance will steadily erode the distinction between owners and workers and, before long, will allow us to transcend capitalism altogether. If history has a sense of humour, then the death of capitalism will begin where it was born — in the United Kingdom. Capital In 2013, 146 years after Marx published his work of the same name, Thomas Piketty published Capital in the Twenty-First Century.1 It was an instant hit, though few made it past the introduction. In Capital, Piketty argued that the central problem of our time was the tendency for the returns to wealth to outstrip economic growth. Because wealth is highly unequally distributed in capitalist systems, this tendency leads to increasing inequality.

An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty”. Chapter Seven The Way Forward 1 This account draws on: Piketty (2013); Hudson, P. and Tribe, K. (2017) The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, London: Agenda; Harvey, D. (2014) “Afterthoughts on Piketty’s Capital”, http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/; Mandel (1976; 1981); Harvey (2018). 2 This account draws on: Marx (1894); Mandel (1981) 3 See, e.g., Autor, D. and Dord, D. (2012) “The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarisation of the US Labour Market”, MIT Department of Economics. 4 This account draws on: Mazzucato, M. (2011) The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, London: Anthem; Mazzucato, M. (2015) “The Market Creating State”, RSA Journal, vol. 2. 5 Srnicek N. and Williams A. (2016) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London: Verso. 6 Eagleton, O. (2017) “Criminalising Anti-Austerity in Ireland”, Jacobin, 21 April. 7 This account draws on: Baker, A. (2013) “The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift”, New Political Economy, vol. 18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2012.662952; Galati, G. and Moessner, R. (2011) “Macroprudential Policy — A Literature Review”, BIS Working Paper 337; Blanchard, O., Rajan, R., Rogoff and Summers (2016); Bank of England (2009) “The Role of Macroprudential Policy: A Discussion Paper” http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/other/financialstability/roleofmacroprudentialpolicy091121.pdf; Kregel, J. (2014) “Minsky and Dynamic Macroprudential Regulation”, Levy Economics Institute Public Policy Brief No. 131. 8 This account draws on: Blakeley (2018a) 9 Haldane, A. (2012) “The Dog and the Frisbee”, speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 36th economic policy symposium, 31 August. 10 IPPR (2018) 11 See, e.g., Stirling, A. (2018) “Just About Managing Demand: Reforming the UK’s Macroeconomic Policy Framework”, IPPR. 12 See, e.g., Roberts, C. and Lawrence, M. (2018) “Our Common Wealth: A Citizens’ Wealth Fund for the UK”, IPPR. 13 See, e.g., Murphy, R. (2017) Dirty Secrets: How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy, London: Verso ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a book is hard.

Since the 1970s, capital has become much more powerful than labour in Anglo-America.25 In the post-war period, strong labour unions and state commitments to maintaining full employment meant that workers could demand wage increases that were in line with productivity. As a result of the increase in the power of labour relative to that of capital, labour got its way. But this was an historically unusual situation — as Thomas Piketty points out, the “golden age” of capitalism was the exception, not the rule. After the 1970s, rising capital mobility, financial deregulation, and changing models of corporate governance have increased the power of shareholders — particularly big investors — in the management of corporations. Workers have been disempowered through simultaneous anti-union legislation and the reversal of the Keynesian economic policy which provided for full employment.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

The Metric Black Hole “A ‘free and frictionless’ method of communication” and other details of Tom Cochran’s e-mail experiment: Cochran, Tom. “Email Is Not Free.” Harvard Business Review, April 8, 2013. http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free/. “it is objectively difficult to measure individual”: from page 509 of Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. “undoubtedly true”: Manzi, Jim. “Piketty’s Can Opener.” National Review, July 7, 2014. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382084/pikettys-can-opener-jim-manzi. This careful and critical review of Piketty’s book by Jim Manzi is where I originally came across the Piketty citation.

Even though we abstractly accept that distraction has costs and depth has value, these impacts, as Tom Cochran discovered, are difficult to measure. This isn’t a trait unique to habits related to distraction and depth: Generally speaking, as knowledge work makes more complex demands of the labor force, it becomes harder to measure the value of an individual’s efforts. The French economist Thomas Piketty made this point explicit in his study of the extreme growth of executive salaries. The enabling assumption driving his argument is that “it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm’s output.” In the absence of such measures, irrational outcomes, such as executive salaries way out of proportion to the executive’s marginal productivity, can occur.

Of course, just because it’s hard to measure metrics related to deep work doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that businesses will dismiss it. We have many examples of behaviors for which it’s hard to measure their bottom-line impact but that nevertheless flourish in our business culture; think, for example, of the three trends that opened this chapter, or the outsize executive salaries that puzzled Thomas Piketty. But without clear metrics to support it, any business behavior is vulnerable to unstable whim and shifting forces, and in this volatile scrum deep work has fared particularly poorly. The reality of this metric black hole is the backdrop for the arguments that follow in this chapter. In these upcoming sections, I’ll describe various mind-sets and biases that have pushed business away from deep work and toward more distracting alternatives.


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The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Federal Reserve Board of Governors, “Changes in US Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 100, no. 4 (September 2014), http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2014/pdf/scf14.pdf. 6. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since the End of the Great Recession,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/. 7. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 8. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “The Inequality Trifecta,” Project Syndicate, October 17, 2014, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/imf-world-bank-annual-meetings-and-inequality-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2014-10. 9.

As noted earlier, the expansion of their balance sheets has tended to support the wealthy since the latter hold a disproportionately large share of the financial assets being targeted for support by central bank action. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that there is now quite a bit of general interest in the matter. Recall how in 2014 a big economic tome (almost seven hundred pages, including research analysis and historical insights) on inequality by French economist Thomas Piketty shot up to the top of bestseller lists, triggering lots of discussions, panels, and interviews in the process.7 At the 2014 IMF–World Bank Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., inequality was the most common topic in seminars organized by the official sector, industry groups, and think tanks. There is also a growing realization that the effects of inequality may well have evolved beyond questions of fairness, and beyond the threats it poses to social, geopolitical, and political well-being: Inequality also creates adverse economic feedback loops that make it much harder for the advanced countries to emerge from their generalized economic malaise.


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Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Subdued labour incomes – thanks to a mixture of weak demand, technological change and competition from cheaper labour elsewhere in the world – meant that gains in sales revenues alone led to higher corporate profits; higher profits, in turn, fed through to further stock market gains, even in the absence of a recovery in investment. For both the owners and managers of companies, this appeared to be a case of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’, triggering much gnashing of teeth and, not surprisingly, a renewed interest in the causes of, and the cures for, rising income inequality. Not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was – in the absence of wars and revolutions – always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth: the implication was simply that the already well-off – basically those with no shortage of capital – would steadily get richer, a conclusion that appeared very much to be playing out before our eyes.

(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Byzantium (i) Cabinet (UK) (i) California (i), (ii) caliphates (i), (ii), (iii) Callaghan, Jim (i), (ii) Cameron, David (i) Canada a reputable country (i) Asian Development Bank and (i) closes gap on US (i) Irish emigrate to (i), (ii) North America Free Trade Agreement (i), (ii) TPP (i) Cape of Good Hope (i) capital, mobility of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also cross-border capital flow Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) (i) capitalism communism and (i) free-market capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Fukuyama’s disciples on (i) Steffens and Shaw on (i) US economic model and (i) Caribbean (i) Carter, Jimmy (i) Castillon, Battle of (i) Castro, Fidel (i) Catherine of Aragon (i) Catherine the Great (i) Catholics (i), (ii), (iii) Caucasus (i), (ii) Central African Republic (i), (ii) Central America (i) Central Asia (i), (ii), (iii) see also Asia central banks (i), (ii) see also bankers inflation targets (i) Kosmos (i) price distortion (i) printing money (i), (ii) quantitative easing (i), (ii), (iii) zero interest rates and (i) Chad (i) Chechens (i) checks and balances (i), (ii) Chile (i) China (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) 1980 emergence (i) ageing population (i) attracting Western investment (i) balance of payments surplus (i) boom to slowdown (i) Brazil and (i) British in (i) Coca-Cola and (i) demand for German goods (i) Deng Xiaoping (i) Disney and (i) economic resurgence (i), (ii) excess capital in US (i) foreign capital for (i) iPhones (i) Japan and (i) living standards (i) military spending (i) OECD and (i) per capita incomes (i), (ii) ratifies Paris climate deal (i) rise of renminbi (i), (ii) Russia threatens (i) South China Sea and neighbour disputes (i) TPP and (i) treaty ports (i) Trump’s protectionism and (i) US tries to contain (i), (ii), (iii) Chongqing (i), (ii) Christianity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Churchill, Winston (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n1 CIA (i) Ciudadanos (i) Cleveland, Grover (i) climate change (i), (ii) Clinton, Hillary 2016 campaign (i) Bernie Sanders opposes (i) concerns of supporters (i) rejects TPP (i), (ii) Syria (i) wins Democrat nomination (i) clubs (i), (ii) Cobden, Richard (i), (ii), (iii) Coca-Cola (i) ‘coffin ships’ (i) Cold War binary rivalry, a (i) economic differences (i) end of (i), (ii) globalization and (i) NATO and (i) Soviet living standards (i) collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) (i) Collins, Philip (i) Columbus, Christopher (i), (ii), (iii) commodity markets (i), (ii), (iii) common sense (i) Commonwealth (i) communism Berlin Wall and (i) capitalism and (i) Cuba (i) Marx’s stages (i) Shaw extols (i) Soviet Union collapse and (i), (ii) Como, Lake (i) Comptoir National d’Escompte de Paris (i) Concert of Europe (i) Congo (i) Congress (US) 1933 banking crisis (i) American public’s confidence in (i) Bush Jnr on terrorism (i) Immigration Act 1917 (i) Japanese sanctions (i), (ii) Smoot–Hawley tariff (i) Congress of Vienna (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Connally, John (i) Conolly, Arthur (i) Conservative Party (i), (ii) Constantinople (i), (ii) Constitutional Tribunal (Poland) (i) ‘Convention of Peking’ (i) Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (i) Corbyn, Jeremy (i), (ii) Córdoba (i), (ii) corporate scandals (i) Corroyer, Edouard (i) Court of Cassation (Egypt) (i) Crécy, Battle of (i) Creole languages (i) Crimea (i), (ii) Crimean War (19th century) (i) crop yields (i) cross-border capital flow allocation of resources and (i) emerging markets and (i), (ii) extraordinary growth of (i), (ii), (iii) globalization dominated by (i) inequality and (i) Varoufakis tries to limit (i) Cuba (i) Czech Republic (i) Czechoslovakia (i) Darius the Great (i) Darwin, Charles (i) Davos (i), (ii) de Gaulle, Charles (i), (ii) debt (i) Africa (i) China (i) debt to income ratios (i) government debt (i) Latin America (i) low inflation and (i) deflation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Delhi (i) demand management (i), (ii) Democratic Party (US) (i), (ii) Democratic Republic of the Congo (i) Denfert-Rochereau, Eugène (i) Deng Xiaoping (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Denmark (i), (ii) Department of Housing and Urban Development (US) (i) deposit insurance (i) devaluation 1930s (i), (ii), (iii) dollars, gold and (i) Eisenhower and Britain (i) franc (i) right conditions for (i) Diaoyu (i) Disney (i), (ii) Doha Round (i) dollar (US) see American dollar Dow Jones Industrial Average (i) Draghi, Mario (i) Duisburg (i) Duterte, Rodrigo (i), (ii) DVDs (i) East Africa (i) see also Africa Eastern Europe EU and its effects (i) importing democracy (i) joining the EU (i), (ii) Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (i) New World emigration (i) Ottoman Empire and (i) Soviet communism and (i), (ii), (iii) ‘Economic Theory of Clubs’ (James Buchanan) (i) Ecuador (i) Eden, Anthony (i), (ii) Edison, Thomas (i) Edison Electric (i) educational attainment (i) Edward VI, King (i) Egypt (i), (ii), (iii) Einstein, Albert (i) Eisenhower, Dwight D.

The Economic Effects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: New estimates, Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper 16-2, Washington, DC, January 2016 Pettis, M. The Great Rebalancing: Trade, conflict and the perilous road ahead for the world economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013 Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014 Pinker, S. and A. Mack. ‘The world is not falling apart’, Slate, 2014, available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html Rachman, G.


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

Then there were other trends, for instance a growing gap between richer parts of India, such as Kerala in the south, and poorer areas like the heartland state of Bihar.47 Tens of millions more people could have been lifted from poverty, according to the Asian Development Bank, had these various kinds of inequality not increased so sharply.48 Most striking of all was a 2017 paper published by Thomas Piketty, whose opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century first raised worries about an era of renewed inequality across the industrialized world. Along with coauthor Lucas Chancel, Piketty compiled data from tax records to show that the share of national income taken by India’s top one percent was at its highest level since records began to be collected under the British Raj in 1922.

To be counted among its richest one percent required assets of just $32,892, according to research from investment bank Credit Suisse in 2016.19 But that same one percent now owns more than half of national wealth, one of the highest rates in the world. The International Monetary Fund suggests that India, alongside China, now ranks as Asia’s most unequal major economy. Thomas Piketty, the French economist famous for his work on global inequality, has shown the share of Indian national income taken by the top one percent of income earners to be at its highest level since tax records began in 1922.20 On these measures, India should now rightly be viewed alongside South Africa and Brazil as one of the world’s least equal countries.

A fierce battle was under way between them, Sinha said, and one whose outcome would define the kind of country India would become. An Unequal Fortune The rise of India’s billionaires mirrored changes that had swept through the world economy over recent decades, bringing with them new anxieties about inequality. Data compiled by Thomas Piketty showed the share of national wealth held by the richest Americans hitting levels not seen since the 1930s.31 A similar story was true in many advanced European economies. Yet while hedge fund magnates and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs came to represent the excesses of Western capitalism, it was in countries like India, with its newly powerful Bollygarch class, that the super-rich were expanding quickest of all.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The most novel involved the offer of 1,000 free live chickens to prospective customers. After a desperate scramble by locals, only chicken feathers and a few lost shoes were left. It was an apt postscript to the latest installment in the rise and fall of emerging markets. In 2014, Thomas Piketty, a French economics professor, had an unexpected bestseller with the English translation of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Self-consciously evoking Karl Marx, the 700-page book analyzed income and wealth distribution. Like Casablanca's Captain Renault, who was shocked to find that gambling was going on under his nose, the world appeared surprised that inequality was increasing and that capitalism concentrates wealth over time.

Alan Weisman, The World without Us, Picador, 2007. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Touchstone Books, 1991. ——, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, Penguin, 2011. Inequality and Trust Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Satyajit Das is a globally respected former banker and consultant with over thirty-five years’ experience in financial markets.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

A number of very good recent books look at the effect of these policies in terms of their impact at the top end of the income distribution, and the consequences of that inequality for everyone else: Chrystia Freedland’s Plutocrats, Robert Frank’s Richistan, Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, and George Packer’s The Unwinding. Spring 2014 saw the publication of Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an important, powerful, and densly argued study of the shift in the balance of power between capital and labor. There is a notable gap in the market here: there are attacks on the existing neoliberal order, but there doesn’t seem to be a powerful popular counternarrative.

With such low effective tax rates—and, importantly, the low tax rate of 20 percent on income from capital gains—it’s not a huge surprise that the share of income going to the top 1 percent has doubled since 1979, and that the share going to the top 0.1 percent has almost tripled, according to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Recall that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the picture becomes even more disturbing.64 prop trading In proprietary trading, banks bet their own money for their own benefit, as opposed to making such trading only on behalf of their clients.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 249But there’s a loophole: Josh Zumbrun (25 Apr 2022), “The $67 billion tariff dodge that’s undermining U.S. trade policy,” Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-67-billion-tariff-dodge-thats-undermining-u-s-trade-policy-di-minimis-rule-customs-tourists-11650897161. 250inequality produces surplus resources: Thomas Piketty (2017), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press. 251the fundamental problem with humanity: Tristan Harris (5 Dec 2019), “Our brains are no match for our technology,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/digital-technology-brain.html. Index Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book.

When those with means or technical ability realized that they could profitably hack systems, they quickly developed the resources and expertise to do so. They learned to exploit vulnerabilities. They learned to move up and down the hacking hierarchy to achieve their goals. They learned how to get their hacks normalized, declared legal, and adopted into the system. This is being made even worse by income inequality. The economist Thomas Piketty explains that inequality produces surplus resources for the winners, and that that surplus can be mobilized to create even more inequality. Much of that mobilization is hacking. Now we have more people with more knowledge of hacking and more resources to hack with than ever before, and with that knowledge and resources comes power.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

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

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

Fisher, 1919, “Economists in Public Service: Annual Address of the President,” American Economic Review 9 (1): 10 and 16. 66. T. Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 67. W. Scheidel, 2018, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 68. On financial occupations, see Lindert and Williamson, 2016, Unequal Gains, figure 8-3. 69. Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 506–7. 70. C. Goldin and R. A. Margo, 1992, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (1): 1–34. 71.

,” Journal of Income Distribution 9 (1): 11–25. 5. H. A. Taine, 1958, Notes on England, 1860–70, trans. E. Hyams (London: Strahan), 181. See also Cannadine, 1977, “The Landowner as Millionaire.” 6. See P. H. Lindert, 1986, “Unequal English Wealth since 1670,” Journal of Political Economy 94 (6): 1127–62. 7. T. Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), figure 3.1. 8. See, for example, C. Boix, and F. Rosenbluth, 2014, “Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality,” American Political Science Review 108 (1): 1–22. 9. J. Diamond, 1987, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1, 64–66. 10.

S. 2015. Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Phyllis, D., and W. A. Cole. 1962. British Economic Growth, 1688–1959: Trends and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, T. 2018. “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict.” Working paper, Paris School of Economics. Piketty, T., and E. Saez. 2003. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.”


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

In part, this failure has occurred because Condorcet’s constitution presupposes a shared commitment to forging a society of equals, and the trend toward ever greater levels of social and economic inequality in many advanced industrial countries today, as documented by the French economist Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, if left unchallenged, effectively nullifies such hopes. But the original revolutionary democratic project was also perverted when, in the hands of fanatics like Babeuf, Rigault, and Lenin, its partisans resorted to brute force and tried to level every single political opponent and institutional obstacle in its path.

If we abandon a virtue like truthfulness: In treating truthfulness as a virtue, I follow Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). “I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state”: Havel, “Politics, Morals and Civility,” 18. “I feel that the dormant goodwill in people”: Ibid., 8–9. In part, this failure has occurred because Condorcet’s constitution: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). “Censorship, the terror, and concentration camps”: Havel, “What I Believe,” in Summer Meditations, 62–63. Through online platforms like Facebook: See Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet, January 23, 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/public-interest-technology/policy-papers/digitaldeceit; Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas; and Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” The New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?

., French Revolution celebration in bounded rationality bourgeoisie Bowen, Sayles Jenks Brecht, Bertolt Brexit Brissot, Jacques-Pierre Brown, John Brunswick Manifesto Brussels Bryce, James Brzezinski, Zbigniew Buonarroti, Philippe Burckhardt, Jacob bureaucracies, power of Bush, George H. W. Bush, George W. California Democratic Council (CDC) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) capitalism; democracy and; Marx’s predicted self-destruction of Carbonari Carlyle, Thomas Carter, Jimmy Cartledge, Paul Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chaerephon Chamberlain, Joseph Charles II, king of England Charmides Chartists; arrests and imprisonment of; Convention of; 1839 conventions of; electoral reforms demanded by; strikes and uprisings by; universal male suffrage as core principle of Cherokee nation Chicago, Ill., 1968 Democratic convention in Chickasaw nation Choctaw nation Chomsky, Noam Chronique de Paris Churchill, Winston Cimon City Dionysia civil disobedience civil liberties, Wilson’s suppression of civil rights movement Civil War, U.S.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

See, for example, Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels, Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 66. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), 615. 67. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 68. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 571. 69. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 573. For a wise and elegant defense of democracy, see also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015). 70. Roger W. Garrison, “Hayek and Friedman,” in Elgar Companion to Hayekian Economics, ed.

Two years after the North London riots, research in the UK showed that by 2013, poverty fueled by lack of education and unemployment already excluded nearly a third of the population from routine social participation.46 Another UK report concluded, “Workers on low and middle incomes are experiencing the biggest decline in their living standards since reliable records began in the mid-19th Century.”47 By 2015, austerity measures had eliminated 19 percent, or 18 billion pounds, from the budgets of local authorities, had forced an 8 percent cut in child protection spending, and had caused 150,000 pensioners to no longer enjoy access to vital services.48 Buy 2014 nearly half of the US population lived in functional poverty, with the highest wage in the bottom half of earners at about $34,000.49 A 2012 US Department of Agriculture survey showed that close to 49 million people lived in “food-insecure” households.50 In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty integrated years of income data to derive a general law of accumulation: the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. This tendency, summarized as r > g, is a dynamic that produces ever-more-extreme income divergence and with it a range of antidemocratic social consequences long predicted as harbingers of an eventual crisis of capitalism.

., “Shopocalypse Now: Consumer Culture and the English Riots of 2011,” British Journal of Criminology 53, no. 1 (2013): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs054; Tom Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting Against a Broken State,” Human Geography 4, no. 3 (2011): 106–15. 42. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010.


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

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

“Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” February notes 225 12, 2013, White House Office of the Press Secretary, available at http://www. whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-unionaddress, p. 1. 13. Ibid., pp. 1–9. The one exception to this was gun control, which may also explain why Obama gave up on it so quickly in 2013. 14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. Ibid., p. 4. 16. Ibid., p. 5. 17. Ibid., p. 6. 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. Ibid., p. 7. 20. Ibid., p. 8. 21. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 22. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) and “Dynamics of Inequality,” an interview with Piketty, New Left Review 85 (January–February 2014). Many are arguing with Piketty’s policy prescriptions, few with his fundamental claim that capital accumulation without growth is at the bottom of intensifying inequality. 23.

While they rarely use the term “neoliberalism,” this is the emphasis of the valuable critiques of Western state policy offered by economists Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz and of development policy offered by Amartya Sen, James Ferguson, and Branko Milanvic, among others.24 Growing inequality is also among the effects that Thomas Piketty establishes as fundamental to the recent past and near future of post-Keynesian capitalism. The second criticism of neoliberal state economic policy and deregulation pertains to the crass or unethical commercialization of things and activities considered inappropriate for marketization. The claim is that marketization contributes to human exploitation or degradation (for example, Third World baby surrogates for wealthy First World couples), because it limits or stratifies access to what ought to be broadly accessible and shared (education, wilderness, infrastructure), or because it enables something intrinsically horrific or severely denigrating to the planet (organ trafficking, pollution rights, clearcutting, fracking).


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

The Atlantic, 21 September. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/corporate-surveillance-activists/406201 (accessed 22 May 2016). Perez, Carlota. 2009. ‘The Double Bubble at the Turn of the Century: Technological Roots and Structural Implications’. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33 (4): 779–805. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Polivka, Anne. 1996. ‘Contingent and Alternative Work Arrangements, Defined’. Monthly Labor Review, 119 (10): 3–9. Pollack, Lisa. 2016. ‘What Is the Price for Your Personal Digital Dataset?’ Financial Times, 10 May. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1d5bd1d0-15f6-11e6-9d98–00386a18e39d.html (accessed 30 June 2016).

It is the latter dynamic, in particular, that will play a key role in the changes that lie at heart of this book. But before we can understand the digital economy we must look back to an earlier period. The End of the Postwar Exception It is increasingly obvious to many that we live in a time still coming to terms with the breakdown of the postwar settlement. Thomas Piketty argues that the reduction in inequality after the Second World War was an exception to the general rule of capitalism; Robert Gordon sees high productivity growth in the middle of the twentieth century as an exception to the historical norm; and numerous thinkers on the left have long argued that the postwar period was an unsustainably good period for capitalism.4 That exceptional moment – broadly defined at the international level by embedded liberalism, at the national level by social democratic consensus, and at the economic level by Fordism – has been falling apart since the 1970s.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

713 http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/06/innovation 714 Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1797 715 http://www.progress.org/banneker/chur.html 716 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, quoted in Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, Atlantic: 2007 717 Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, University of Chicago: 1948. http://library.mises.org/books/Friedrich%20A%20Hayek/Individualism%20and%20Economic%20Order.pdf 718 http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/publication/golden-growth 719 http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2010/speech442.pdf 720 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n04/andrew-haldane/the-doom-loop 721 Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The World Top Incomes Database” http://topincomes.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/#Database: 722 Ibid. Table 4 723 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard: 2014 724 David Sainsbury, Progressive Capitalism: How To Achieve Economic Growth, Liberty and Social Justice, Biteback: 2013 725 "Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses.

The top 0.01 per cent took home 0.75 per cent, nearly five times the 0.17 per cent they got in 1980. Looking at the Gini coefficient, a measure of a society’s overall income inequality, Britain and Italy are the most unequal societies in western Europe, while Denmark is the most equal, with Sweden just behind.722 The distribution of wealth is generally much more unequal. And as Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has pointed out, as growth slows and with it the creation of new wealth, old (inherited) fortunes weigh more heavily than before.723 A decent society should want to encourage effort and enterprise – by everyone, not just those who end up billionaires – without rewarding undeserved or unearned income.


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

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

Their chart 2 exhibits weekly income distributions in 1886 prices at 1886, 1906, 1938, and 1960, showing the disappearance of the inflation-adjusted classic line of misery for British workers, “’round about a pound a week.”8 Yet the left works overtime, out of the best of motives, to rescue its ethically irrelevant focus on Gini coefficients and the relative poverty line. A recent example of the leftish labor is the book by a French economist I have mentioned, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (translated 2014), which was greeted with squeals of delight by the American and British left, and rapidly rose to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Piketty claims that relative poverty is what matters, whether or not the poorest improve. “Just as we’ve been saying!”

Righteous, if inexpensive, indignation inspired by survivor’s guilt about alleged “victims” of something called “capitalism,” and envious anger at the silly consumption by the rich, does not invariably yield betterment for the poor. Remarks such as “there are still poor people” or “some people have more power than others,” though claiming the ethical high-ground for the speaker, are neither deep nor clever. Repeating them, or nodding wisely at their repetition, or buying Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to display on your coffee table, does not make you a good person. You are a good person if you actually help the poor. Open a business. Invest in a grocery store in an urban food desert. Invent a new battery. Vote for better schools. Adopt a Pakistani orphan. Volunteer to feed people at Grace Church on Saturday mornings.

“The Securities Exchange Commission: From Where, Where To?” In McCloskey, ed. 1993, pp. 136–141. Phillipson, Nicholas. 2010. Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1932 (1965). The Moral Judgment of the Child. Trans. Marjorie Gabain. New York: Free Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pink, Daniel H. 2012. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin. Pipes, Richard. 1999 (2000). Property and Freedom. New York: Knopf. Pirenne, Henri. 1925. Ville du Moyen Age (Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade).


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

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

Replying to Marx’s charge that the capitalist exploited the worker, the American economist John Bates Clark, in his 1899 book The Distribution of Wealth, used a simple aggregate production function to show that, in a competitive market equilibrium, the two factors of production, capital and labour, would be paid their marginal products – that is, in proportion to their contribution to satisfying individual preferences.1 Distribution was off the economic agenda. Recently, discussion of distribution has centred on the fact, and meaning, of the sharp rise in inequality since the 1970s, particularly in the United States and Britain. The most notable contributions here 288 di s t r i bu t ion a s a m ac roe c onom ic p robl e m are Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), a documentation of long-run trends in the distribution of wealth and income in developed capitalist economies, and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (2017). 2 Piketty’s data show both a widening dispersal of incomes and a fall in labour’s wage share since the 1970s and 1980s.

Trying to restore the profit rate by cutting wages only reduced prices and consumer demand further. Devine called this the under-consumption trap.28 I V. T h e Mode r n U n de rc onsu m p t ion is t S t ory The modern under-consumptionist story starts with the big increase in inequality, noticeable in all developed countries since the 1970s. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century documented 298 di s t r i bu t ion a s a m ac roe c onom ic p robl e m in exhaustive detail the increase in inequality over the last forty years.29 Coming on top of the crash of 2008, it rekindled interest in distributional issues in both their moral and efficiency aspects.

W. (1958), The relation between unemployment and the rate of change of money wage rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957. Economica, 25 (100), pp. 283–99. Pigou, A. C. (1912), Wealth and Welfare. London: Macmillan. Pigou, A. C. (1913), Review of R. G. Hawtrey, Good and Bad Trade, The Economic Journal, 23, pp. 580–83. Piketty, T. (2014 (2013)), Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Piketty, T. (2017), Chronicles: On our Troubled Times. London: Penguin. Plumpe, W. (2016), German Economic and Business History in the 19th and 20th Centuries. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Private Debt Project (2015), Conversation with Lord Adair Turner.


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Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

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

The growing inequality of wealth and income in the world has become an increasing focus of attention from activists, politicians, and pundits. Occupy Wall Street struck a chord with the slogan “we are the 99 percent,” drawing attention to the fact that almost all the gains from economic growth in recent decades have accrued to 1 percent or less of the population. Economist Thomas Piketty scored an improbable best seller with Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a massive treatise about the history of wealth and the prospect of an increasingly unequal world.22 The two crises I’ve described are fundamentally about inequality as well. They are about the distribution of scarcity and abundance, about who will pay the costs of ecological damage and who will enjoy the benefits of a highly productive, automated economy.

Lbo-News.com, 2015. 17Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, New York: Putnam, 1995; Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 18Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948, p. 28. 19Paul Krugman, “Sympathy for the Luddites,” New York Times, June 14, 2013. 20Ford, Rise of the Robots; Derek Thompson, “A World Without Work,” Atlantic, July/August 2015; Farhad Manjoo, “Will Robots Steal Your Job?,” Slate.com, September 26, 2011; Drum, “Welcome Robot Overlords.” 21Mike Konczal, “The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy,” NextNewDeal.net, 2015. 22Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 23Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen Productions, 2003. 24Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, New York: Penguin, 2005. 25Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, Marxists.org, 1915. 26Robert Costanza, “Will It Be Star Trek, Ecotopia, Big Government, or Mad Max?


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The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Single, poor, his prospects for life expectancy are not good.) Large inequalities of wealth and income and a preponderance of inherited wealth characterised nineteenth-century Britain and France. These insights and the concern that we may be heading that way again are the message of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For a 685-page economics book, published by a university press, to become a best-seller – it sold out within days, and was likely to have sold 200,000 copies within three months – and for its author, a serious French economics professor, to become a superstar, Capital must be tapping in to something important.

What the figures on income and wealth show is that there are oceans of money sloshing about. It is not easy to maintain the fiction that we do not have enough money to do good things. The problem is that, within countries, the concentration of wealth is becoming more extreme. That was the message of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. At the same time as wealth concentration is increasing, all across Europe and the US we are being lectured to on the dire importance of austerity. Public services have to be cut back because . . . because . . . we cannot afford them? John Maynard Keynes, immediately after the Second World War, wrote: ‘The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.’8 In country after country, too much of our public conversation is about how we can grow national income, too little about how we can improve society.

Health Equity Studies. 2008; 12. 13Woolf SH, Aron L, editors. U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. National Research Council; Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013. 14Stiglitz J. The Price of Inequality. New York: Penguin, 2013. 15Piketty T. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 16Vardi N. The 25 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers and Traders. Forbes. 2014. 17Ostry JD, Berg A, Tsangarides CG. IMF Staff Discussion Note: Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth. International Monetary Fund, 2014. 18Sen A. Inequality Reexamined.


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SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Modern Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27(2) (Spring 2013): 3-28. 7. Oxfam International, “Richest 1% Will Own More Than All the Rest by 2016,” press release, January 19, 2015, https://www.oxfamorg/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-01-19/richest-1-will-own-more-all-rest-2016. 8. For reference, see also: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1, 237, Kindle edition. 9. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing), 3, Kindle edition. 10. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W.

Therefore, having top academic credentials, policy experience, and access to high-caliber networks provide thought leaders with distinct competitive advantages that propel them into the league of superhubs. Most thought leaders in finance are economists. A select few have become academic celebrities, such as Thomas Piketty, Nassim Taleb, and Paul Krugman, because they have touched the Zeitgeist. They are their own brands, with rock star status and almost cultlike followings. Inundated with media requests, exclusive invitations, and offers to join prestigious boards, their work surpasses the insular world of academia and becomes the center of public attention.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

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

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

Progressive scientists will apply gene therapy to climate change, as they have already begun to do with the woolly mammoth—which they hope, once brought back to life, might restore the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and prevent methane release from permafrost—and will probably do soon with the mosquito, hoping to eradicate mosquito-borne disease. Perhaps a rogue billionaire will try to single-handedly cool the earth with geoengineering, flying a few private planes around the equator to disperse sulfur and citing the model of Bill Gates and his mosquito nets. “apparatus of justification”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice: The founder of hipster foodie magazine Modern Farmer is, in 2018, rumored to be launching a “Goop for climate change.” the pesticide Roundup: Alexis Temkin, “Breakfast with a Dose of Roundup?”

But when critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypocritical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.” And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

American Political Science Review 93 (September): 609–24. ———. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bonnet, Odran, Pierre-Henri Bono, Guillaume Chapelle, and Etienne Wasmer. 2014. “Does Housing Capital Contribute to Inequality? A Comment on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper, 7: 1–12. Borjas, George J. 2013. “Immigration and the American Worker: Review of the Academic Literature.” Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, DC. https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/CIS2013.pdf. Bork, Robert. 1978.

Yet Piketty’s own data show that after taking account of destruction of capital and capital taxation, in fact r < g for the entire period from 1913 to 2012—that is, basically during the period of democracy (see figures 10.10 and 10.11). The dire prediction for the future relies on the key assumption “that fiscal competition will gradually lead to total disappearance of taxes on capital in the twenty-first century” (2014, 355), coupled with a sharp drop in growth rates.11 A look at actual capital taxation rates instead reveals remarkable stability. While top statutory capital tax rates have come down in most countries since the 1980s, Swank and Steinmo (2002) show that such cuts were accompanied by a broadening of the tax base that left effective tax rates virtually unchanged from 1981 to 1995.

Like Gordon, he believes that the capacity of technology to produce high rates of GDP growth is low. Specifically, he argues that “global growth is likely to be [only] around 1.5 percent a year between 2050 and 2100” (355). At the same time, he believes that capital is becoming more mobile and that “fiscal competition will gradually lead to total disappearance of taxes on capital in the twenty-first century.” Combined with a relatively constant rate of return on capital of about four percent, the result is r > g and a massive rise in inequality. There may be work for all, but the fruits of this labor will be increasingly captured by the rich. How does our framework cast light on these debates?


pages: 424 words: 121,425

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The social contract forged during the Great Depression stabilized U.S. banking for several decades. For fifty years, the banking sector experienced measured growth and success while the rest of the economy generally thrived. This growth and stability coincided with exceptional international economic growth. As Thomas Piketty explains in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the time between the Great Depression and the 1970s marked a unique period in world history of relative equalities of wealth and remarkable economic growth.89 Surely, sustained economic growth contributed to a stable and successful banking system. And so did the federal deposit insurance fund, which succeeded in finally ending the confidence-destroying runs that had historically wreaked havoc on banks.

For a comprehensive discussion of “redlining,” see Charles Lewis Nier, III, “The Shadow of Credit: The Historical Origins of Racial Predatory Lending and its Impact upon African American Wealth Accumulation,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change (2008). 89. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2014), 80. 90. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” accessed March 19, 2015, www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/i-have-dream-1. 91. Richard Scott Carnell, Jonathan R. Macey, and Geoffrey P. Miller, The Law of Banking and Financial Institutions, 350 (New York: Aspen Publishers, 2009). 92.

Before the civil-rights-era laws forbidding discrimination in banking were passed, many blacks were left out of the mainstream banking institutions. Many blacks had to form their own institutions—black-owned banks. The story of black banking is too rich to be summarized in this text but will be the topic of the author’s future research and study. 36. Regulation Q, 12 CFR §217. 37. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 38. Connecticut Department of Banking, “ABCs of Banking,” accessed March 17, 2015, www.ct.gov/dob/cwp/view.asp?a=2235&q=297892. 39. “The relaxation of restrictions on intrastate branching and interstate banking that took place in the 1980s and early 1990s facilitated both mergers and consolidations.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole, A Theory of Incentives in Regulation and Procurement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). In Germany, Hans-Werner Sinn also made a significant contribution to the analysis of the provision of public goods and built this position up as the basis for a critique of many of the Euro rescue mechanisms. 45. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 32. 46. Obituary: Raymond Barre, Independent, August 26, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/raymond-barre-5334901.html. 47. Jacques Sapir, Les Économistes contre la démocratie: Pouvoir, mondialisation et démocratie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). 48.

Jean Tirole and Jean-Jacques Laffont in particular have been instrumental in developing a new approach to the provision of incentives by regulators, in which the dangers of creating moral hazard play a key role.44 The visions of the past influence the way that economics is seen. Most French economists complain—as did the recent best-selling author Thomas Piketty of Capital, a dramatic manifesto on how capitalism does not provide a self-sustaining and politically acceptable model of growth—that “economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites.”45 In fact, a popular and intellectual culture exists that sees economists as narrow-minded and soulless technocrats who force a dehumanized concept of rationality on their fellow citizens.

A powerful statement of the world of French thought—which was presented as a revolution against traditional Anglo-Saxon economics—was the report of a commission called by Sarkozy and cochaired by Jean-Paul Fitoussi (along with two distinguished but left-leaning non-French Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen), in which the central role of government in the economy was emphasized and a plea made for a more extensive assessment of the role of “well-being.”50 Even economists like to participate in the backlash against modern economics. Distinguished (and numerate) figures such as Edmond Malinvaud and Thomas Piketty complain about the overmathematization of economics. The same sort of public mobilization of economists for a political cause that took place in Germany against rescue packages occurred in France against the German doctrines and against austerity politics. In September 2010, over 700 French economists signed a widely publicized manifesto for “an alternative economic and social strategy” for Europe, attacking the “false economic platitudes” of “neoliberal dogma.”51 The manifesto was drawn up by four economists, three of whom worked at governmental research institutes, and the fourth was an adviser to the antiglobalization organization Attac.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

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

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

Krueger, A. (2002) ‘Economic scene: when it comes to income inequality, more than just market forces are at work’, New York Times, 4 April 2002, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/04/business/economic-scene-when-it-comes-income-inequality-more-than-just-market-forces-are.html?_r=0 11. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 12. Ostry, J. D. et al. (2014) Redistribution, inequality and growth. IMF Staff discussion note, February 2014, p. 5. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf 13. Quinn, J. and Hall, J. (2009) ‘Goldman Sachs vice-chairman says “learn to tolerate inequality” ’, Daily Telegraph 21 October 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/recession/6392127/Goldman-Sachs-vice-chairman-says-Learn-to-tolerate-inequality.html 14.

Pearce, J. et al. (2012) ‘A new model for enabling innovation in appropriate technology for sustainable development’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 8: 2, pp. 42–53. Persky, J. (1992) ‘Retrospectives: Pareto’s law’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 6: 2, pp. 181–192. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pizzigati, S. (2004) Greed and Good. New York: Apex Press. Polanyi, K. (2001) The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Pop-Eleches, C. et al. (2011) ‘Mobile phone technologies improve adherence to antiretroviral treatment in resource-limited settings: a randomized controlled trial of text message reminders’, AIDS 25: 6, pp. 825–834.

What’s more, starting in the early 1980s, many high-income countries that believed they had successfully made it over the curve’s hump saw their income distribution begin to widen again, resulting in the infamous rise of the one percent accompanied by flat or falling wages for the majority. It was, however, the economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 long view of the dynamics of distribution under capitalism that made the underlying story plain to see. By asking not just who earns what but also who owns what, he distinguished between two kinds of households: those that own capital – such as land, housing, and financial assets which generate rent, dividends and interest – and those households that own only their labour, which generates only wages.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

In the years that followed Thatcher, landlords also received tax breaks: alongside mortgage interest relief there was even a wear-and-tear allowance to repair any damage to their properties. Some of that relief has since been clawed back in an attempt to even things out. This has stalled the growth of the private rented sector, but the impact on British society and our economy is deep set. We have witnessed what the French economist Thomas Piketty describes in his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century as the return of rentier capitalism. This is a system in which one class monopolises access to any kind of property and resources and gains significant amounts of profit from that without properly contributing to society. It’s a lot like feudalism. In Britain, it has given birth to a new wealth-based class system in which the ownership of housing is a key decider of someone’s freedom: their social status, their spending power and their social mobility.

‘year zero’: See Gavriel Hollander, ‘Thirty years on: how the Housing Act changed everything’, Inside Housing, 24 January 2019, www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/thirty-years-on-how-the-housing-act-changed-everything-59821 banks tend to give mortgages more readily: This is evidenced in the fact that in the boom years of 1996–2006 first-time buyers were entering the market in large numbers, putting homeownership close to an all-time high. But when the financial crisis hit, lending to them was cut in half and landlords were seen as a less risky bet by lenders. 20.3 per cent of households: www.statista.com/statistics/286444/england-number-of-private-rented-households the return of rentier capitalism: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (2013; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) is an important work though, of course, not everyone agrees with its contents. A key claim made by Piketty is that income inequality has increased sharply since the late 1970s, with a particularly dramatic rise in the share of total income going to the very highest earners in the US and Europe.

Antrim 1 banking regulations 1 Banksy 1, 2 Barbour, Mary 1 Barr, Robert 1 Bates, Justin 1 Bath, Somerset 1 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 1, 2 Beadle, Ben 1 ‘beds in sheds’ 1 Belgium 1 bell hooks 1, 2 ‘belonging’, see location/place benefit cap 1, 2 Benefits Street (TV documentary series) 1 Berlin, Germany 1 Berry, Siân 1 Best, Richard 1 Bevan, Aneurin ‘Nye’ 1, 2, 3 Beveridge, William 1, 2, 3, 4 Beveridge Report (1942) 1 Bexhill, East Sussex 1 ‘Big Bang’ (financial markets) 1 biomarkers, 1 Blackpool 1 Blackstone (corporate landlord) 1 Blair, Tony 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bolsover, Derbyshire 1 Boughton, John 1 Bourdieu, Pierre 1 Bourne, Nick, Baron Bourne of Aberystwyth 1 Bradford, West Yorkshire 1, 2, 3, 4 Bradford Council 1 Brake, Tom 1 Brazil 1 Brexit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Brighton, Sussex 1, 2, 3 Brighton and Hove, 1 Bristol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bristol Cable 1 Bristol Community Land Trust 1 British Future (think tank) 1 British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) 1, 2, 3 Brixton, London 1 Brokenshire, James 1, 2 Bromley, south London 1, 2 Brown, Gordon 1, 2, 3 Bryant, John 1 Buck, Karen 1, 2, 3, 4 Buckinghamshire County Council 1 ‘build-to-rent’ sector 1 Building Research Establishment Trust 1, 2 C C-reactive protein (CRP) 1 Callaghan, James 1 Cambridge House centre 1, 2 Camelot Guardian Management Ltd 1, 2, 3, 4 Cameron, David 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Canterbury, Kent 1 capital gains tax (CGT) 1 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) 1 capitalism 1, 2, 3, 4 rentier capitalism 1 Care Quality Commission (CQC) 1, 2 Cathy Come Home (TV drama) 1 Central Heating Evaluation programme (Scotland) 1 Centre For Towns think tank 1 Centre Point, London 1 Ceredigion, Wales 1 Chadwick, Duncan and Edwin 1 Chartered Institute of Building 1 Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) 1 Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) 1, 2 Chartist movement 1 Chatham, Kent 1 Cheshire West and Chester, 1 children 1, 2 childcare 1 health 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 homelessness 1, 2 housing displacement and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Churchill, Winston 1 City A.M. 1 cladding crisis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Clair, Amy 1 class, see social class Clegg, Nick 1 climate change 1, 2 Cloward, Richard 1 Coggeshall, Essex 1, 2 Colchester, Essex 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Colchester Renters campaign group 1, 2, 3 Cold Weather Fund 1 Colombia 1 Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN) 1 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx & Engels) 1 Communist Party 1 community land trusts 1 Comte, Auguste 1 Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels) 1 Conservative Party 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Constitution of Liberty (Hayek), 1 Copenhagen, Denmark 1 Corby, Northamptonshire 1 Corbyn, Jeremy 1, 2, 3 Cornwall 1, 2 coronavirus pandemic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 eviction ban 1 homelessness and 1, 2, 3 impact on housing 1, 2, 3, 4 overcrowding and 1, 2 poor housing and 1, 2 private renters and 1 corporate landlords 1 Costa Rica 1 council housing, see social housing Covid-19, see coronavirus Cowan, Dave 1 Craw, Dan Wilson 1 Crisis (homeless charity) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Croydon 1, 2, 3 Cutler, Horace 1 D Daily Mail 1, 2 Daily Telegraph 1 David Plaister Ltd 1 Dawson, Gloria 1 Dawson’s Heights estate, East Dulwich 1 Decent Homes Standard 1, 2, 3 Delingpole, James 1 Denmark 1, 2 Denton, Greater Manchester 1 Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) 1 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 1 Department of Social Security (DSS) 1 Derry, Northern Ireland 1 Desmond, Matthew 1 Dickens, Charles 1 disability 1, 2, 3 Discus Housing First, Amsterdam 1 Dismaland (Banksy) 1 DnR Vinyl, 1 domestic abuse 1, 2 Dorling, Danny 1 Dorrington Court, Croydon 1, 2, 3 Douglas-Home, Alec 1 Duffy, Bobby 1 Duncan, William 1 E East Ayrshire, Scotland 1 Economic Journal 1 Eden, Anthony 1, 2 education 1, 2, 3 Education Act (1870) 1 Einstein, Albert 1 Elephant and Castle, London 1, 2, 3 Elsworth, Linda 1, 2 emergency B&Bs 1, 2 ‘emerging adulthood’, 1 energy efficient homes 1 energy price caps 1 Engels, Friedrich 1, 2 English Housing Survey 1, 2, 3 2017/18: 1 2018/19: 1 2019/20: 1 2020/21: 1 Equality Act (2010) 1 Escape to the Country (TV series) 1 estate agents 1, 2 Evening Standard 1 ‘Everyone In’ scheme 1, 2 Evicted (Desmond) 1 evictions 1, 2, 3, 4 children and 1, 2, 3 guardianship and 1 illegal evictions 1 legal aid 1 mental health and 1, 2, 3, 4 physical health and 1 Section 1, 2 Section 1 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 ‘Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health’ (Desmond) 1 ‘excluded occupiers’ 1 F Farage, Nigel 1 Ferreri, Mara 1 Field, Hazell 1, 2 Financial Times 1 Finland 1, 2, 3 Flat Justice 1 free market forces 1, 2 Friedman, Sam 1 ‘friendlords’ 1 Frome, Somerset 1 Fullilove, Mindy 1, 2, 3, 4 G Gabor, Daniela 1 Gallik, Tomas 1 Gandhi, Mohandas 1 garden cities 1, 2 Garden City Association 1 gardening 1 gender housing gap 1 Generation Rent (lobby group) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Generation Rent (term) 1, 2, 3 generations 1 Baby Boomers 1, 2 Generation X 1 Generation Z 1 intergenerational inequality 1 millennials 1, 2, 3 Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

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

And all the more so, the argument goes, in an increasingly globalized world: a world in which capital is liquid, companies are multinational and effectively able to choose where they pay tax, labour is offshored to low-cost jurisdictions with few rights or union protections, while the rich are mobile and can relocate as and where they see fit. This in turn supports an emergent global value system which exalts material success and tacitly despises national cultures and local values and institutions. The runaway success of Thomas Piketty’s recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, with its argument that the past thirty years have been conspicuous for the imbalance between the economic returns accruing to capital and to labour, is just one token of a much deeper and wider sense of malaise. But as with economics, as with financial markets, so some would go further still, and place the ultimate blame for these failures of capitalism on Adam Smith himself.

Monks, Corpocracy: How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World’s Greatest Wealth Machine—and How to Get It Back, John Wiley 2007 Arguments for falling rates of gain from technology: see Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton University Press 2016 Absence of critique: debate on the nature of capitalism has been hugely reinvigorated by Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, Allen Lane 2014. In many ways rightly so, for it offers a very important analytical window into data on wealth and incomes, a simple but comprehensive theory of their long-term evolution and an overdue focus on the distributional consequences of the key trends involved.

Kenneth Laine Ketner, Harvard University Press 1992 Phelps, Edmund, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, Princeton University Press 2013 Phillipson, Nicholas, David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian, rev. edn, Penguin Books 2011 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Allen Lane 2014 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence and its Causes, Allen Lane 2011 Pinker, Steven, Enlightenment Now, Allen Lane 2018 Pirie, Madsen, The Neoliberal Mind: The Ideology of the Future, Adam Smith Institute 2017 Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press 1985 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation, Farrar & Rinehart 1944 Pujol, Michèle A., Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought, Edward Elgar 1992 Putnam, Hilary and Vivian Walsh (eds.), The End of Value-Free Economics, Routledge 2011 Raphael, D.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

It has long been widely understood that one cannot grasp actually-existing patterns of socioeconomic inequality without factoring in landownership.2 But what is much less obvious, though no less important, is that land rents and land value gains appear to be critical to rapidly growing levels of inequality, in terms of both income and wealth, during the neoliberal era – a trend that is, of course, one of the key issues of the moment in Western societies. The centrality of land to this troubling ongoing development has been a principal theme of emerging critiques of the book that has done so much to put inequality in the intellectual and political spotlight – Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.3 The first line of critique concerns income inequalities. One of Piketty’s main contributions has been to show that stability in the respective shares of national income accruing to wage earners and capital owners, for so long considered a ‘stylized fact’ of macroeconomics, did not survive beyond the 1950s.

One of the most striking things about the widespread attempts in Asia and Africa between 1950 and 1980 to create more egalitarian rural societies precisely through land reform – collectivization in China, Vietnam and Ethiopia, for example, and landlord abolition in Egypt and India – is that, in this regard, they failed. See D. Low, The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa, 1950–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 1 G. La Cava, ‘Piketty’s Rising Share of Capital Income and the US Housing Market’, Vox, 8 October 2016, at voxeu.org. Long before Piketty, notably, another Frenchman, the Marxist Henri Lefebvre, called attention to the rising share of income accruing to landowners in twentieth-century capitalism, and the fact that this trend contradicted Marx’s expectation that land would ultimately be subsumed under capital and that rent – as a distinct category of capital income – would be subsumed within profit.

., 191 budgets, squeezing, 205–6 Build Now, Pay Later scheme, 236, 265, 282 Cabinet Office, 122, 122n1, 135, 137, 174, 182, 264, 268–9 Cable, Vince, 340 Cahill, Kevin, 25, 31, 74, 84, 90, 116, 173, 189, 247–8, 297 Callcutt, John, 303 Camden, 204, 347 Cameron, David, 137, 159, 192–4, 254, 303, 326, 327, 333 Canada, 5 Canary Wharf, 314, 317–8 Canary Wharf Group Investment Holdings, 298 Canterbury City Council, 266, 271 Capital (Marx), 62, 67–8 capital charging, 178–80, 184–5 capital gains, 48–55, 61–2, 64 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 53–4 capitalism and land, 11–13, 26, 34–5, 38– 72, 75, 83, 113–4, 283 contradictions of, 59–60, 62–3, 283 rentier form of, 305–11 role of the state in, 39–40, 64–5, 71 Cardiff, 265–6 Carlino, Nicholas, 268 Carlisle, John, 221 Catalano, Alejandrina, 52, 112–3, 116–7, 117n2, 297, 328–9, 339, 341 Cayman Islands, 195 Central Bedfordshire Council, 219 central government. see also Whitehall landholdings, 87, 115, 117, 134, 198, 209, 251–4, 259–63 Centre for Environmental Studies, 328–9 Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), 179 Chakrabortty, Aditya, 38, 124 Chamberlain, Joseph, 86 Chamberlain Walker Economics, 302n2, 3 Chartist movement, 86 Chelsea Barracks, 253 Churchill, Winston, 48–9, 60–1 City Hall, 199 City of London, 192, 332 city villages, 236, 313 City Villages, 160, 161, 162–3 civil estate, 134–6, 178, 182, 226–7, 253, 260 Civil Estate Property Benchmarking Service, 184 Civitas, 171 Clark, Gordon, 89, 90, 94 Clifford, Ben, 146, 319 coalition government, UK (2010–15), 122, 168, 228, 326 Cobden, Richard, 86 Cogan, Jacob, 27 collectivization, 53n2 Collings, Jesse, 86 Collinson, Patrick, 308 Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), 201–2 commodity, land as a, 33–4, 60, 66–72, 311–2, 324, 327. see also ‘fictitious commodities’ Common Good lands, 260 common land, 9, 10–3, 30, 80–3, 116–7, 139, 323, 344 Commons Act (1876), 81, 82 Commons Preservation Society, 81 The Communist Manifesto (Engels and Marx), 46–7 Communities and Local Government Committee, 214n3, 238, 272, 293n4 community benefits, of land disposal, 228, 230, 232, 276–9 Community Care Act, 254 Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015), 239 Community Land Act (1975), 107, 112, 113 Community Land Bill, 107 community land trust (CLT), 346–7 Community Right to Reclaim Land, 151, 228, 237, 238, 239 competition, 15–16, 18n2, 59, 61, 120–1 compulsion, of land disposal, 215–23 compulsory purchase, of land, 40–1, 95, 98–9, 110–1, 314, 320–1 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels), 67–8 Conservative Party (UK), 111, 119 donorship, 125 landlord MPs, 122 land privatization, 122, 176, 207, 213, 253, 268 views on landownership, 27, 93, 108, 173, 328 Cooper, Olivia, 88 Corby Borough Council, 266–7n5 Corbyn, Jeremy, 195–6, 337–8 Cornwall, 78 Couchman, James, 136 council estates ‘regeneration’ of, 160–3, 176n1, 236–7, 313, 325, 331 council housing, 240, 272, 314, 320–1, 339. see also Right to Buy policy birth of, 94–5 financing, 145–6, 212–3 land acquisition for, 94–6, 99–100 privatization, 1–2, 7–8, 144–6, 255, 267–8 repurchase by councils, 270–1 waiting lists, 271 Council Tax, 170, 196n2 ‘counter-movement’ (Polanyi), 324, 327, 328 Coventry, 100 Cowen, Tyler, 2–3 Cox, Andrew, 110, 165, 173 Coyle, Diane, 173 Cragoe, Matthew, 88–9 Crawley, 99 Crewe, Tom, 147, 148, 255, 258 Crichel Down affair/rules, 225, 227 Cromwell, Thomas, 79 Crosland, Anthony, 111 Crown Estate, 9–10, 10n1, 88, 116– 7, 259n1, 298 Crown Estate (Scotland), 10n1, 346 Crown land, 88 Cumbria County Council, 12n1 Currie, Edwina, 152 Dalton, Hugh, 110–1, 113 Dalyell, Tam, 217 Davies, Ceri, 18n2, 177–8, 179–80. see also Davies report (1983) Davies, Will, 15 Davies report (1983), 186, 210, 211, 254, 332. see also Davies, Ceri DB Schenker, 273 deBuys, William, 331 Defence Infrastructure Organisation, 165, 215 defence land. see Ministry of Defence, landholdings Defence Lands Committee, 105 deficit reduction, 119, 131, 152, 154, 213 Deloitte Real Estate, 218, 219, 332 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), 198n1, 208, 221–2, 235, 280–2, 284, 285n4, 340n3 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) landholdings, 209, 259–60, 281 Department for Transport, 273 Department of Health, 221, 254, 280, 281, 333. see also National Health Service Department of the Environment, 187 de-risked sites, 235–6, 285 de Soto, Hernando Mystery of Capital, 34–5 Development Land Tax (1976), 112–3 Dissolution of the Monasteries, 79, 81 Dobson, Frank, 224, 225 Dobson, Julian, 277–9 Domesday Book, 73–4, 77, 199 Dorset, 105–6 ‘double movement’ (Polanyi), 68–9 Downing (property developer), 239 Dunkley, Emma, 1, 2 Eastbourne, 242 Eastbourne Review, 243–4 economic growth, land privatization and, 129, 157–8, 165–7, 264–5, 307–10 Edinburgh, 239 Education Funding Agency (EFA), 232n2, 319 Edwards, Chris, 2 efficiency land allocation, 4, 42–3, 59, 62–5, 286–96 land use, 11–12, 126–7, 136–43, 153, 177–85, 274 Elazar, Dahlia, 26, 27 Elephant Park, 314 employment, land privatization and, 129, 157, 165–7 enclosure movement, 11–4, 30–1, 79–85 Enfield, 320 Engels, Friedrich, 242 The Communist Manifesto, 46–7 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 67–8 enterprise privatizations, 1–3, 6–7, 120–1, 247–8, 299, 328 ‘factor of production,’ 29, 120 Fair, J.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

All of these narratives imply that the causes and effects of the Great Depression extend beyond economists’ simple story of multiple rounds of expenditure and the effects of interest rates on rational investing behavior. The decline in modesty and compassion narratives since the Great Depression may help to explain many economic trends. The modesty decline is likely related to the rise in inequality, in the share of national income earned by the top 1%, documented by Thomas Piketty in his 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.39 It also is likely related to the long-term decline in managers’ feeling of loyalty to their employees, documented by Louis Uchitelle in his 2006 book The Disposable American.40 A narrative downplaying modesty and compassion was supported by Donald Trump in his 2007 book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, coauthored with Bill Zanker.41 The frugality narrative was repeated in Japan after 1990, with different stories and personalities.

Notably, Google Trends shows a huge uptrend in searches for the term universal basic income starting in 2012. ProQuest News & Newspapers reveals essentially the same uptrend. Public attention to inequality has burgeoned, with much attention to the increased share of income by the top 1% or the top one-tenth of 1%. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which described this trend, was a best seller that generated intense discussion. The term “digital divide” has gone viral, describing a sort of inequality related to access to digital computers. No one can predict the effects of labor-saving and intelligent machines on livelihoods and work in the future, but the narratives themselves have the potential to drive amplified economic booms and recessions, as well as public policy.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 44(2):51–66. Pierce, Karen, R. A. Müller, J. Ambrose, G. Allen, and E. Courchesne. 2001. “Face Processing Occurs Outside the Fusiform ‘Face Area’ in Autism: Evidence from Functional MRI.” Brain 124(10):2059–73. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piore, Michael. 2010. “Qualitative Research: Does It Fit in Economics?” European Management Review 3(1):17–23. Polletta, Francesca. 2002. “Plotting Protest Mobilizing Stories in the 1960 Student Sit-Ins.” In Joseph E. Davis, ed., Stories of Change.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

(Spiro, alongside philosopher Martha Nussbaum and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, is named by Huntington as an example of “transnational” intellectuals who “abandon their commitment to their nation and their fellow citizens and argue the moral superiority of identifying with humanity at large.”) Citing Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Spiro summed up the book to a glassy-eyed crowd at a Henley & Partners conference in 2014 at which he was invited to speak: “The take away line was that inequality was suppressed during the twentieth century. The reason for that was that that was a period of great conflict along state lines, individuals felt like they could share with their fellow citizens.”


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Contracts and property rights support free markets, but capitalism requires more—the legal privileging of some assets, which gives their holders a comparative advantage in accumulating wealth over others.12 Uncovering the legal structure of capital also helps solve the puzzle Thomas Piketty presented in his seminal book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.13 In advanced economies, he showed, the average rate of return on capital exceeds the average rate of economic growth (r > g). Piketty did not explain this puzzle, but settled on documenting its remarkable empirical regularity. Yet his own data offer important cues for solving it.

., 169 Bank for International Settlement (BIS), 149–50 bankruptcy, ix–x; capital rule and, 207, 209, 211, 227; cloning legal persons and, 48– 49, 51, 55, 62–63, 73, 75; code masters and, 160, 168, 269n58; coding land and, 27; derivatives and, 144–52; empire of law and, 3, 13–14, 16, 21; global code and, 137, 144–53, 262n42; ISDA and, 147–51; law and, 3, 13, 16, 21, 73, 78, 87, 107, 137, 144–52, 160, 168, 209, 239n55, 262n42, 269n58; Lehman Brothers and, 48–58, 61–65, 70–75, 80, 85, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 135, 149, 175, 190, 245n4, 246n6, 248n33; minting debt and, 78–80, 83–84, 87, 107, 255n71; safe harbors and, 63, 145, 148–50, 152, 207, 211, 227, 262n44, 263n49; United States and, 55, 148, 239n55, 255n71, 262n44 Banque de France, 104 Barclays, 203 barristers, 169–70 Bayerische Landesbank, 85 bearer assets, 198 Bear Stearns, 64, 83 Belize: British colonialism and, 26–27; coding land and, 23–29, 230, 241n7, 261n21; Constitution of, 25, 28, 241n7; courts and, 23–24, 27–29, 126, 230, 261n21; global code and, 261n21; independence of, 26– 27; Maya people and, 23–29, 230, 261n21; mining and, 25–27, 29, 37; Privy Council and, 27–29, 126 beneficiaries, 43–45, 53, 81, 115, 164, 181–82 big data, 126–31 bilateral investment treaties (BITs), 140, 155, 264n67 bilateral trade, 122, 132, 136, 140, 154–56, 256n23 bills of exchange, 57, 78, 88–92, 108, 198–99, 252n31 Bitcoin, 197–202 Black Act, 243n42 blacklisting, 73, 225 Blackstone, William, 46 blockchain, 184, 187–90, 192, 195, 197–98, 203–4, 270n2 blue-chip corporations, 83, 175–76, 269n55 BNP Paribas, 85 Bonaparte, Louis, 104 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 133, 242n27 bourgeoisie, 10, 208 Brandeis, Louis, 109 Braudel, Fernand, 9 Breast Cancer Susceptibility Gene (BRCA), 111–14, 116, 127, 130, 214 Brexit, 179 bright-line rule, 224–25 Bristol-Myers, 124 Bruges, 57–58 bubbles, 59, 247n26 bugs, 185, 188, 196 Campbell, Lord, 158, 170 Canada: coding land and, 29; Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and, 156–57, 264n69; Eli Lilly and, 138–43, 152–55, 261n17, 261n19; Federal Court of, 139; global code and, 138–43, 156–57, 261n17, 261n18, 263n57, 264n69; intellectual property and, 138–43, 152–55, 261n17, 261n19; NAFTA and, 124, 138, 138–42, 155, 261n20; USMCA and, 139, 261n20 Canadian Patent Act, 140, 261n23 Cancer Genetics Network Project, 113 capital: attributes of, 3–4, 11–15, 21, 39, 78, 161, 183, 205, 211–12, 233; coding land and, 24, 26, 29, 34–45; Commons on, 12; convertibility and, 3–4, 11, 13, 15, 19, 77–78, 183, 193, 199, 211, 229, 233; corporations and, 47–48, 52–53, 56–57, 64–67, 70, 73–76; digital code and, 183–86, 189, 195–200, 203; durability and, 3, 211, 229, 233 (see also durability); economic growth and, 2; empire of law and, 2–22; enigma of, 9–13; global code and, 132–38, 143, 149, 152–57; intangible, 8, 115–18; intellectual property and, 108, 112–20, 126, 130; labor and, 2, 9–11, 116, 160, 169, 217, 237n37; legal attributes and, 13–15; legal codes and, 2 (see also legal code); Levy on, 12; Marxism and, 9–11; minting debt and, 77–79, 83, 92, 100–102, 107; Piketty on, 4–5; priority rights and, 206–7, 215 (see also priority rights); in service of, 152–57; Smith on, 6, 46, 134, 220, 240n68; state power and, 15–19 (see indeX also state power); universality and, 3–4, 11, 13–14, 19, 21, 54, 211, 229, 233; venture, 112; wealth and, 12–13 (see also wealth) capital gains, 235n9 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 4–5 capitalism: capital rule and, 205–9, 212, 217, 222, 224, 228–29, 234; cloning legal persons and, 47; code masters and, 168, 179, 182, 266n24; coding land and, 26; digital code and, 199–200; empire of law and, 2, 4, 8, 10–14, 17–21, 238n44; free markets and, 4, 19, 106–7, 128–29; global code and, 132–33; historiography of, 10; nature’s code and, 112; substance of, 238n44 Capitalism without Capital (Haskel and Westlake), 115–16 capital rule: arbitration and, 215, 217, 223, 226; autonomy and, 209, 212–13, 215, 218–20, 232, 272n29; bankruptcy and, 207, 209, 211, 227; bright-line rule and, 224–25; capitalism and, 205–9, 212, 217, 222, 224, 228–29, 234; coercive power and, 220, 232–33; collateral and, 224; contracts and, 209–18, 222–27, 231, 276n37; convertibility and, 211, 226–27, 229, 233; corporate law and, 209–11, 224; costly externalities and, 226; courts and, 206–7, 211–18, 221–24, 227, 230; creditors and, 206–7, 211, 216; debt and, 206–7, 209, 219, 228; derivatives and, 211, 227; durability and, 211, 229, 233; elitism and, 218; enclosure and, 229; enforcement and, 210, 220, 223; enigma of capital and, 9–13; feudalism and, 5–6, 205, 211, 223, 276n24; firstmover advantage and, 214–15; global code and, 152–57; globalization and, 219–23, 277n51; governing the code and, 222–29; growth and, 220; harmonization and, 227; inequality and, 223; intangible capital and, 212, 216; International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and, 154–55; investment and, 225–26; knowledge and, 229; law’s inherent incompleteness and, 210–13; lawyers and, 206–16, 221, 224, 227–29, 234; legal attributes and, 13–15; legal code and, 205, 211–13, 216, 218–20, 225, 227, 230; legal structures and, 225; Marxism and, 207–8, 216, 234; mortgages and, 206–7, 211; New York Arbitration 281 Convention and, 154; partnerships and, 228; patents and, 211–15, 230; priority rights and, 206–7, 215; private code and, 20, 209–19; private law and, 209–15; property and, 206, 209, 212–20, 222, 224, 230, 276n24; public power and, 216–19; reform and, 218, 231; regulation and, 211, 213, 216–17, 221, 224–27, 274n1; resurrecting limitations and, 227; risk and, 207, 226, 229; roll-back strategies for, 224–29; roving, 219–21; safe harbors and, 63, 145, 148–50, 152, 207, 211, 227, 262n44, 263n49; shareholders and, 213, 229; slavery and, 205; sovereignty and, 234, 277n51; state power and, 15–18, 205, 208–9, 212, 216, 221–23; treaty law and, 225; United Kingdom and, 228, 234; United States and, 219, 227–28, 234; universality and, 211, 229, 233; veils and, 8, 13, 48, 207, 246n16; wealth and, 205–9, 215, 217, 221–22, 224, 230; Weber and, 206; without law, 229–34 Cayman Islands, 50, 71, 99, 135, 249n53 central banks: code masters and, 167; empire of law and, 6; global code and, 151; minting debt and, 77–78, 89, 102–6, 255n72 Chase, 64, 83–85, 248n32, 255n70 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 200 China, 178 China Investment Corporation (CIC), 85 Chrysler, 247n17 Citigroup, 60, 248n32; foreign help for, 84; Kleros clones and, 100; NC2 and, 79–87, 94, 98–100, 106–7, 135, 251n4, 251n19 Citigroup Mortgage Realty Corporation (CMRC), 80–85 City Group Global Markets (CGGM), 85 civil law, 42–43, 133, 168–73, 178, 249n48 civil rights, 232 claims to future pay, 78, 84, 88 cloning legal persons: bankruptcy and, 48–49, 51, 55, 62–63, 73, 75; capitalism and, 47; collateral and, 51; contracts and, 47–48, 52–55, 58–60, 64–65, 68–69, 247n24; corporate law and, 47–56, 60– 62, 65, 67–72, 74, 76, 246n14, 246n16, 248n30; courts and, 58, 68–70, 73–76, 247n24; creditors and, 47–48, 51, 54–67, 71, 73, 75, 246n16, 247n24; debt and, 47–53, 56, 59–60, 67, 73–74; durability and, 47, 54–55; elitism and, 66, 75; immortality and, 50, 55, 65–67; 282 indeX cloning legal persons (continued) incorporation theory and, 69–70, 74, 136, 246n10; investment and, 48–53, 60–65, 67, 72, 75, 248n39; Kleros and, 99; labor and, 49; lawyers and, 48, 52, 70; legal entities and, 51–53, 55, 57, 65, 69–71; Lehman Brothers and, 48–58, 61–65, 70– 75, 80, 85, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 135, 149, 175, 190, 245n4, 246n6, 248n33, 250n59; limited liability and, 60–61; loss shifting and, 55, 59–64, 67; monopolies and, 66; NC2 and, 79–87, 94, 98–100, 106–7, 135, 251n4, 251n19; priority rights and, 55–56, 63; private law and, 68; property and, 47, 68; regulation and, 249n46; risk and, 48, 54–56, 59, 63–66, 70, 74–75; Roman law and, 51; slavery and, 49, 54, 57, 60; universality and, 54; wealth and, 48, 56, 59, 64, 66–67 Coase, Ronald, 45, 192 code masters: arbitration and, 161–62, 178, 180–82; assets and, 158–61, 164–69, 174–75, 177, 180–82; bankruptcy and, 160, 168, 269n58; capitalism and, 168, 179, 182, 266n24; central banks and, 167; coercive power and, 177, 180; collateral and, 160, 177; common law and, 168–73, 176–78; contracts and, 159–60, 172, 178, 181–82; corporate law and, 159–60, 163–64, 168, 174–79, 269n60; courts and, 159–64, 168–73, 177, 180–82; creditors and, 158–59, 168; debt and, 158, 167, 174; durability and, 159, 161, 182; elitism and, 158, 162, 164, 175–77; enforcement and, 168, 180; globalization and, 176–79, 270n71; growth and, 166, 175, 267n26, 270n71; inequality and, 167; investment and, 160–61, 165, 167–68; labor and, 160, 169; legal code and, 158–59, 167, 177, 180; legal origin of, 167–76; Lehman Brothers and, 175; partnerships and, 162–63, 166, 175–78; poison pills and, 163–64, 266n15, 266n17; priority rights and, 158, 161; private law and, 169–73, 182; private money and, 175; property and, 158–60, 164, 172, 177; reform and, 158–59, 171; regulation and, 160–63, 168, 171–77, 182, 267n37, 268n42; risk and, 161–62, 165; securitization and, 165; shareholders and, 164, 168; sovereignty and, 160; United Kingdom and, 168, 178–79; United States and, 162, 168, 171, 174–79; wealth and, 159, 162, 164–67, 174, 176 coding land: acquired rights and, 45–46; autonomy and, 33; bankruptcy and, 27; Belize and, 23–29, 230, 241n7, 261n21; British colonies and, 39–42; capitalism and, 26; collateral and, 30, 35–36; common law and, 31–32, 40, 243n43; common use and, 29–30; contracts and, 41–42; Conveyance Act and, 38–39; corporate law and, 24, 35, 37, 44; courts and, 23–34, 38–45, 244n63; creditors and, 24, 30, 35–45; debt and, 30, 35–42; decoding the trust and, 42–45; digital code and, 183–90, 194, 197, 203–4; discovery doctrine and, 34–35; durability and, 24, 39, 42–43, 46; elitism and, 8, 40–41, 75, 158, 164, 254n55; emerging land market and, 32; enclosure and, 29–35, 39, 229, 256n14; eviction and, 41, 233; important role of land and, 23–24; inequality and, 46; investment and, 25, 37, 45, 241n13; landowners and, 24, 34–39, 42, 45, 56, 78, 128, 158–59, 166, 254n55; lawyers and, 24, 31–32, 35, 37– 38, 40, 43–45, 164, 240n6, 242n29; legal code and, 24, 39–40, 43; legal title and, 24–29, 33–34, 45–46; Maya people and, 23–29, 230, 261n21; monopolies and, 41; mortgages and, 35–38, 43; ownership and, 30, 34–35, 136; priority rights and, 24–25, 29, 37, 39, 46; property and, 23–39, 42–46, 240n2, 241n10, 241n13, 242n27, 242n36, 243n41, 245n75; protecting spoils and, 35–39; reform and, 38–41, 244n58, 244n64; regulation and, 44; risk and, 35, 41; securitization and, 43, 45; Settled Land Acts and, 38–39; settlers and, 33–35, 42, 125, 192–93; shielding and, 44; slavery and, 39; sovereignty and, 26–27, 33–34; state power and, 23, 46; Statute of Enrollments and, 44; Statute of Uses and, 44; titles and, 25–27, 30–35, 37, 43, 46, 125, 194; trust law and, 42–45; turning land into private, 29–35; usage and, 24–29; wealth and, 24, 27, 35–46 coercive power: capital rule and, 220, 232– 33; code masters and, 177, 180; digital code and, 187, 193; empire of law and, 4, 7, 15–21, 239n60; global code and, 132, 154; minting debt and, 90; trade secrets and, 126, 129; World Trade Organization (WTO) and, 125 Cohen, Morris, 137–38 indeX Coindesk, 203 collateral, ix–x; capital rule and, 224; cloning legal persons and, 51; code masters and, 160, 177; coding land and, 30, 35–36; digital code and, 187, 190–91, 271n19; empire of law and, 3, 7, 11–13, 16, 21, 238n49; global code and, 144, 148, 263n48; minting debt and, 78, 81, 86–87, 92, 97, 99, 103, 107; mortgages and, 13–14; slavery and, 11–12 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 87, 99–101, 108, 165, 211, 254n53 Columbia Law School, 270n4 Commerce Clause, 70, 177 commercial codes, 13, 238n48, 260n8 common law: code masters and, 168–73, 176–78; coding land and, 31–32, 40, 243n43; digital code and, 271n13; empire of law and, 5, 8; English law and, 27, 38–40, 43, 146, 178, 262n41; frustration of contracts and, 271n13; global code and, 133, 264n65; law schools and, 243n43; nature’s code and, 119; New York State laws and, 8, 76, 80, 132–33, 135, 143, 146, 150, 168, 178; Roman law and, 30, 42, 132–33, 135, 170, 177, 242n27, 243n43; United Kingdom and, 176–77 Common Pleas, 32 Commons, John, 12, 238n44 Companies Act, 61 competition: free trade and, 38; guild barriers and, 128–29; intangible capital and, 118; investment banking and, 50, 91– 92; lawyers and, 174, 176; private rights and, 122; property and, 121; regulatory, 68, 135, 221, 227; Schumpeter on, 118, 276n30; state power and, 221; tax shelters and, 72; trade secrets and, 128–29 Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), 156–57, 264n69 conflict-of-law rules, 9, 68–69, 134–35, 212, 225, 249n48, 276n37 contingent convertibles (CoCos), 202 contracts, ix–x; blockchain and, 184, 187–90, 192, 195, 197–98, 203–4, 270n2; capital rule and, 209–18, 222–27, 231, 276n37; cloning legal persons and, 47–48, 52–55, 58–60, 64–65, 68–69, 247n24; code masters and, 159–60, 172, 178, 181–82; coding land and, 41–42; credible enforcement and, 1–2; digital code and, 183–92, 195, 198, 203, 271n13, 271n17, 271n18, 272n32; empire of law and, 2–8, 283 13, 15–16, 21, 238n48; enforcement of, 2, 16, 203; frustration of in common law, 271n13; global code and, 135–37, 139, 145–53; insurance, 190, 271n17; minting debt and, 78–81, 86, 88–89, 107; nature’s code and, 129; nexus of, 48; rise of West and, 4; Roman law and, 187; smart, 187– 91; theory of firms and, 272n32 convertibility: capital rule and, 211, 226–27, 229, 233; debt and, 3, 15, 77–78, 87–91; digital code and, 183, 193, 199; empire of law and, 3–4, 11, 13, 15, 19; state money and, 3 Conveyance Act, 38–39 copyright, 11, 115, 256n23 corporate law, ix–x; asset partitioning and, 53; capital rule and, 209–11, 224; choosing, 69–71; cloning legal persons and, 47–56, 60–62, 65, 67–72, 74, 76, 246n14, 246n16, 248n30; code masters and, 159–60, 163–64, 168, 174–79, 269n60; coding land and, 24, 35, 37, 44; digital code and, 185, 189, 196, 202; empire of law and, 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 21, 238n54; enabling, 55; global code and, 135–36, 155; incorporation theory and, 69–70, 74, 136, 246n10; international private, 68–69; international treaty, 9, 120, 136–39, 225; legal personality and, 55; minting debt and, 78, 80, 86, 91, 98–102, 107, 252n22, 253n41; nature’s code and, 108, 115, 122, 125; seat theory and, 53, 69–70; shopping for, 67–69; sunset provisions and, 76; treaty law and, 70; veils and, 8, 13, 48, 246n16 corporations: arbitration and, 48, 56, 67, 73–76; autonomy and, 50; blue-chip, 83, 175–76, 269n55; bonds and, 5, 16, 44, 48–49, 83, 86, 102–5, 108, 128, 195, 198, 202, 211, 252n22, 262n32; choosing tax rate and, 71–73; coding modern, 54–56; conflict of law and, 9, 68–69, 134–35, 212, 225, 249n48, 276n37; contracts and, 47–48, 52–55, 58–60, 64–65, 68–69; durability and, 47, 54–55; essence of, 52; immortality and, 50, 55, 65–67; incorporation theory and, 69–70, 74, 136, 246n10; legal entities and, 14, 51–59, 65, 69–71, 249n46, 253n41; legal structures and, 48–51, 54, 58, 70–71, 76, 80; Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and, 48–58, 61–65, 70–75, 80, 85, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 135, 149, 175, 190, 245n4, 284 indeX corporations (continued) 246n6, 248n33; limited liability and, 51, 53–54, 60–61, 63, 99, 254n49; loss shifting and, 55, 59–64, 67; mobility and, 68, 70; ownership and, 59, 67, 92, 118, 136; partnerships and, 65 (see also partnerships); poison pills and, 163–64, 266n15, 266n17; PRIMA and, 136; put option and, 55, 64, 226; RASCAL and, 73–75, 250n60, 250n62; rating agencies and, 80, 86–87, 98–100, 251n6, 251n19; regulation and, 47–48, 50, 56, 68, 73–76, 226, 249n46; risk and, 48, 54–56, 59, 63–66, 70, 74–75; Roman law and, 51, 54; shareholders and, 48–56 (see also shareholders); shielding and, 3, 14, 20, 22, 44, 47–48, 51–63, 65, 67, 71, 78, 84, 86, 99, 107, 129, 161, 165, 205, 215, 238n51, 246n16, 247n20; sovereignty and, 53, 66–70; subsidiaries and, 50–53, 58–59, 61–64, 70–74, 84, 131, 135, 149, 151, 191, 196, 247n17, 250n59, 259n80; United States and, 139, 142, 148, 151, 156; US Supreme Court and, 68 cotton, 41, 49, 246n5 courts: appeals and, 26–27, 72, 113, 139, 143, 155–56, 261n18; arbitration and, 180–82 (see also arbitration); Belize and, 23–24, 27–29, 126, 230, 261n21; Canada and, 138–43, 152–57, 261n17, 261n19; capital rule and, 206–7, 211–18, 221–24, 227, 230; cease and desist orders and, 113; certiorari writ and, 261n18; cloning legal persons and, 58, 68–70, 73–76, 247n24; code masters and, 159–64, 168–73, 177, 180–82; coding land and, 23–34, 38–45, 244n63; Common Pleas and, 32; Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and, 156–57; digital code and, 187, 204; discovery doctrine and, 34–35; empire of law and, 7–8, 12, 15–20; equity rule and, 31–32; European Court of Justice and, 70, 156; first-mover advantage and, 214–15; genetics and, 109–16, 127, 211, 214; global code and, 133, 136, 138–46, 150, 152–56, 261n18, 261n21, 262n45; Ibanez case and, 95–97; Indian Removal Act and, 34; indigenous rights and, 126; Inns of Court and, 242n29; International Court of Justice and, 125, 146; ISDA and, 146; jingle rule, 247n24; King’s Council and, 27, 31; landowners and, 38–39; minting debt and, 87, 90–91, 96–98, 104, 252n31; nature’s code and, 110–16; patents and, 120; plaintiffs and, 32, 58, 69, 113, 142, 214, 265n5, 275n17; Privy Council and, 27–29, 126; property and, 17, 23–28, 30, 38–39, 43–44, 96–97, 126, 136, 140, 143, 159–60, 172, 214–15, 218, 262; Star Chamber and, 31; sunset provisions and, 76; trade secrets and, 127–31; tribunals and, 18, 136–43, 146, 152, 155–57, 261n21, 264n70; US Supreme Court and, 34, 68, 110–13, 116, 127, 211, 214 credit cooperatives, 93–95 credit default swaps (CDS), 190–91, 271nn17–19 credit derivatives, 78, 145, 165, 227 Crédit Mobilier, 102–6 creditors: bailouts and, 55, 62, 64, 104–5, 151, 226, 247n17; capital rule and, 206–7, 211, 216; cloning legal persons and, 47– 48, 51, 54–67, 71, 73, 75, 246n16, 247n24; code masters and, 158–59, 168; coding land and, 24, 30, 35–45; Debt Recovery Act and, 39–40; digital code and, 187–88, 202; empire of law and, 3, 13–16, 20; eviction and, 41, 233; global code and, 144, 147–50, 262n41, 262n45; landlords and, 206–7; Lehman Brothers and, 61, 63–64, 71, 73, 103; limited liability and, 51, 53–54, 60–61, 63, 99, 254n49; lobbying by, 207; minting debt and, 77–79, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 103–5, 107; reciprocal claims and, 262n41; Roman law and, 54; shareholders and, 14, 48, 55–56, 60–67, 71, 104, 168, 202, 246n16; shielding assets from, 14, 20, 47–48, 54– 61, 63, 65, 67, 71, 107, 247n20; Statute of Enrollments and, 44; Statute of Uses and, 44; tort, 55, 59; trade secrets and, 128 Crick, Francis, 108–10 Critique of Rights (Menke), 209, 231 cryptocurrencies, 15, 192, 196–203, 238n53, 270n4, 273n43, 274n57 debt, ix; bills of exchange and, 57, 78, 88–92, 108, 198–99, 252n31; capital rule and, 206–7, 209, 219, 228; cloning legal persons and, 47–53, 56, 59–60, 67, 73–74; code masters and, 158, 167, 174; coding land and, 30, 35–42; convertibility and, 3, 15, 77–78, 87–91; credit cooperatives and, 93–95; Crédit Mobilier and, 102–6; creditors and, 3, indeX 13 (see also creditors); default and, 14, 35–36, 38, 42, 56, 62, 81–83, 88–89, 92, 96–97, 100, 102, 105, 137, 146–48, 151, 153, 170, 174, 180, 187, 190, 223, 233, 262n45; derivatives and, 78, 81, 86, 91; digital code and, 187, 190, 198–203; empire of law and, 3, 13–16, 20–21; foreclosure and, 39, 95–98, 253n44; global code and, 144, 147, 149–50, 262n41; Kleros clones and, 79, 86, 98–100, 107, 135, 165; minting, 77–107 (see also minting debt); NC2 and, 79–87, 94, 98–100, 106–7, 135, 251n4, 251n19; notes and, 78, 88–92, 98, 108, 198–200, 202; private money and, 86, 89, 92, 101–7, 147, 202; regulation and, 85, 90–91, 99–100, 103–7, 251n6, 255n73; risk and, 78–87, 90–95, 98–100, 104–5, 251n6, 251n19; securitization and, 78–86, 91–95, 98–101, 251n11, 251n13, 253n41; state money and, 77–78, 88–93, 106; unsecured, 79 Debt Recovery Act, 39–40 Deposit Trust Corporation, 254n49 derivatives: Bank for International Settlement (BIS) and, 149–50; bankruptcy and, 144–52; capital rule and, 211, 227; collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and, 87, 99–101, 108, 165, 211, 254n53; comeback of, 262n36; complex credit, 165; digital code and, 189, 202; empire of law and, 5, 8; Financial Stability Board (FSB) and, 150–51; global code and, 143–53, 262n36, 263n49; International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and, 145–53, 261n31, 271n18; Lehman Brothers and, 63; Loan Market Association (LMA) and, 262n32; Master Agreement (MA) and, 146–47, 150–51, 153; minting debt and, 78, 81, 86, 91; paving way for, 143–52; PRIME and, 146; safe harbors for, 263n49; transnational, 150–51 De Soto, Hernando, 14 digital autonomous organizations (DAO), 194–97, 272n29, 272n30, 272n33 digital code: arbitration and, 190, 204; assets and, 187–94, 197–204; autonomy and, 194–97; Bitcoin and, 197–202; blockchains and, 184, 187–90, 192, 195, 197–98, 203–4, 270n2; bugs and, 185, 188, 196; capitalism and, 199–200; capital rule and, 205, 208–9, 212, 216, 221–23; “code is law” and, 183, 196; 285 coercive power and, 187, 193; collateral and, 187, 190–91, 271n19; common law and, 271n13; contracts and, 183–92, 195, 198, 203, 271n13, 271n17, 271n18, 272n32; convertibility and, 183, 193, 199; corporate law and, 185, 189, 196, 202; courts and, 187, 204; creditors and, 187–88, 202; debt and, 187, 190, 198–203; derivatives and, 189, 202; durability and, 183, 193; elitism and, 186; enclosure and, 183, 203; enforcement and, 187, 190, 203; exogenous shocks and, 188; hierarchy and, 185–86, 201–2; immutable ledgers and, 188–90; investment and, 195–97, 200–202, 272n33; knowledge and, 183; lawyers and, 183–86, 188, 204; legal code and, 183–90, 194, 197, 203–4; legal entities and, 195; Lehman Brothers and, 190; LIBOR and, 190; Marxism and, 185; as meritocracy, 186; mining and, 200– 201; patents and, 203–4; priority rights and, 193; private code and, 198; private money and, 198–99, 202; property and, 184–86, 191–94, 198, 203–4, 272n28; realists and, 184–86; reform and, 273n46; regulation and, 185–86, 190, 271n17, 272n30; replacing law by, 183–84; residual rights and, 191–92; scalability and, 184; shareholders and, 195–96, 202; state money and, 198–203; state power and, 184, 193, 197; Szabo on, 192–93, 198; United States and, 202; utopists and, 184; wealth and, 198, 200 discovery doctrine, 34–35 dividends, 11, 53, 61–62, 103 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 108–11, 114 Drahos, Peter, 124 dry exchange, 90 Du Pont, 124 durability: capital rule and, 211, 229, 233; cloning legal persons and, 47, 54–55; code masters and, 159, 161, 182; coding land and, 24, 39, 42–43, 46; digital code and, 183, 193; empire of law and, 3–5, 11, 13–15, 19, 21; intangible capital and, 117; minting debt and, 78 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 65–67, 196 East Asian Financial Crisis, 105 Economist, The (magazine), 37 Edward III, King of England, 118 Egypt, 133 286 indeX Eichengreen, Barry, 240n64 elephant curve, 1, 8 Eli Lilly, 138–43, 152–55, 261n17, 261n19 elitism: capital rule and, 218; cloning legal persons and, 66, 75; code masters and, 158, 162, 164, 175–77; coding land and, 8, 40–41, 75, 158, 164, 254n55; digital code and, 186; empire of law and, 2, 8; global code and, 133; gold coins and, 254n55; Goldman Sachs and, 175; Lehman Brothers and, 175; minting debt and, 85, 254n55; Roman law and, 132–33; WASPs and, 176 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 32, 119 empire of law: arbitration and, 15, 18; bankruptcy and, 3, 13–14, 16, 21; capitalism and, 2, 4, 8, 10–14, 17–21, 238n44; coercive power and, 4, 7, 15–21, 239n60; collateral and, 3, 7, 11–13, 16, 21, 238n49; common law and, 5, 8; contracts and, 2–4, 7–8, 13, 15–16, 21, 238n48; convertibility and, 3–4, 11, 13, 15, 19; corporate law and, 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 21, 238n54; courts and, 7–8, 12, 15–20; creditors and, 3, 13–16, 20; debt and, 3, 13–16, 20–21; derivatives and, 5, 8; durability and, 3–5, 11, 13–15, 19, 21; elephant curve and, 1, 8; elitism and, 2, 8; enforcement and, 2, 9, 12, 16–19, 239n60; enigma of capital and, 9–13; globalization and, 2; growth and, 1, 4, 8, 20, 235n10; inequality and, 1–3, 6, 21–22, 235n9, 240n69, 240n70; inheritance and, 238n48; intangible capital and, 13; investment and, 12, 14, 16; labor and, 2, 9–11, 237n37; law’s guiding hand and, 6–9; lawyers and, 3–4, 6, 8, 15, 19–20, 22, 165, 236n26; legal attributes and, 13–15; legal code and, 2–15, 19–22; legal entities and, 14; legal norms and, 16–17; legal structures and, 4, 6, 9, 18, 21; Marxism and, 2, 9–11, 22; monopolies and, 17; mortgages and, 13–15; patents and, 11; priority rights and, 13–14, 16, 18; private law and, 20–21; property and, 1–5, 11–14, 17, 19, 21, 238n44, 238n48, 238n50, 239n56, 240n68; reform and, 1; regulation and, 7; risk and, 14, 17; selfinterest and, 6, 8–9, 18, 232, 236n18; shielding and, 3, 14, 20, 22; slavery and, 11–12, 237n38, 237n40; state power and, 4, 14–19; universality and, 3–4, 11, 13–14, 15, 19, 21; wealth and, 1–8, 12–14, 17–22 enclosure: capital rule and, 229; coding land and, 229; digital code and, 183, 203; intangible capital and, 117, 256n14; knowledge and, 35, 108–9, 115, 117, 131, 183; nature’s code and, 109–12, 115; property and, 29–35, 39, 229; trade secrets and, 131 Enclosure Acts, 29–30, 242n22 enforcement: capital rule and, 210, 220, 223; code masters and, 168, 180; contract, 2, 16, 203; digital code and, 187, 190, 203; empire of law and, 2, 9, 12, 16–19, 239n60; global code and, 134, 139–40, 147, 152, 154; International Court of Justice and, 125; law, 16–19, 125, 152, 154, 168, 180, 187, 220, 259n80; minting debt and, 88; priority rights and, 16; trade secrets and, 130; World Trade Organization (WTO) and, 125 Engels, Friedrich, 185 English law.

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 4. See, for example, Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, New York: Verso, 1999). 5. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, London: Norton, 2002); Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (New York: Norton, 2011). 6. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 7. This is, according to Padgett, the key question in the evolution of institutions. See the introduction to John F. Padgett and W. W. Powell, eds., The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 8.


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

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

Those with power and wealth are getting ahead, and those without are falling behind. This new prosperity paradox, not to be confused with the intergenerational “Paradox of Prosperity” coined by economists such as Gilbert Morris, has befuddled every policy maker in the Western world. One of the best-selling business books of 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, became the #1 best seller on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list in 2014. A tour de force of academic scholarship, Capital explains why inequality is accelerating and will likely continue to do so as long as the return on capital exceeds long-term economic growth.

Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2009). This figure is an estimate. 8. Interview with Joyce Kim, June 12, 2015. 9. www.ilo.org/global/topics/youth-employment/lang—en/index.htm. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014). 11. www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/05/declining%20business%20dynamism%20litan/declining_business_dynamism_hathaway_litan.pdf. 12. Ruth Simon and Caelainn Barr, “Endangered Species: Young U.S. Entrepreneurs,” The Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2015; www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-young-u-s-entrepreneurs-1420246116. 13.

Airbnb, 115–17 Big Seven, 128–42 distributed applications, 117–22 distributed autonomous enterprises, 126–28 hacking your future, 142–44 Buterin, Vitalik, 87–88, 262, 278–80 autonomous agents, 123, 125 consensus mechanisms, 31 futarchy, 220 re-architecting the firm, 18, 87–88, 96, 100–101 Buzzcar, 137 Byrne, David, 227 Byrne, Patrick, 83 Byzantine Generals’ Problem, 241 Cabell, James Branch, 277 California Public Employees’ Retirement System, 77 Campus microgrids, 148 “Canonical persona,” 16, 140 Cap-and-trade system, 222–23 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 173, 175 Carlyle, James, 69 Cars, 137, 164–67, 165–67 Cavoukian, Ann, 27, 28, 41, 42, 51–52, 275 CBW Bank, 73 Ceglowski, Maciej, 254, 275 Central banks (banking), 9, 31, 57, 286–87, 293–96, 309 Cerf, Vint, 274, 281, 299 Chain (company), 67–68 Chamber of Digital Commerce, 208, 287, 288, 302, 303 Change.org, 304 Chase, Robin, 137 Chaum, David, 4, 219 Chesky, Brian, 135 China, 13, 56, 174, 243–45, 264, 266–67, 272 Choi, Constance, 288, 307 Christie, Chris, 98 Circle, 83, 284 Circle Internet Financial, 71–72 Cisco Quad, 139 Civil Justice Council, U.K., 221 Clark, David, 281 Clark, Jeremy, 215 Climate change, 149, 221–23 Cloud computing, 118, 122 Coalition for Automated Legal Applications (COALA), 301–2, 303 Coase, Ronald, 74, 92–93, 100, 105, 121, 142, 319n Cohen, Bram, 119, 262 Coinbase, 44, 83–84, 284, 302 Coin Center, 286, 287, 302, 303 CoinPip, 217 Collaboration, 139–42 Collins, John, 302 Colu, 238 CommitCoin, 215 “Commons-based peer production,” 129 Competitive advantage, 64, 66, 110–11, 140 Complex instruction set computer (CISC), 260–61 CompuServe, 118 Computer viruses, 122, 123 Computing, evolution of, 150–52 Conflict adjudication, 100, 105, 219, 221 Conflicts of interest, 100, 125 Consensus mechanisms, 30–33, 36–37, 95, 98, 262, 266, 305 Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), 15, 87–92, 99, 101, 112–14, 130 Consideration, 10, 30 Conspiracy theories, 213 Content ID, 235 Contract breaches, 104, 258 Contracting costs, 99–101 Contracts.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

On long-term development strategies, see Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2003). 28 Lauren Gambini, ‘Trump Pans Immigration Proposal as Bringing People from “Shithole Countries”’, Guardian, 12 January 2018. 29 For the idea that an absolute improvement in conditions might be coupled with a rise in relative inequality, see in particular Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 30 ‘2017 Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel’, Israel Democracy Institute and Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (2017), https://en.idi.org.il/articles/20439; Melanie Lidman, ‘As ultra-Orthodox women bring home the bacon, don’t say the F-word’, Times of Israel, 1 January 2016. 31 Lidman, ‘As ultra-Orthodox women bring home the bacon’, op. cit; ‘Statistical Report on Ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel’, Israel Democracy Institute and Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies 18 (2016).

, Washington Post, 25 June 2016; John Curtice, ‘US election 2016: The Trump–Brexit voter revolt’, BBC, 11 November 2016. 7 The most famous of these remains, of course, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992). 8 Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018); Anne Garrels, Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016); Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2016). 9 Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2015, 53; Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, ‘From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia 1905–2016’, July 2017, World Wealth and Income Database; Shaun Walker, ‘Unequal Russia’, Guardian, 25 April 2017. 10 Ayelet Shani, ‘The Israelis Who Take Rebuilding the Third Temple Very Seriously’, Haaretz, 10 August 2017; ‘Israeli Minister: We Should Rebuild Jerusalem Temple’, Israel Today, 7 July 2013; Yuri Yanover, ‘Dep.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Fitz The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself, Peter Fleming Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, Corey Pein Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work, Eva Paus On economics An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Capital, Karl Marx “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (essay), John Maynard Keynes The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty The Economics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, Alvin E. Roth Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard H. Thaler Notes Introduction 1. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since 2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent encampments of the angry and dispossessed. It’s also why there are now more calls for fundamental change than at any point since the 1960s. It’s why a challenging book like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, exposing the built-in structures of ever-increasing wealth concentration, can sit atop bestseller lists for months, and why when comedian and social commentator Russell Brand went on the BBC and called for “revolution,” his appearance attracted more than ten million YouTube views.66 Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself.

Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, June 14, 2013, http://energy.gov; “Greenhouse Gas 100 Polluters Index,” Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, June 2013, http://www.peri.umass.edu. 47. Borgar Aamaas, Jens Borken-Kleefeld, and Glen P. Peters, “The Climate Impact of Travel Behavior: A German Case Study with Illustrative Mitigation Options,” Environmental Science & Policy 33 (2013): 273, 276. 48. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Gar Lipow, Solving the Climate Crisis through Social Change: Public Investment in Social Prosperity to Cool a Fevered Planet (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 56; Stephen W. Pacala, “Equitable Solutions to Greenhouse Warming: On the Distribution of Wealth, Emissions and Responsibility Within and Between Nations,” presentation to International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, November 2007, p. 3. 49.

., 211–12, 328 cadmium, 176 Caldeira, Ken, 263–64, 271 Calgary, Canada, 2, 245–49 California, 13, 52, 347 California, University of: at Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies at, 101 at Irvine, 14 Cameron, David, 7, 106–7, 110, 149, 251 Cameron, James, 449 Canada, 11, 17, 19, 71, 83, 143 divestment movement in, 354 environmental legislation in, 202 extractive industry subsidies in, 127 fossil fuels in, 69, 79, 178 fracking in, 299, 303–4, 313 government attacks on Indigenous land rights in, 381–82 government repression of environmental protest in, 299, 303 politics of climate change in, 36, 46 pro-mining policies of, 382 S&P rating of, 368 tar sands in, see Alberta tar sands weakening of environmental protections in, 381–82 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 149 Canadian Auto Workers Union, 122 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 70, 129, 400 Canadian Natural Resources, 281 Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 362 cancer, tar sands linked to, 327 cap-and-trade system, 208, 218, 226–29, 287 cap and dividend, 118 capitalism, 22, 25, 38–39, 47, 61, 88, 89, 125, 158, 159, 176, 179, 228n, 233, 450 and attempts to mitigate climate change, 230–55 climate change as argument against, 157 climate change regulation seen as threat to, 31, 33 conservation and, 185–86 deregulated, 18, 20, 75, 154 disaster, 51, 109, 154, 233 fossil fuels and, 175, 176 Gaia, 231 industrial, 173–74, 177 nature vs., 177, 186 rebranding of, 252 see also free-market ideology Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 154–55 carbon: atmospheric, 109 high-risk, 130 new sources of, 141 carbon bubble, 358 carbon budget, collective, 153 carbon cowboys, 220–21 carbon credits, 305 carbon dioxide, 143 recycling into products, 246–47 carbon emissions, 14, 23, 79 caps on, 118, 141, 208, 218, 226–29, 287 climate debt and, 409 cutting of, see carbon reduction of developing world, 409–10 historical evidence for, 415, 452 Industrial Revolution and increase in, 175–76, 409 rising levels of, 4, 11, 13, 14–15, 26 of U.S., 113, 409 wartime activities and, 17 wealth and, 113–14 see also greenhouse gas emissions Carbon Engineering, 281 carbon footprint, 77, 144, 178, 235, 247, 248, 288 carbon markets, 211, 218–25, 233 failure of, 224–25, 252 carbon offsets, 8, 39, 212, 251, 287 ineffectiveness of, 223–24, 387 carbon sequestration, 134, 218, 221–23, 232, 245, 247–48, 284, 439 carbon-sucking machines, 236, 244, 245, 254, 257, 260, 263, 279, 288 carbon taxes, 112, 114, 125, 157, 218, 250, 400, 461 Carbon Tracker Initiative, 148 carbon trading, 39, 87, 124, 125, 199–201, 208, 218, 226–29, 287, 418 Carbon War Room, 199, 264 Cargill, 89 Caribbean, 240, 414–15 caribou, 435 Carleton College, 401 Carmichael, Ruth, 433–34 cars, 16, 90–91, 116, 210 Carson, Rachel, 185, 201, 207, 286, 337 Carter, Bob, 33, 47 Carter, Jimmy, 116–17, 205 Carter, Nick, 349 Case for Climate Engineering, A (Keith), 275 Casselton, N.Dak., 312, 333 Castro, Rodrigo, 161 Caterpillar, 227 Cato Institute, 32, 33, 36, 39, 45, 142 CBC, 362 CBS This Morning, 288 cell phones, 91n Cenovus, 349 Center for American Progress, 111 Center for Biological Diversity, 206 Center for Strategic and International Studies, 53 Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), 216, 356n Central America, sweatshops in, 81 Centre for Science and Environment, 96, 414 Centrica, 149 centrism, 22, 59, 83 Cha, J.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

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

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

., McLeod, Howard L., and Ginsburg, Geoffrey S. (2013). “Genomic Medicine: A Decade of Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities,” Science Translational Medicine 5, no. 189: 189sr4. McCloskey, Deidre. (2014). “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured, and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics 7, no. 2: 73–115. McDowell, M. S. (1929). “What the Agricultural Extension Service Has Done for Agriculture,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 142 (March): 250–56. McIntosh, Elaine N. (1995). American Food Habits in Historical Perspective.

“Digital Technology and Institutional Change from the Gilded Age to Modern Times: The Impact of the Telegraph and the Internet,” Journal of Economic Issues 34, no. 2 (June): 266–89. Pierce, Bessie Louise. (1957). A History of Chicago, vol. III: The Rise of a Modern City 1871–1893. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press. Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA/London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. (2003). “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February): 1–39. Pinker, Steven. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes.

A symbol of rising inequality, a topic treated in chapter 18, is the ever-growing chasm between domestic travel in economy class and the quality of the premium cabin on international flights, whether from San Francisco to Hong Kong or from Seattle to Amsterdam. As stated by the Economist in its issue of September 20, 2014: Nowadays those at the cheap end of the plane barely have room to open their copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism, at the top of the national best-seller lists for its lament about the new age of inequality. Airlines keep cramming more bodies into economy class while passengers, despite their moans, regard this as a fair tradeoff for cheap fares. But in the front of the cabin carriers have made seats as plush as first class seats used to be a few years earlier.48 One exception to the discomfort of economy-class air travel is the spread of inflight entertainment options.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

“factories every day”: Elon Musk’s blog post announcing Tesla’s new patent policy was titled “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” June 12, 2014 (https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you). CHAPTER NINE: HOW TO DO A PERFECT HANDSTAND thirty years as a cadence for change: My thinking on the thirty-year theory of change was first sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In particular, his demonstration of the impact of a 1 percent growth rate over the course of thirty years. Using basic accounting and money management practices, Piketty shows how a small amount of change accelerates over time. I wondered, Is this what’s happening around us?

Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain Economics Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Updated and Expanded) Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up Business Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker Konosuke Matsushita, Not for Bread Alone Daniel H.

Adele, xvi, 155–58, 161–63, 168–69, 175, 201, 216 Adeney, Peter, 166–67 Adler, Charles, 5 Age of Fracture (Rodgers), 236–37 algorithms, 152 “affirmative” type of, 216–17 for basketball scoring, 160–61 loyalty-measuring, 157–58, 161–62, 216 for ticket sales, 168–69, 263 Amazon, xii, 51, 54, 109, 177–78 Anderson, Elizabeth, 241–43 Apple, 54, 70–71, 78–79, 211 Ariely, Dan, 22–23 Aristotle, 134 Arnault, Bernard, 109–10 ARPANET, 79 Asimov, Isaac, 192 automation, 72–73, 192 autonomy, 45, 48, 119, 141, 145, 217, 236 awareness, 28, 57, 144–45, 167, 174, 202 Baker, Dusty, 8 banking industry, xiii, 44–47, 77–78, 257, 271 Beatles, xv, 11, 37, 143 Ben & Jerry’s, 169–70, 264 bento box, xvi, 125–26, 131, 138, 243 Bentoism, 191 examples of, 158, 161–62, 166, 168–69, 174–76 explanation of, 125–53, 199–201 “hockey stick” graph of, 125–27, 200, 243 for individuals, 201–9 for Maximizing Class, 213–18 for organizations, 209–13 origins of, 235–43 and values helix, 218–25 Bernstein, Carl, 11 Bezos, Jeff, 109–10, 114–15, 177–78, 260 Bible, 3, 104 big business, 39, 42, 51, 53–55, 82–83, 196 Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, 37, 40–41, 55 Bird, Larry, 159 Bloomberg, Michael, 110 “Body Like a Back Road” (Hunt), 37, 41, 55 Bohnet, Iris, 22 Bowerman, Bill, 186 Bowles, Jonathan, 48 Buffett, Warren, 15, 68, 109–10 Burke, Glenn, 8 Business Roundtable, 81–82 Cairo, Egypt, 13 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 156 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 265 capitalism, xiii–xiv, 27, 54, 92, 102, 115, 193–94, 240 Carlson, Tucker, xii–xiii Carnegie Mellon, 117, 261 Cathy, S. Truett, 165 Center for an Urban Future, 47–48 Chen, Perry, 4–5 Chesterton, G. K., 54 Chick-fil-A, 165–66, 169, 175, 264 Chile, 198–99 China, ix, xii, 58–59, 71 Chouinard, Yvon, 172 Clear Channel Communications, 39–40 climate change, 144, 191–92 Cold War, 27–28, 31, 105 communitarianism, 236–37 community, xv, 48, 135, 243 companies contribute to, 51, 213, 216–17 as governing value, 142, 145 highly valued, xi–xiii, 45, 48 in pursuit of, 162–63 companies on hypergrowth path, 95–97, 100, 236 and public service, 60, 62, 101–2 purpose-oriented, 100–101 secular missions of, 212–13, 217–18 share-holder centric, 82–85, 169–70 values-minded, 165–66, 210–18 See also specific names; specific topics competition, 33, 39, 53–54, 83, 98–99, 104, 153, 172–74, 196 Compleat Strategyst, The (Williams), 29–31 compound interest, xiv, 191, 194 Confederacy of Dunces, A (Toole), 11 Conrad, Parker, 95–96 consumerism, xii, 51, 120, 168, 187, 217 cooperation/collaboration, 32–34, 102, 198–99, 213 Creative Independent, The, 170–71, 270 creativity and creating value, 12, 171, 175 highly valued, 45, 48 investment in, 5, 7, 10–13, 88, 170–71 and producing profits, 43–44, 134, 170 credit cards, 65–66, 74 crowdfunding, 4–13, 15, 247–48.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

Gini coefficients of income inequality have risen in all regions of the world ­except Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East/North Africa, although Notes to Chapter 9 295 they were already high in those areas. The coefficient has risen most sharply in China. See ibid. 22. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 23. Fareed Zakaria, “Populism on the March: Why the West Is in Trouble,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2016 issue, accessed online May 2, 2017, https://​www​ .foreignaffairs​.com/​articles/​united​-states/​2016​-10​-17/​populism​-march. 24.

Most importantly, globalization seems to have deepened income inequality within nations—with the fruits of global interdependence flowing disproportionately to urban professionals, corporate executives, and in many cases government officials—particularly in the financial sector. In China, for example, the net Gini index has risen over fifteen points since 1990.20 This perverse pattern prevails in both the G-7 nations and the developing world.21 As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, returns Shadows and Critical Uncertainties 191 to capital have substantially increased relative to returns to labor over the three decades that globalization has recently intensified. And the prospects are strong that this general pattern of deepening intranational inequality will continue.22 Financial-sector globalization has also had a perverse, destabilizing potential impact, even as it has accelerated growth and enhanced economic efficiency.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Indeed, as both a former top corporate executive as well as a former business school dean, he is nothing but sympathetic to these sorts of educational challenges. He is simply pointing out that the benefits of Western capitalism have come with a complicated and wholly political set of trade-offs. The reason French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, took off like a rocket was that he examined some of those trade-offs, such as economic inequality, and put forth well-researched arguments that they might not be sustainable, either socially or politically. The point here isn’t whether Piketty is correct, it’s that a book of that importance has never come out of the Harvard Business School.

He’s right: HBS has explicitly compared the rate of median salary increase of its graduates to the rate of tuition increase when it has sought to justify increases in tuition, in the process reducing an education to nothing more than a return-on-investment calculation. Thomas Piketty, author of the surprise 2014 bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is arguably the world’s top expert on income inequality—not from a “what to do about it perspective,” but the mere fact of it, as represented by his unrivaled analysis of data, across both geographies and time. In a 2003 paper cowritten with Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” he encapsulated the dynamics of increasing inequality in the United States in just two sentences: “The marginal product of top executives in large corporations is notoriously difficult to estimate, and executive pay is probably determined to a significant extent by herd behavior.

Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 9 (2011): 9–12. 5Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998 (series Updated to 2000 Available),” working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2001, http://www.nber.org/papers/w8467. 6Liam Murphy, “Why Does Inequality Matter? Reflections on the Political Morality of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Tax Law Review, April 1, 2015, https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3–3831048851.html. 7Gerald F. Davis, “Corporate Power in the 21st Century,” in Subramanian Rangan, ed., Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business and Society (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 8“At the Center of Corporate Scandal Where Do We Go From Here?


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders (one of the workers was reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). No one even mentioned the two establishment favorites, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. A steelworker named Jack Baum told me that he was supporting Trump. He liked Trump’s “patriotic” positions on trade and immigration, but he also found Trump’s insults refreshing, even exhilarating.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 22–43. See also Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 292; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71–72; and Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, 2017, 303, 895, 943. 4.Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013), 23–37; Marshall Berman, “Dancing with America: Philip Roth, Writer on the Left,” New Labor Forum 9 (Fall–Winter 2001), 53–54. 5.

Marx discussed the issue of economies of scale and the rise of the factory system at great length in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 13 and 14 (“Cooperation” and “Division of Labour and Manufacture”). 31.Jenkins, “Introduction,” x–xii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 24; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial Capital, 81, 260; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 299, 302. 32.Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 107. 33.On British forms of wealth, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 113–20, 129–31. Willersley Castle now is a Christian Guild hotel. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 91, 94–98, 102, 169, 246; R. S. Fitton, The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune ([1989] Matlock, Eng.: Derwent Valley Mills Educational Trust, 2012), 224–96; Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy ([1840] London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1968), quote on 76. 34.Local church towers, however, did rival the mills in height.


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Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Whether it was a matter of ideology, short-termism, simple selfishness, or all three, they used their power to force the American community to look the other way and ignore what was happening to those left out of the knowledge economy. The result was exactly as Peterson predicted in 1971. Writing forty-three years later in his best-selling book about economic inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty would describe what happened this way: It is obvious that lack of adequate investment in training can exclude entire social groups from the benefits of economic growth. Growth can harm some groups while benefiting others (witness the recent displacement of workers in the more advanced economies by workers in China).

“Consumer prices”: “How China Is Battling Ever More Intensely in World Markets,” The Economist, September 23, 2017, https://www.economist.com/​news/​leaders/​21729430-does-it-play-fair-how-china-battling-ever-more-intensely-world-markets. “Yes, trade has cut costs”: Interview with Stiglitz. “It is obvious”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Coalition for Queens: Information about Coalition for Queens/Tech Equality comes from a series of interviews conducted with the founder, Jukay Hsu, and staff members and trainees in the spring and fall of 2017, as well as company materials that were provided to the board of directors, which I joined in 2016.


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

It could be that the preferences of compensation committee members rely on model based thinking informed by data. However, those preferences might also be socially constructed or part of an elaborate log roll, in which CEOs vote to raise one another’s pay. Our next model of income inequality comes from Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This is less a model than an observation that the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of capital. When that holds, the portion of income that high-income individuals receive from returns on capital will increase over time. By constructing more elaborate versions of the growth models from Chapter 8, it can be shown that the return to capital should always exceed the rate of growth in the broader economy.

basketball, 157 Bass model, 136–137 Bayesian multi-armed bandit problems, 321–324 Beatles, 132 Bednar, Jenna, 283 behavioral rules, 284 belief-based learning rule, 316 beliefs, 14 in rational-actor model, 48 benchmarks rational choice and, 50 in rational-actor model, 51 Berkshire Hathaway, 154 Berlin Observatory, 24 Bernoulli bandit problems, 320–321 Bernoulli urn model, 154–155, 163 betweenness network structure and, 118 score, 119 bias immediacy, 52 psychological, 51–53 selection, 89 big coefficient, 89–90 big rocks first, 17 bin packing problem, 17 binary categorization model, 30–31 binary classifications, of data, 92–93 Bitcoin, 241–242 BlackRock, 4 block entropy, 326 blocks, 177 body mass index (BMI), 37–38 Boldrin, Michele, 336–337 bootstrap aggregation, 42 Borges, Jorge Luis, 33 Botswana, 96 Box, George, 6 Boyle’s law, 19 broadcast model, 132–134 data and, 134 defined, 132 r-shaped adoption curve and, 133 (fig.) budget balance, 285, 293 Buffett, Warren, 154 burning money, 304 Burt’s structural holes, 130 Camerer, Colin, 316 Campbell’s law, 57 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 348 capitalists, 348 carbon, 97–98 Carnegie, Andrew, 329 Castro, Fidel, 10 catastrophes, long-tailed distributions and, 76–77 categories data and, 34 models, 326 The Categories (Aristotle), 30 categorization error, decreasing, 35 categorization models, 27 binary, 30–31 defining, 30–31 causation, correlation and, 86–87 Cavic, Milroad, 88 central limit theorem defining, 62 logic and, 62 centrality, 130 CEO political capture, 347 chain store paradox, 247 chair trading, 187 China, 9 economic dominance of, 105 Churchill, Frank, 8 Clark, Gregory, 352 cleaner fish, 259 clique friends, 125, 126 clustering bootstraps cooperation, 265 clustering coefficient, 119 network structure and, 118 coalitions, 108 Cobb-Douglas model, 99–100, 344 defining, 100 cod, 278 cognitive closure, many-model thinking and, 56–58 Cold War, 313 Collatz conjecture, 188 collective action problems defining, 271 solved, 280–281 unsolved, 280–281 Collins, Jim, 162 commodities, 239 common network structures, 121–122 communicable models, 14 communication, 15 in REDCAPE, 20–21 communities, 120 compatibility, incentive, 285–286, 288, 293 competition.

Allesina, Stefano, and Mercedes Pascual. 2009. “Googling Food Webs: Can an Eigenvector Measure Species’ Importance for Coextinctions?” PLOS: Computational Biology 9, no. 4. Allison, Graham. 1971. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Little, Brown. Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez. 2013. “The World Top Incomes Database.” https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/projects/view/149. Anderson, Chris. 2008a. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired 16, no. 7. Anderson, Chris. 2008b. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.


pages: 199 words: 61,648

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, Mary Pilon. Bloomsbury, 2015. CAPITALISM Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1, Karl Marx, translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Classics, 1992. First published in English in 1867. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. First published in English in 2014. “Economists Clash on Theory, but Will Still Share the Nobel,” Binyamin Appelbaum. New York Times, October 14, 2013. “Blame Economists for the Mess We’re In,” Binyamin Appelbaum. New York Times, August 24, 2019.

I know that Dan already has two other bikes, but I also know how much he rides. When he comes in, I ask him about capitalism. He’s a sociologist, and the first person I’ve talked with who seems comfortable with the subject. You’ve read Marx? he checks. I read Capital in college, I tell him. And I’ve just read the first chapter of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so I know that Piketty, like Marx, believes that capitalism, unchecked, will always produce inequality. But I still don’t understand the inner workings of contemporary capitalism, the nuts and bolts of the markets, the push and pull of bubbles and recessions. Even economists, Dan says, don’t understand that.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Examples of capital include land that yields rents, shares that yield dividends, industrial machinery that yields profits, and intellectual property that yields royalties.5 Since the early 1980s, the share of overall income yielded by capital has steadily grown in relation to the share earned by labour. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Thomas Piketty predicts that the rate of return on capital OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS The Wealth Cyclone 315 will continue to outpace overall economic growth.6 If that’s right, then it means, on average, that those who own capital will enjoy higher returns than those who labour for a living.

For further reading, see Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London:Verso, 2015); David Frayne, The Refusal of Work:The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books, 2015); André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, translated by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, translated by Martin Chalmers (London and New York:Verso, 2012); and Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). Chapter 18 1. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 169. 2. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (London: Atlantic, 2010), 276. 3. Ibid. 4. Cited in Wu, Master Switch, 276–7. 5. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 18. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 427 6. Piketty, Capital, 26. 7. Piketty, Capital, 22; Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans:Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century (New York: St.

In the next section, I sketch out six possible alterations to the Private Property Paradigm. These are not the only options but they may provide a helpful starting point. The New Property Paradigm Tax on Capital One way to counteract the Wealth Cyclone would be to levy a tax on capital or the profits earned by it. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty argues for a ‘progressive global tax on capital’ as the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 328 FUTURE POLITICS ‘ideal’ way to avoid ‘an endless inegalitarian spiral’ and regain control over ‘the dynamics of accumulation’.48 A Robot Tax of the kind proposed by Bill Gates could be targeted at productive technologies.49 There may even be ways of taxing the usage or flow of data.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

The third of the conditions I listed as a driver of populism was rising inequality. This has been a persistent problem in modern democratic societies. It is certainly a problem today: Western democracies are reaching levels of inequality in both income and wealth that have not been seen since the end of the nineteenth century, the last great ‘gilded age’. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) describes the inexorable tendency for inequality to rise over the long history of capitalism, which overlaps with the history of democracy.28 That trend was reversed during the twentieth century, but even then only as a consequence of the collective experience of war.

, YouGov–Cambridge, 13 February 2015, http://bit.ly/2ACrfI5 (full survey results: http://bit.ly/2k2kvNf). 25Quoted in Christian Davies, ‘The conspiracy theorists who have taken over Poland,’ Guardian ‘Long Read’, 16 February 2016 http://bit.ly/2enJyvI 26See ‘Free silver and the mind of “Coin” Harvey’, in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 2008). 27For the classic version of this story, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). 28Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 29Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 2 Catastrophe! 30Rachel Carson, ‘Silent spring – I’, New Yorker, 16 June 1962, http://bit.ly/2zYoOlx 31John Hersey, ‘Hiroshima’, New Yorker, 31 August 1946, http://bit.ly/2yibwPT 32Hannah Arendt, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem – I’, New Yorker, 16 February1963 (and four following issues), http://bit.ly/2gkvNOi 33As above. 34‘The desolate year’, Monsanto Magazine, October 1962, pp. 4–9. 35Paul Krugman, ‘Pollution and politics’, New York Times, 27 November 2014, http://nyti.ms/2B288H9 36Eben Harrell, ‘The four horsemen of the nuclear apocalypse’, Time, 10 march 2011, http://ti.me/2hmn8RY 37Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (London: The Bodley Head, 2017), p. 50. 38Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 39Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 453ff. 40Quoted in Craig Lambert, ‘Nuclear weapons or democracy’, Harvard Magazine, March 2014, http://bit.ly/2i2BFgc 41Nick Bostrom, ‘Existential risks: analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards’, Journal of Evolution and Technology (9, 2002), http://bit.ly/2jSajtw 42As above. 43Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker, 23 November 2015, http://bit.ly/2zdfTJY 44Cormac McCarthy, The Road, p. 54 (London: Picador, 2006). 45David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (London: Sceptre, 2014). 46E.

., 87–8, 108 Khrushchev, President Nikita, 108 Kimera Systems (digital technology company), 189 Kissinger, Henry, 56, 95, 96 knowledge acquisition of, 153 and discrimination, 180 internet and, 153 political, 188–9 and power, 186–7, 204 social, 196 social scientific, 183 Krugman, Paul, 90 Kubrick, Stanley: Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (film), 95–6, 109 L Land, Nick, 165–7 Le Pen, marine, 149 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych: The State and Revolution, 171 libertarianism, 194 Lilla, mark, 150 Limbaugh, Rush, 20 Lincoln, President Abraham, 14 Lloyd George, David, 71 Long, Huey, 49 loss aversion, 175, 188 Luttwak, Edward: Coup D’État: A Practical Handbook, 41, 44 M McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, 113, 118–19 McGinnis, Joe: The Selling of the President, 158 machines, 121–2, 125–6, 127, 196, 197, 199, 200–201, 202, 205, 219; see also artificial intelligence; computers; robots; technocracy; technology McKinley, President William, 74 Macron, President Emanuel, 148, 149–50 Man on Wire (film), 117–18 Marx, Karl: ‘The Fragment on machines’, 196–7 Marxism-Leninism, 171 Mason, Paul: Postcapitalism, 196, 197, 199, 205 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 58 Mencius Moldbug see Yarvin, Curtis metadata, 154 Mill, John Stuart, 182–3, 185 Miller, Stephen, 13 mindlessness, 84, 86–8 Mitchell, David: The Bone Clocks, 113 Modi, Narendra, 65–6, 149 monarchs, 167 Monsanto (company): ‘The Desolate Year’, 88 Mugabe, President Robert, 48 Mullin, Chris: A Very British Coup, 58 N NATO, 59 Nazis, 85, 97, 99 Netherlands, 148 networks and anarchism, 193 and change, 196 interconnectedness, 112–15 political movements, 149 social 136, 151, 160, 177; see also Facebook; social media; Twitter utopian, 200 see also internet New York crime, 211 World Trade Center, 117–18 New York Times, 159–60 New Yorker (magazine), 82–3, 84, 106 news, fake, 64, 75, 98, 156, 157 Nixon, President Richard, 56, 90, 158 North Korea, 213 Nozick, Robert: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 193–4, 195 nuclear disarmament, 107 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 94–5 nuclear weapons, 56, 83–4, 86, 94, 95, 96–7, 102, 103–104, 106, 107 Nunn, Sam, 95 O Obama, President Barack and climate change, 92 and conspiracy theory, 64 executive initiatives, 55 and inequality, 79 and Trump’s election, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18 oil companies, 131 Orban, Viktor, 175 Osborne, George, 208 Oxford and Cambridge Review, 120 P Papademos, Lucas, 39 Papandreou, Andreas, 27 Papandreou, George, 39 paranoia, 67, 74 Parent, Joe, 62 Parfit, Derek, 100, 202–3 Paul, Rand, 154 Perry, William, 95 pesticides, 87–9 Petit, Philippe, 117–18 Piergiacomi, Alessio, 167–8 Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 78 Pinker, Steven: The Better Angels of our Nature, 211 Plato, 179 Poland, 65, 66 police, 171 political parties, 214 artificiality, 145–6 charisma, 147 and identity politics, 150 as machines, 127 membership, 146, 147–8 ‘Net’, 162 partisan nature, 146 ‘Pirate’, 162 United States, 146–7, 221 politicians: and trust, 144–5, 164, 214 pollution, 89, 90 populism, 13, 175 and banality, 98–9 causes of, 67 and conspiracy theory, 65–7, 72, 168 and disconnect, 141 and economic growth, 192 and inequality, 77–8 and movement politics, 148–9 United States, 67–70, 73 and war, 75 precautionary principle, 100–101 pressure groups, 89 prisons, 151, 152, 212 Putin, President Vladimir, 157 R racism, 143 Rand, Ayn, 194 rational choice theory, 108–9 referendums, 47–8, 179, 183 France, 70 Turkey, 52 United Kingdom, 48 reform, 70, 71, 78, 79, 185; see also social change revolutions, 41, 78, 196; see also digital revolution risk, 101–5, 110–12, 116 robots, 7, 103, 111, 128–9, 130, 168, 210 Rockefeller, John D., 131–2 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 70, 71, 131 Russia ‘competitive authoritarianism’, 175 Cuban missile Crisis (1962), 107–8 data harvesting, 156 foreign policy, 30 S Sacco, Justine, 143 San Francisco, 162, 163 Sandberg, Cheryl, 137 Sanders, Bernie, 58, 149 Sarandon, Susan, 198 Scarry, Elaine: Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom, 104 Scheidel, Walter: The Great Leveler, 78 Schlesinger, James, 56 Schultz, George, 95 Shita, Mouna, 189–90 Simon, Herbert, 153 el-Sisi, General Abdul Fatah, 48–9 slavery, 23, 35, 73, 123–4 sleepwalking, 115, 116, 117 Snowden, Edward, 151–2 Snyder, Timothy: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 97–8, 99 social change, 192, 219; see also reform social media, 149; see also Facebook; networks: social; Twitter socialism 171 Socrates, 38 Spain, 162 Stalinism, 99, 169, 171 suffrage, universal, 187–8 Sulzberger, Cyrus, 27, 28 surveillance, 152–5 Sweden, 162, 163 T taxation, 70, 72, 193 technocracy, 180–81, 191–2, 198, 205, 214 technology, 125, 126 corporations, 131 digital, 144, 151, 154, 161, 162–3; see also internet and dignity, 203 information, 7–8 and mortality, 24–5 and risk management, 105 and ‘the shock of the old’, 122 threat of, 103, 120–21 see also machines terrorism, 74 terrorists, 97, 212 Texas, 163 Thiel, Peter, 198 tightrope-walking, 117–18 totalitarianism, 98; see also tyrannies tribalism, 163–4 Truman, President Harry S., 84–5 Trump, Melania, 13 Trump, President Donald, 49 behaviour, 20–21, 22–3, 159, 173 and change, 198 and Charlottesville demonstrations, 4 and climate change, 93 and conspiracy theory, 64–5 and dignity, 173 election of, 1–2, 5, 13, 16–18, 19, 20, 25, 118, 149, 156 and executive aggrandisement, 92 and fake news, 157 inaugural speech, 11–14, 74 military’s influence on, 59 novels inspired by, 57 and nuclear war, 86 and political violence, 212 presidency, 213 and Silicon Valley firms, 137 supporters of, 98 on surveillance, 154 use of Twitter, 143 Tsipras, Alexis, 33–4, 209 Turkey, 50–3 conspiracy theories, 65, 66 coups, 50–2, 53, 66 and Cyprus, 38 elections, 51 Justice and Development Party (AKP), 51 movement politics, 149 referendum (2017), 52 Twitter, 65, 137, 142, 143, 156 tyrannies 61; see also totalitarianism U United Kingdom austerity, 208 Boer War, 75 Brexit, 48, 156, 179 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 94–5 Conservative Party, 146, 209 general election (2017), 95 Labour Party, 58, 70, 94–5, 148–9, 150 metadata, 154 political enfranchisement, 76 reform, 185 welfare state, 76 United States, 23–4, 25, 49–50 CIA, 28, 30 climate change, 92 Congress, 19 conspiracy theories, 62, 67 corporations, 132 Cuban missile Crisis (1962), 107–8 democratic failure, 2, 14 demonstrations, 4 direct democracy, 163 economic growth, 175 and Egypt compared, 49–50 environment, 87–90 and Greece, 30 immigration, 183 inequality, 79 judiciary, 19 McCarthyism, 67 metadata, 154 military, 17, 18 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 New Deal, 76, 78 and nuclear war, 86, 95 ‘pax Americana’, 198 pesticides, 87–9 political enfranchisement, 76 political parties Democrats, 15, 62, 64, 108, 146–7, 221 Republicans, 62, 146–7, 221 politicians, 164 populism, 67–70, 73 presidential elections, 14, 16, 54–5, 58, 68, 220–24 Kennedy, John F., 108 Trump, Donald, 1–2, 5, 13, 19, 20, 25, 118, 149 prisons, 212 reform, 70 rights, 72 road accidents, 211–12 Silicon Valley, 137, 204 ‘tyranny of the majority’, 142 violence, 73–4, 211–12 war with Spain (1890s), 75 see also Chicago; New York; San Francisco; Texas Uscinski, Joe, 62 utopias, 126, 194, 195, 201 V Varoufakis, Yanis, 32–4, 116–17, 209 Venezuela, 154–5, 208 violence, 6, 73–5 ancient Athens, 38 decline of, 13 and environmental disaster, 93 Greece, 31, 210 and inequality, 78–80 Japan, 210 online, 142–4 political, 16–17, 18 United States, 73–4, 211–12 voting AI and, 189–90 right to, 76, 183–4 systems, 182–3 see also elections W wars, 74–7 citizens’ experience of, 77 and conspiracy theory, 77 First World War, 76, 115 of national survival, 75 nuclear, 83–4, 84–5, 87, 93–7, 109, 213 and populism, 75 total, 76–7 United States and North Korea, 115 see also Cold War wealth: and death, 204; see also elites Weber, Max, 127, 131, 147, 164, 187–8 welfare states, 70, 76, 109–10 whistleblowers see Snowden, Edward Wilson, President Woodrow, 69, 71, 75–6 Y Yarvin, Curtis, 167 Z Zimbabwe, 48 Zuckerberg, Mark, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 157–8, 215; see also Facebook ALSO FROM PROFILE BOOKS Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy Francis Fukuyama The most important book about the history and future of politics since The End of History.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Income data is from the World DataBank, “GNI per Capita, PPP (Current International $)” table, accessed November 29, 2014, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/views/reports/tableview.aspx#. 4. For example, Robert Reich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich, last modified December 31, 2014); Paul Krugman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman, last modified December 12, 2014); and the recent influential book by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2014). 5. This analogy relies primarily on income data from the U.S. Census (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/families/index.html, last modified September 16, 2014). 6. I recall as a child buying packs of “chocolate cigarettes” (cylindrical sticks of candy wrapped in rolling papers). 7.


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

Somehow the invisible hand must be heavily biased toward the richest—otherwise, how could today’s enormous wealth concentration continue to grow? Many of us were raised to believe in the slogan “Economic growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats.” The saying ignores the plight of the millions who are clinging to leaky rafts—or who have no boats at all. In his best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), economist Thomas Piketty provided an exhaustive analysis of the tendency of contemporary capitalism to increase economic inequality. His diagnosis of the problem stimulated debate around the world. Piketty was fundamentally correct about the nature of the problem. But his proposed solution, which relies mainly on the use of progressive taxation to remedy income imbalances, was not equal to the task.

See Boston Consulting Group Benioff, Marc, 106 Berger, Jacques, 60 Bernou, Jean, 105, 136 biofuels, 44 Bloomberg L.P., 189 Bon et Bien, 139, 140, 141 Bosnia, 133 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 56 Branson, Richard, 105, 106 Bruysten, Saskia, 56, 184 businesses organization of, 26 solving problems with, 26 two types of, 28 Campo Vivo, 136, 138, 141 Capital In the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 8 capitalism alternatives for, 147 crises of, 41–48, 263–264 damage of, 15 economic growth with, 8 economy and, 7 framework of, 259 human freedom and, 230 inequality and, 6–10 millennial and, 145 new economic system and, 37, 264 problem of, 39 system of, 229–230 theory of, 260 zero-sum assumption of, 15 See also free market Capitalist Man GDP and, 14 Real Man versus, 11–15, 260 carbon emissions, 125 Chapiro, Cecilia, 157 charity economic system and, 71 efforts for, 262 governments and, 213 wealthy people and, 10 child mortality, 123 China, 20 civic projects, 212–213 civil institutions governments and, 220 human freedoms and, 219 threats against, 220–221 Climate Action, 128 climate change, 18 activist for, 20 agriculture and, 46 Bangladesh and, 95 China and, 20 dangers of, 19 focus on, 19 human society and, 21 poor people and, 130 sea level rise and, 97 sustainability and, 125 Trump and Paris Accord, 20 turning point of, 120 Clinton, Hillary, 85 Clinton Foundation, 108 Coel, 196, 197 collateral, 23–24, 88 communism, 147 consumption, 128 conventional banks, 23, 29 COP21.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The traditional argument that we do not need to worry about the robots taking our jobs still leaves us with the worry that the only reason we will still have our jobs is because we are willing to do them for lower wages.6 If the machines’ share of work continues to increase, then workers’ income will fall, while that accruing to the owners of the AI will rise. In his best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty highlighted that for the past few decades, labor’s share of national income (in the United States and elsewhere) has been falling in favor of the share earned by capital. This trend is concerning because it has led to increased inequality. The critical question here is whether AI will reinforce this trend or mitigate it.

See also autonomous vehicles autonomous vehicles, 8, 14–15 decision making by, 111–112 knowledge loss and, 78 legal requirements on, 116 loss of human driving skill and, 193 mail delivery, 103 in mining, 112–114 passenger interests and, 95 preferences and, 88–90 rail systems, 104 reward function engineering in, 92 school bus drivers and, 149–150 tolerance for error in, 185–187 value capture and, 164–165 Autopilot, 8 Babbage, Charles, 12, 65 back propagation, 38 Baidu, 164, 217, 219 bail-granting decisions, 56–58 bank tellers, 171–173 Bayesian estimation, 13 Beane, Billy, 56, 161–162 Beijing Automotive Group, 164 beta testing, 184, 191 Bhalla, Ajay, 25 biases, 19 feedback data and, 204–205 human predictions and, 55–58 in job ads, 195–198 against machine recommendations, 117 regression models and, 34 variance and, 34–35 binding affinity, 135–138 Bing, 50, 204, 216 biopsies, 108–109, 148 BlackBerry, 129 The Black Swan (Taleb), 60–61 Blake, Thomas, 199 blockchain, 220 Bostrom, Nick, 221, 222 boundary shifting, 157–158, 167–178 data ownership and, 174–176 what to leave in/out and, 168–170 breast cancer, 65 Bresnahan, Tim, 12 Bricklin, Dan, 141, 163, 164 A Brief History of Time (Hawking), 210–211 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 91 business models, 156–157 Amazon, 16–17 Camelyon Grand Challenge, 65 capital, 170–171, 213 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 213 capsule networks, 13 Cardiio, 44 Cardiogram, 44–45, 46, 47–49 causality, 63–64 reverse, 62 CDL. See Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) Champy, James, 123–134 Chavez, R. Martin, 125 Chen Juhong, 164 China, 8 AI advantages of, 218–220 autonomous vehicles in, 164 language translation in, 26–27 Chiou, Lesley, 216 Chisel, 3, 53–54, 68 Christensen, Clay, 50, 181 churn, 32–36 classification, 13 cloud, data from the, 188–189, 202 clustering, 13 collaboration, human/machine, 65–67, 212 bank tellers/ATMs and, 171–173 job redesign for, 141–151 in medical imaging, 146–147 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 36–37 complements, 15, 76.


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

This places the Fed in an unenviable and, in our view, ultimately unwinnable bind. The Fed was born out of a desire to stop financial panics from infecting the real economy, so it must act in the wake of a carry crash. Yet those actions increasingly are seen as putting it on the side of the elite and as reinforcing unfair economic outcomes. Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is often described as a “surprise” bestseller. The term “surprise” is revealing on several dimensions. First, there was the surprise generated by his data showing that capitalism naturally gravitates toward very unequal wealth distributions over time. A more balanced distribution, which had been thought to be normal especially in the United States, was actually an exception due to the effects of World War II’s massive capital destruction.

See Bank of Japan Brazil, 19, 39, 55n6, 65–66 current account, 31 Brazilian real, 11, 30, 66 Bretton Woods system, 218 Brownian noise, 97, 97f Bruno, Valentina, 80–81 bubble-boom economies, carry bubble conditions and, 39 business cycle carry and global, 2 carry bubbles and, 127–134 carry crashes and, 127–134 carry influence on, 57, 69 carry regime and, 125–127 money supply and, 125–126 Caballero, Ricardo, 59 call options, 146–147 Cambridge Associates, 79 capital asset pricing model, 99 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 219 221 222 capital inflows, Australia, 40, 40f, 42 capitalism, 195, 219, 220 carry central banks’ role in, 5–8 compensation incentives for, 70–72 corporate use of, 80–83 as cumulative advantage, 181–184 defining, 2 as flow from weak to strong, 179–181 global business cycle and, 2 hedge funds as agents of, 72–73 insidious structural aspects of, 200–205 leverage importance to, 70–72 lost opportunity to lean against, 220 as luck compounded, 184–186 monetary policy and, 3 as naturally occurring phenomenon, 88 necessary amounts of, 174 omnipresence of, 190–191 as power, 191–192 as rent-seeking, 175–177 rise of, 1 volatility, 86 carry bubbles, 6, 7 business cycle and, 127–134 credit bubbles and, 37–38, 41 credit demand and, 114 disguised, 134–140 economic indicators distorted by, 44–45 economic problems obscured by, 44 inflation and, 39 monetary conditions and, 39 nonmonetary assets and, 169 Ponzi schemes and, 140–143 as risk mispricing, 142 Turkey, 42–46 carry crashes, 6 Asian financial crisis and, 23–25 bailouts limiting losses from, 203 business cycle and, 127–134 carry trade returns and, 36 deflation and, 7, 170 deflation shock and, 121–124 in emerging economies, 201 incentive changes and, 84 inevitability of, 34–35, 108 leverage and, 96–98 liquidity and, 128 money supply and, 122–123 INDEX of 1998, 25–26 Turkey, 42–46 Turkish lira, of 2018, 45 of 2008, 30, 31 Volmageddon, 98, 161 yen melt-up and, 23–24 carry portfolios backtesting, 65–67 BIS data comparison with, 63, 63t constructing, 49–50 lessons from historical study of, 64–65 losses in, 51–56, 54f carry regime, 2 anti-carry regime similarity to, 173–175 asset prices and, 204 business cycle and, 125–127 central bank policies and, 86–89, 107, 208, 210 central bank power and, 123 central banks and collapses of, 215–216 central banks weakened by, 7 debt levels and, 168 defining, 107–108 deflation and, 113–121, 203, 210, 213 development of, 127, 134 economic growth and, 209 economic imbalances from, 201 financial market structure and, 7 fragility of, 201 monetary equilibrium and, 169 monetary growth and, 169 monetary perspective on, 168–170 money in, 108–113 nonmonetary assets and, 112, 114, 122 resource allocation and, 114–115 risk mispricing and, 134–140 S&P 500 importance to, 86–87, 87f theoretical alternative to, 166–168 vanishing point and, 116, 195, 209–210 volatility signs of ending, 214–218 carry trade.


pages: 334 words: 82,041

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

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

39.Going Naked Part 8: Out of Sight, Out of Mind 40.The Holocaust We Will Not See 41.The Empire Strikes Back 42.Unremitting Pain 43.Bomb Everyone Part 9: Holding Us Down 44.A Global Ban on Leftwing Politics 45.Innocent until Proved Dead 46.The Paranoia Squad 47.Union with the Devil Part 10: Finding Our Place 48.Someone Else’s Story 49.Highland Spring 50.A Telling Silence 51.The Values of Everything Acknowledgements Notes Index Introduction In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that no government programme could be sustained without an ‘apparatus of justification’.1 Without the corporate press, without spin doctors and lobbyists and think tanks, the unnecessary programmes of austerity that several governments have imposed would be politically impossible.

Thank you too to my assistant Ketty Hughes; my agents James Macdonald Lockhart and Antony Harwood; the editor and commissioner of this book, Leo Hollis, whose idea it was; and the many friends (and opponents) with whom I have debated the issues it contains. September 2015 Notes Introduction 1Thomas Piketty, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2Susan Jacoby, 2008, The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy, Old Street Publishing, London. 3David Harvey, 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford; Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin Books, London. 4Isaiah Berlin, 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, published in Isaiah Berlin, 1969, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 5Fred Block and Margaret Somers, 2014, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 6Amartya Sen, 1981, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1.

., 54, 209, 223 Business Council, 264 C Californian condor, decline of, 84–5 Cambridge University, 20, 49, 50, 51 Cameron, David, 76, 275, 282, 283 Cameron, James, 227 Canada greenhouse gas emissions in, 87 revocation of patents by, 251 rise in moose numbers, 86 Canadian tar sands, 151 capital gains tax, 276, 280 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 1 capitalism, 176, 187, 195. See also consumer capitalism capitalists, 193 carbon, governments in rich world exhorting citizens to use less, 148 carbon capture and storage, 147, 150 carbon-cutting programmes, 151 carbon dioxide catching and burying of, 150 contributions of whales in removal of, 83 production of, 86, 148, 204 rise in, 84, 103–4 carbon-fuelled expansion, 176 Carbon Tracker Initiative, 156 Cardigan Bay, 95 care workers, 184–6 Carnegie, Andrew, 1, 191 carnivores, impact of large carnivores, 80 Catholic church, on abortion and contraception, 72–6 CBI (Confederation of British Industry), 263, 267 Center for Responsive Politics, 24 Centre for Policy Studies, 219 chastity, 59 Cherry Orchard estate, 45 Chesterman, Gordon, 51 child prisoners, 69 children.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Thompson, 1963 Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, Eric Hobsbawm, 1968 Why the West Rules – For Now, Ian Morris, 2010 Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, 2011 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem), Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1832: ‘Ye are many—they are few’ ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ (essay), Simon Fairlie, 2009 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy, Jonathan Taplin, 2017 The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860 From Sci-fi to Wi-fi to My-Wi Rocannon’s World, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1966 The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham, 1957 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932 Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999 ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (short story), Philip K.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

I have always been aware of their existence, but a salient—and pernicious—attribute came to me while observing the reactions of its members to the works of the French economist Thomas Piketty. Piketty followed Karl Marx by writing an ambitious book on capital. A friend gave me the book as a gift when it was still in French (and unknown outside France) because I find it commendable that people publish their original, nonmathematical work in social science in book format. The book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, makes aggressive claims about the alarming rise of inequality, adding to it a theory of why capital tends to command too much return in relation to labor and how the absence of redistribution and dispossession might make the world collapse.

Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science 26(2): 023103. Available: scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/chaos/26/2/10.1063/1.4940236 Piketty, Thomas, 1995. “Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 110(3): 551–584. ———, 2015. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Pinker, Steven, 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin. Pitman, E. 1980. “Subexponential Distribution Functions.” Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society, Series A, 29(3): 337–347. Pitman, J. W., 1975.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

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

In the last few years, the Occupy movement protested against the rapid growth of the tallest giants, the so-called ‘1 per cent’ of top earners. In major cities protestors camped out and set up makeshift universities where people debated the reasons for increasing inequality and what could be done about it. Economics professors joined the debate. The French economist Thomas Piketty (b. 1971) published a book in 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which examined the rise of the rich and confirmed fears about how fast they were pulling ahead of everybody else. How did the giants get so huge? Karl Marx said that they’re the capitalists who exploit the workers to make money; Joseph Schumpeter, that they’re bold people who take risks and get rich when they get lucky.

absolute poverty (i) acid rain (i) adaptive expectations (i) adverse selection (i) advertising (i) agriculture (i), (ii), (iii) aid (i) Akerlof, George (i) alienation (i) Ambrose, St (i) animal spirits (i), (ii), (iii) antitrust policies (i) Apple (i) Aquinas, St Thomas (i), (ii) Aristotle (i) Arrow, Kenneth (i) ascending auction (i) Asian Tigers (i), (ii) Atkinson, Anthony (i), (ii) auction theory (i) auctions (i) Augustine of Hippo, St (i) austerity (i) balance of trade (i) banks and entrepreneurs (i) and interest rates (i) and loans (i) and monopoly capitalism (i), (ii) and speculation (i) see also Britain, Bank of England; central banks; independent central banks; World Bank battle of the methods (i) Becker, Gary (i) behavioural economics (i) benevolent patriarch (i) Beveridge, William (i) big push (i) Black Wednesday (i) bonds (i) bourgeoisie (i), (ii), (iii) brand image (i) Britain Bank of England (i) inflation (i) pegged currency (i) Second World War (i) war with China (i) war with South Africa (i) bubbles (i), (ii) Buchanan, James (i) budget deficit (i) Burke, Edmund (i) capabilities (i) capital (i) and growth (i) Marx on (i) Capital (Marx) (i) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) (i) capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) and entrepreneurs (i) and governments (i) and the Great Depression (i) and the Great Recession (i) historical law of (i) Marx on (i) world (i) see also communism Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) (i) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter) (i) capitalists (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and imperialism (i), (ii), (iii) Marx on (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) carbon tax (i) carbon trading permits (i) Carlyle, Thomas (i), (ii) Castro, Fidel (i), (ii) central banks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) central planning (i), (ii) chaebols (i) chain of being (i), (ii) Chamberlin, Edward (i) Chaplin, Charlie (i) Chicago Boys (i) Chicago school (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) China, war with Britain (i) Christianity, views on money (i) Churchill, Winston (i) classical dichotomy (i) classical economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) coins (i), (ii) Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (i) colonies/colonialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) American (i) Ghana (i), (ii) commerce (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) communism (i) and the Soviet Union (i) Communist Manifesto, The (Engels and Marx) (i), (ii) comparative advantage (i), (ii) competition (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Condorcet, Marquis de (i) Confessions of an Economic Heretic (Hobson) (i) conspicuous consumption (i) constitution (rules) (i) consumers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) contagion, economic (i) core (i) Corn Laws (i), (ii) Cortés, Hernan (i) cost (i) creative destruction (i) Credit Crunch (i) crime, economic theory of (i) Cuba (i) currency (i), (ii) see also coins currency markets (i), (ii) currency reserves (i) Debreu, Gérard (i) demand law of (i) see also supply and demand demand curve (i) democracy (i), (ii) Democratic Republic of the Congo (i) dependency theory (i) Depression (Great) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and economic growth (i) and the US central bank (i) descending auction (i) developing/underdeveloped countries (i), (ii) development economics (i) Development of Underdevelopment, The (Frank) (i) diminishing marginal utility (i), (ii) diminishing return to capital (i) discretion (i) discrimination coefficient (i) distribution of income (i), (ii) diversification (i), (ii) dividends (i) division of labour (i) doomsday machines (i) Drake, Sir Francis (i) Drew, Daniel (i) dual economy (i) economic value (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) economics defined (i) normative (i) Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson) (i) economies of scale (i) economists (i), (ii), (iii) efficient markets hypothesis (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) efficient/inefficient economic outcome (i) see also pareto efficiency; pareto improvement Elizabeth I (i) Elizabeth II (i) employment, full (i) Engels, Friedrich (i) England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (Mun) (i) entitlement (i), (ii) entrepreneurs (i), (ii) equilibrium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) exchange of goods (i), (ii) exchange rates (i) expectations, adaptive/rational (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) exploitation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) exports (i) and poor countries (i), (ii), (iii) externalities (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (MacKay) (i) failure, market (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Fama, Eugene (i) famine (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) feminist economics (i) feudalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) financial systems (i), (ii) Finer, Herman (i) first price auction (i), (ii) First Welfare Theorem (i), (ii) First World War (i) fiscal policy (i), (ii) floating exchange rate (i) Florence (i) Folbre, Nancy (i) Fourier, Charles (i) framing (i), (ii) France agriculture (i) economic models (i), (ii) revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and taxation (i) Frank, Andre Gunder (i) free choice (i), (ii) free-market economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free trade (i), (ii), (iii) Friedman, Milton (i), (ii), (iii) full employment (i) game theory (i), (ii), (iii) general equilibrium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes) (i) Germany, infant industries (i) Ghana (i), (ii) Gilded Age (i) Global Financial Crisis (i), (ii) global warming (i) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (i) gold (i), (ii) Golden Age (i) goods and services (i) government, and economies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Great Moderation (i), (ii) Great Recession (i) Greece (i), (ii), (iii) gross domestic product (i) growth (i) and dependency theory (i) of government (i) and the Great Moderation (i) and Pakistan (i) and population (i) theory (i) Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ (i), (ii) guilds (i) Hamilton, Alexander (i) Hansen, Alvin (i) harmony, system of (i) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) hedge funds (i) herds (i) Hicks, John (i) historical law of capitalism (i) HIV/AIDS (i) Hobson, John (i) Homobonus, St (i) human capital (i) human development (i), (ii) Human Development Index (i) imperfect competition (i), (ii) imperialism (i) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin) (i) imports (i), (ii), (iii) income (i), (ii) and bank loans (i) and capitalism (i) and communism (i) distribution of (i), (ii) and growth (i), (ii) national (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) income per person (i), (ii) independent central banks (i) Industrial Revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) inequality (i), (ii) infant industries (i) inflation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) information economics (i), (ii), (iii) injection of spending (i) innovations (i), (ii) insurance (i), (ii) interest rates (i) British (i) and monetary policy (i) and recession (i) and usury (i) International Monetary Fund (i) investment (i) and the big push (i) and recession (i), (ii) invisible hand (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) iron law of wages (i) Irrational Exuberance (Shiller) (i) Jefferson, Thomas (i) Jevons, William (i) just price (i) Kahneman, Daniel (i), (ii) Kennedy, John F.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Pechman, Joseph, 1987, Federal Tax Policy, Fifth Edition (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution). Persson, Torsten and Guido Tabellini, 2003, The Economic Effects of Constitutions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Pigou, A. C., 1920, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan). Piketty, Thomas, 2014, The Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA and New York: Harvard University Press). 2015, The Economics of Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Piketty, Thomas, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva, 2011, “Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities,” Working Paper 17616, NBER.

Giavazzi, 2012, “The Output Effect of Fiscal Consolidation,” NBER, Working Paper No. 18336 (June). Alesina, Alberto and Francesco Passarelli, 2014, “Regulation versus Taxation,” Journal of Public Economics 110, pp. 147–156. Alter, Jonathan, 2006, The Defining Moment (New York: Simon & Schuster). 401 402 Bibliography Alvaredo Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, 2013, “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historic Perspective,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (3), pp. 3–20. Amar, Akhil Reed, 2012, America’s Unwritten Constitution (New York: Basic Books). American Action Forum (AAF), 2016, “How Many Federal Forms Are There?”

., 1999, The Economic Consequences of Rolling Back the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). 2008, “European Union Social Policy in a Globalizing Context” in Costabile, editor, pp. 15–32. Atkinson, Anthony B. and Gunnar Viby Mogensen, 1993, Welfare and Work Incentives : A North European Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Atkinson, Anthony B., Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, 2011, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” Journal of Economic Literature 39 (1), pp. 3–71. Atkinson, Sir Anthony, 2015, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Baiardi, Donatella, Paola Profeta, Riccardo Puglisi and Simona Scabrosetti, 2017, “Tax Policy and Economic Growth: Does It Really Matter?”


pages: 443 words: 98,113

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

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

He concluded in his epochal General Theory that, as capitalism spread, it would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital … [W]hilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital … I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.2 Eighty years on, the rentier is anything but dead; rentiers have become the main beneficiaries of capitalism’s emerging income distribution system. Yet the term does not appear in the index of Tony Atkinson’s magisterial book Inequality, while Thomas Piketty’s much-cited tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century claims that rentier capitalism has faded.3 Keynes was mistaken because he did not foresee how the neoliberal framework built since the 1980s would allow individuals and firms to generate ‘contrived scarcity’ of assets from which to gain rental income. Nor did he foresee how the modern ‘competitiveness’ agenda would give asset owners power to extract rental subsidies from the state.

NOTES 1 An Economy for the 1%, Oxfam Briefing Paper 210, January 2016. 2 J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Palgrave Macmillan, 1936), Chapter 24. 3 A. B. Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done? (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2015); T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014). 4 Some use a more restrictive definition to mean an economy where more is collected in rent than in taxes, the rent comes from foreign sources, only an elite gain from rent seeking and the government is the main rent collector. See H. Beblawi, ‘The rentier state in the Arab world’, in G.

Another plan is to encourage ‘shared ownership’, where people buy a share of a house and pay rent on the rest, with an option to buy in full later. None of this helps low-income groups. Housing wealth has been key to rising inequality in Britain and elsewhere. One study argues that the rising share of income going to capital identified by Piketty in Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century is largely attributable to increased payments to house owners.33 In seven rich countries, capital income from housing accounted for 3 per cent of the total in 1950 but 10 per cent today. These results may be exaggerated, since rental income has been growing from other sources too.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Penn and Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats.” Also Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” “The simple fact of the matter”: Danielle Allen, “Charlottesville Is Not the Continuation of an Old Fight. It Is Something New,” Washington Post, August 13, 2017. The intensity of partisan animosities: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Today’s racially tinged partisan polarization: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 613. economic changes of the last few decades: Katherine Kramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 3.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

More than a fifth of my Airbnb hosts respondents have multiple units; one respondent in particular maintains space for twenty-five guests a night. In his words: “I own a hotel. I’m a hotelier. I just have a room here and apartment there. . . . Until I have that chain of hotels, I just have a chain of different apartments all over this island.” In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty notes that in a slow-growth economy, wealth provides better returns than labor. As a result, those with wealth to invest will get wealthier; those without probably won’t. Or as William Alden explains, “These markets also tend to attract a class of well-heeled professional operators, who outperform the amateurs—just like in the rest of the economy.

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2519:179–88. Peterson, Latoya. 2015. “Uber’s Convenient Racial Politics.” Fusion, July 23. Pew Research Center. 2014. Views of Job Market Tick Up, No Rise in Economic Optimism. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. 2003. “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(1):1–39. Plaut, Melissa. 2007. Hack: How I Stopped Worrying about What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab.

See also bathroom access British law, 64–65, 66, 92 broken-windows theory, 151–52 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 17, 162, 186 Bureau of Economic Analysis, 9 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10, 37, 101, 176, 180 business-to-business tier, 182, 228n14 Busque, Leah, 54 C2C (consumer-to-consumer sales). See consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sales Callinicos, Brent, 76 Camp, Garrett, 49, 223n75 Cantillon, Ricard, 36 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 40 capitalism, 5, 23 capital issue: overview, 7, 23, 31, 39; distribution inequality, 186; in gig economy services, 166–68; hosts and, 19–20, 165; human and social capital, 183; participant recruitment and methodology, 42 career opportunities, 23, 36, 50, 56, 58–59, 162–63, 162–64.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

According to the Land Registry, the average property value in London in 1977 was £13,180. In the subsequent forty-three years it has grown, by March 2020, to £485,794.16 This rise had mainly been as a result of rising urban land prices rather than just the bricks and mortar above ground. This is proof of economist Thomas Piketty’s historic argument in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that capital has always had the advantage over income.17 At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to regulate, or even register who owns what, and where. * * * ‘Buy land’, joked the American humourist Mark Twain. ‘They’re not making any more of it.’

P. ‘The resilience of a London great estate: urban development, adaptive capacity and the politics of stewardship’, Journal of Urbanism, Vol. 11, no. 1 (2018), p. 109 15 Ibid., p. 111 16 UK House Price Index, Land Registry website, https://landregistry.data.gov.uk/ 17 Piketty, T. Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Harvard University Press, 2014 18 Christophers, B. 2018 19 Monbiot, G., Grey, R., Kenny, T., Macfarlane, L., Powell-Smith, A., Shrubsole, G. and Stratford, B. Land for the Many, 2019, https://landforthemany.uk/ Index References to images are in italics. abduction 76 Albemarle, Duke of 120, 121 Alexander, Mr 175 Alston, John 243, 257 America 48, 73, 77–8, 189 American Embassy (London) 256 Andrews, Mr 168 Andrews, Richard 237, 248 Anglicanism 24, 101, 102, 106, 109 Anjou, Philippe, Duke of, see Philip V of Spain, King Anne of Great Britain, Queen 89, 114, 147, 175, 229 anti-Catholic sentiment 101–5 architecture 30, 73–4, 82–3, 92–3, 226, 254–5 Ariès, Philippe 60–1 aristocracy 30, 50, 68, 115–16, 120–1, 252–3 Arlington, Lord 50, 79, 113 Arthur, Mr 2, 4, 153, 156 and Hôtel Castile 158, 159, 160, 164 asylums 220–1 Atkins, Thomas 143 Atkinson, Rowland 252 Atkyns, Edward 54 Aubrey, John 141 Audley, Hugh 14–16, 20–1, 23–7, 31, 33, 247 and Goring House 49 and Manor of Ebury 22 Axtell, Anne 181–2, 183, 208 Ayres, Dr 4, 158, 159–60, 162–3, 176, 195–6, 204 Baker, Robert 30 banking 15, 112 Barbon, Nicholas 117–20, 122 An Apology for the Builder 254–5 Barlow, Thomas 237, 240, 243 Barnaby, Bryan 35 Becket, Thomas à 209 Bedlam, see Bethlem Hospital Behn, Aphra 89 Belgravia (London) 10, 32 Berkeley, Lady 121–2 Berkeley, Lord 67, 72–5, 85, 113 Bethlem Hospital (London) 134, 135, 220 Blake, Sir William 49 Blencoe, Sir John 212 Bloomsbury (London) 115–17, 232 Blount, Lady Anne 96 Boghurst, William 36 Bond, Sir Thomas 121, 122 Bonfroy, Nicholas 25–6, 27 Bonfroy, Thomas 25–6 Bonnie Prince Charlie, see James Francis Edward Stuart Booth’s Uprising (1659) 80, 100 Bossy, John 106–7 Bowtell, John 143 Bracey, Anne 178, 213 Bradshaw, John 185 Brerewood, William 138, 139, 144, 197–8 Britannia Illustrata (Kip/Knyff) 225–6, 227 Brough, Dorothy 169 Browne, Thomas 113 Buckingham, Duke of 21, 79–80 Buckingham Palace (London) 22, 49 Burlington, 1st Earl of 67 Burlington, 3rd Earl of 234, 235 Burlington House (London) 234 Burnaby, Richard 181, 182, 183, 189, 208 Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy 135–6 Burton, Thomas 94–5 Bury, Sir Thomas 212 Byerley, Joseph 150, 151, 177, 180 Cadogan, Lord 233 Campbell, Colen 234, 235, 244 capitalism 19–20, 78, 112, 247 Carew, Thomas 249 Carlos II of Spain, King 150 Cartwright, Dr Thomas, Bishop of Chester 107, 110, 129 Catherine of Braganza, Queen 101 Catholic Church 18, 90, 101–5, 109 and Grosvenor, Dame Mary 105–6, 107–8 and Rome 152–3 see also Jacobites Cavendish, Margaret 89 Cavendish Square (London) 238, 240, 245 Chancery 217 Charaz, Frederick 177–8 Charles I of England, King 20, 23, 72, 73, 92–3 and execution 186 and London 66 Charles II of England, King 24, 29, 30, 50, 77, 120 and death 108 and Great Fire 54, 56 and heir 101, 104–5 and London 65 and plague 39 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor 150, 151 Chester 79, 80, 83, 84, 91–6, 99–100 and anti-Catholicism 102, 103, 104 and James II 110 Cheyne, George: The English Malady 137 childbirth 125–6, 127–8 children 60–4, 130 Chirk Castle (North Wales) 248 Cholmondeley, Charles 96, 98, 221, 222 Cholmondeley, Francis 93, 143, 207, 218–19 and Fenwick 172–3, 180 and Grosvenor children 211–13, 214–15, 221–2, 225 Cholmondeley, Robert 100 Cholmondeley, Sir Thomas 85, 134, 143, 144, 168, 172 Christophers, Brett 7 The New Enclosure 259 churches 69, 232, 237 Churches, Christine 46 Civil Wars 25, 27, 30, 49, 72–3 and Catholic Church 102 and Chester 99–100 and Grosvenors 80 and Westminster 185 and women 91 Clarendon, Earl of 20, 22, 67–8, 113, 120–1 class 63, 70, 191, 217 Clement XI, Pope 152, 153 common land 18–19 Compton, Henry 212 Cook, John 35 Cookson, Mrs 146, 152, 198 Corsellis, Nicholas 52 Cotton, Lady 138 Court of Chancery 173 Court of Delegates 209–10, 212–14 Court of Wards and Liveries (London) 16, 20, 22–3, 24, 216, 217 couverture 45, 247 Cowper, William 233 Cox, Sarah 76 Cranfield, Lionel 21–2, 31, 48 Cromwell, Oliver 23, 29, 32, 47, 80 and head 185 and London 66 and matrimony 70 Crown, the 16–17, 18, 22, 32, 254 Culpeper, Nicholas 126 Cutler, Sir John 13 Dahl, Michael 2, 147 Daniell, Peter 80 Davies, Alexander 24, 25–6, 27, 30–1, 49 and death 40–4, 60, 64 and inheritance 32–4, 35 and land 78 Davies, John 25 Davies, Mary, see Grosvenor, Dame Mary Davies, Thomas 25–6, 27, 33, 43, 44, 48 Davies, William 43 Davis, Juliet 257–8 Davis, Rob 134, 197 De Worde, Wynkyn 14 Defoe, Daniel 220, 241, 244 A Journal of the Plague Year 36, 39, 40, 42 Delaval, Robert 91 Delaval, William 150, 177 Denham, Sir John 234 Dissolution of the Monasteries 18, 22, 32, 45 Doblen, John 53 Dockwra, Richard 167 Dockwra, William 145, 167, 168, 203 Dorchester Hotel (London) 22 Drake, Judith: An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex 88–9 Dubois, Nicholas 235 Dufief, Madame 159, 176, 177, 200, 201–2 Dukeson, Dr Richard 24, 27, 85 Dutton, Thomas 103 Earle, John 102 Eaton Hall (Chester) 79, 82, 83, 84, 91–6, 97, 169–70 and Britannia Illustrata 226, 227 and Grosvenor, Sir Richard 225 Ebury Manor, see Manor of Ebury Eccleston 99, 140–1, 249 education 61, 62–4 Egerton, Elizabeth 128 Elizabeth I of England, Queen 29, 36, 89 Ellis, Bishop 155, 179–80 Enlightenment 8, 112, 137 environmentalism 256 Erickson, Amy Louise 45, 46 Errington, John 149 Europe, see Grand Tour; Paris; Rome; Spain Evans, Catherine 197 Evelyn, John 50, 95, 61–2, 73–4, 116, 121 Fumifugium 29–30 and Great Fire 53, 56 and London 68, 69 Exclusion Crisis 101–5, 106, 116, 185 Fairchild, Thomas: The City Gardener 243 Fallowes, Thomas 220–1 Faversham, Earl of 108 Fawkes, Guido 185 Fenwick, Edward 2, 4–5, 6–7, 146, 147–8, 179 and Court of Delegates 210, 212–13, 214 and estate 168–9, 181–3, 208, 209 and Hôtel Castile 158, 159, 160–5 and marriage 173–5 and Paris 154–5, 156, 177 and trial 180, 189–206 and Westminster 170–1 Fenwick, Sir John 189 Fenwick, Lodowick 1, 4, 130–1, 139, 142 and Court of Delegates 212–13 and Ellis 179–80 and Hôtel Castile 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163–4, 178 and travel 144, 152, 154, 155, 156 and trial 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 203 fire insurance 117, 122 Fitzwilliams, Michael 103 Fleet Street (London) 57–8 Flitcroft, Henry 235 Foucault, Michel 216, 217, 220 Franklin, Thomas 181–2, 183, 208 Frith, Richard 122, 123 Fuller, Thomas 19 Fulwood, Roger 76 funerals 140–2 gardens 243, 257 Gatty, Charles 26 Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera 44 Gehl, Jan 256 George I of Great Britain, King 230, 232, 233, 243 George of Denmark, Prince 147 ghost houses 258 Glorious Revolution (1688) 111 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry 101 Goodchild, John 33, 34 Goring, Lord 49 Goring House (London) 32, 48–9, 50, 65, 72, 79 and Arlington 113 Grand Remonstrance (1641) 22–3 Grand Tour 81–2, 211, 226 Grange (Dorset) 92 Great Fire of London 50–8, 69 Grosvenor, Anne (daughter) 144, 167, 207–8, 219, 237 Grosvenor, Dame Mary 1–2, 207–8, 210–11, 248–9, 250 and Berkeley 72, 74–5 and birth 34, 35 and care 218–20, 221, 222–4 and Catholicism 105–6, 107–8 and childhood 60–1, 63, 64–5 and Court of Delegates 212, 213, 214 and Eaton Hall 91–2, 93, 94–5 and Fenwick, Edward 4–5, 6–7, 168–70, 171–3, 174–6, 177–8 and Fenwick, Lodowick 130–1 and first marriage 8 and Hôtel Castile 158–65 and inheritance 3–4, 9–10, 45, 46–8, 50, 58 and Manor of Ebury 123–4 and marriage 84–6, 87–8, 90, 96, 98 and mental health 131–2, 133–4, 137, 138–9, 155–6, 167–8, 215–16 and Millbank 166–7 and motherhood 125–7, 128–30 and Paris 149, 150, 151–2 and portrait 2–3 and widowhood 140, 142–3 and Rome 153–5 and travel 144, 145–8 and trial 179–81, 182–3, 189–206 Grosvenor, Richard, Earl (grandson) 249 Grosvenor, Sir Richard (son) 79–81, 143, 145, 207–8 and death 249 and Grand Tour 211 and Grosvenor Estate 242, 243, 246, 247 and inheritance 214–15, 221–2, 225 and marriage 228–9 and politics 230 and portrait 226, 228 and speculating 235–6, 237 Grosvenor, Sir Robert (son) 143, 207–8, 230–1, 236–7, 249 Grosvenor, Sir Thomas (husband) 8, 79, 81–2, 83–6 and death 139, 140–4 and Eaton Hall 94–5 and Exclusion Crisis 101–2, 104, 105 and James II 108–10 and land 112–13 and marriage 87–8 and politics 98–9, 100–1, 124–5 and religion 107, 108 Grosvenor, Sir Thomas (son) 143, 207–8, 230–1, 249 Grosvenor Square (London) 240–7, 251, 256–8 Guy, Thomas 220 Gwynne, Nell 68 Hale, Sir Matthew 201 Hamilton, Duke of 204 Hanover Square (London) 232, 245 Harcourt, Simon 190–1 Harvey, Robert 25–6, 27 Hawksmoor, Nicholas 232, 235 Hay Fair 114–15 Henri IV of France, King 48 Henry II of England, King 186, 209 Henry VIII of England, King 18, 20, 47 Hermannides, Rutger 28, 29 Hill, Emery 35 Hinde, John 121–3 Hodges, Nathaniel 37, 39 Hollar, Wenceslaus 184, 185 Holt, Lord Chief Justice John 6, 188–9, 194, 205–6 Hooke, Robert 56, 57, 116, 134, 137 Hooper, Mr 193–4, 195, 196, 197 Hopper, George 212 Hôtel Castile (Paris) 1–2, 4, 6, 10, 156, 157, 158–65 and Fenwick’s story 174–5 and Middleton 176, 177 housing 7, 30, 57, 68, 69, 258 and Barbon 118–20 and gardens 243 and Grosvenor Square 246 and London 234–5 Houston, R.

A. 137–8 Hubert, Robert 55 Huguenots 48 Hyde Manor (London) 31 Hyde Park (London) 66–7 Innocent XII, Pope 152, 153 insane, see madness Ireland 23, 74, 75, 100, 102 Ireton, Henry 185 Jacobites 148, 149, 150, 151, 189 and rebellion 229, 230, 231, 249 Jacobs, Jane 257 James I of England, King 20, 21, 22, 36, 48 James II of England, King 2, 72, 73, 101, 108, 109–11 and Catholic Church 153 and death 178 and the law 188 and Paris 148, 149–50 and Rye House Plot 116 James Francis Edward Stuart 150, 178, 230, 249 James, John 232 Jenkins, Simon 8, 259 Landlords to London 252 Jennings, Will 146, 152, 198 Jerman, Edward 69 Jermyn, Henry 68, 115 Jones, Inigo 67, 82, 92 Jonson, Ben 14 Kensington (London) 10, 55 Kent, William 235 Kip, Johannes and Knyff, Leonard: Britannia Illustrata 225–6, 227 Lammas Ground 19 land 7, 8, 10–11, 138, 258–60 and America 77–8 and aristocracy 252–3 and Audley 21 and common 18–19 and compound fine 23–4 and control 16–18 and Davies 32–3 and Grosvenors 112–13 and London 113–14, 115–16 and suburbs 68, 69 and women 45–7 see also property law, the 17, 18, 209–10, 212–14 and women 45, 46, 90 Lawe’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights, The 90 Le Brun, Charles 149 Le Cleve, Thomas 178 Le Vau, Louis 149 Leicester Square (London) 30 Lely, Sir Peter 83–4, 147 Leoni, Giacomo 235 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor 150 Lewis, Mr 4–5, 164–5 Lilly, William 35 Lincoln’s Inn Fields (London) 34, 35 Livingston, Elizabeth 91 Lloyd, Nathaniel 171, 172 Locke, John 255 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 62 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina 77–8 Lockwood, Marie 25 Lodge, Tom 146, 154, 155–6, 163–4, 165 and trial 199–200, 204 Londinum London (map) 28, 29 London 6–8, 10–11, 65–70 and anti-Catholicism 102 and Audley 15–16 and Barbon 117–19 and Bloomsbury 115–17 and Burlington Estate 234–5 and Davies 32–4 and Evelyn 29–30 and expansion 113–14, 115–16, 231–2 and Great Fire 50–8 and Grosvenor Estate 235–8, 240–7, 256–8 and housing 119–20 and maps 27–9, 30–2 and Mayfair 251–2 and ownership 252–4 and Pepys 13–14 and plague 36–43, 47 and property prices 259 and South Sea Bubble 238, 240 and speculators 121–3 and squares 232–3 Louis XIV of France, King 148, 149, 150, 151, 178 Luttrell, Narcissus 206 Lyon 155–6, 176, 177 Macclesfield, Earl of 105 Mackay, John 239, 240 Macky, John: Journey through England 235 Mad House Act (1774) 217, 221 Maddison, Charles 138, 139, 198 madness 132–3, 134–8, 216–18, 220–1 Magna Carta 17 Mainwaringe, Dr Everard 32 Manchester, Lady 150 Mandeville, Geoffrey de 22 Manor of Ebury (Westminster) 9, 10, 19, 31–2, 48, 56 and Audley 21, 22, 26–7 and Fenwick 181–2, 208 and Grosvenor, Dame Mary 123–4 and Grosvenor, Richard 222 and Parliament 229–30 and tenants 173–4, 211–12 maps 27–9, 30–2, 97, 157, 239, 240 Market Meadows 32, 33, 35, 44 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of 108 marriage 70–2, 76, 90–1, 209, 213–14 Marriage Acts: 1653: 70 1753: 214 Mary II of England, Queen 111, 131 Massey, Edward 100, 103 Massey, William 103, 104, 106 May, Hugh 73–4, 82 May Fair 114–15 Mayfair (London) 8, 10, 251–2 melancholy 135–7 Mercator, Nicholas 82 Middleton, George 171, 172, 173, 176–7, 178–9, 180 and imprisonment 191 Miège, Guy 232 Millbank (London) 5, 28, 29, 40, 44, 235–6 and Great Fire 55 Miller, Tom 146, 152, 154, 155, 167, 213 and Hôtel Castile 161, 162, 165 and trial 192, 195, 199–200, 204 Mills, Peter 57 Misson, Henri 141, 142 Monbiot, George 260 moneylending 15–16 Monmouth, James, Duke of 104–5, 108, 109 Monument (London) 69, 102 Moore, Francis 150 More, Thomas: Utopia 19 Morris, Dr 62–4 Myddleton, Sir Richard 143, 221, 237–8 Myddleton, Robert 248 Myddleton, Thomas 85 Neate House (London) 31, 32 neoclassicism 226, 234, 244 New World, see America Newton, Sir Isaac 238 Nicholls, Dr John 138, 167, 197 Nicolson, William 212 Norman Conquest 16, 22, 79 North, Roger 118 Oates, Titus 101, 102, 185 Orton, John 181–2, 183, 208 Osbourne, Thomas 40 Oxford 23, 39 Oxford, Edward Harley, Earl of 238 Palladio, Andrea 226 Panton, Thomas 30 Papists, see Catholic Church Paris 8, 148–50, 154–5; see also Hôtel Castile; Versailles Parliament 17, 18, 22–3, 24, 99 and churches 232 and James II 109–10 and land 48 and Manor of Ebury 229–30 and power 111 and property 78–9 Parry, Henry 177 Pepys, Samuel 13–14, 50, 66, 68, 73 and Great Fire 51, 52 Perrault, Claude 149 Peterborough, Earl of 34 Peterborough, Henry Mordaunt, Lord 72 Peterborough, Lady 168, 173 Peterborough House (London) 41, 168, 236 Pevet, Margaret 155 Philip V of Spain, King 150, 151, 167, 178 Phipps, Edward 181–2, 183, 208 Piccadilly (London) 30 Piggot, Mr 169, 170, 198, 230–1 Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the Twenty-First Century 259 Pimlico (London) 10 place-making 255–7 plague 36–43, 47 Plessington, John 103–4, 106 Poole, James 103 poor, the 18–19, 37, 40, 42 Powell, Sir John 212 Powys, Sir Thomas 189–90, 194, 197, 202–3 Pratt, Roger 57, 82 Certain Heads to be Largely Treated Concerning the Undertaking of Any Building 67 pregnancy 125–7 Price, Thomas 153–4 primogeniture 17, 247 Private Eye (magazine) 252 private property 8–9, 10–11, 24, 55–7, 259 property 16–18, 138, 117–20, 181–3, 225–6 and investment 258 and London 252–4 and marriage 71 and ownership 77–9 and women 45–7, 89 see also housing; private property Property Week (magazine) 253 Protestantism 107 psychiatry 132–3, 134–7, 216 public land 259–60 Purcell, Dr John 136 Qatar 253 Queen’s Bench 180–1, 182, 188 Queen’s House (London) 92–3 Questel, Robert 213 Radcliffe, Francis 4, 154, 164, 165, 213 and trial 180, 204 Raleigh, Sir Walter 185 Ralph, James 245 rape 201, 203 Rea, John 24, 27 Rebuilding Act (1667) 57 rentier capitalism 78 Restoration 24, 29, 44, 49 Ridley, Mrs 204 Rippon, William 133, 197 Roberts, Hugh 80–1 Rolfe, Samuel 69 Rome 144, 151, 152–5 Roxburghe, Duke of 233 Royal Exchange (London) 69 Royal Society 136 Royalists 24, 26, 47, 49, 72–3 and Chester 80 and Cromwell 23, 32 Rue Saint-Dominique, see Hôtel Castile Russell, Lady Rachel 116, 117, 215, 232 Russell, William, Lord 116 Rye House Plot 116 St James’s Park (London) 50 St James’s Square (London) 68 St Paul’s Cathedral (London) 13, 25, 69–70, 89 and Great Fire 53, 54, 55 Samwell, William 82–3, 92–3 sanitation 242 Scarborough, Richard Lumley, Earl of 232–3, 237 Schlarman, Julie 246 Second Anglo-Dutch War 50 Sedgemoor, Battle of (1685) 108 Selby, Mrs 146, 152, 154, 167, 213 and Hôtel Castile 159, 160, 161–2, 163–4, 165 and trial 192–5, 199–200, 204, 205 Shaftesbury, Earl of 77, 101, 109–10 Shakespeare, William 70 Shepherd, Edward 245 Sherrington, Grace 63 Shireburn, Sir Richard 102 Showalter, Elaine 137 Shrewsbury, Earl of 124 Simmons, John 244–5 slavery 108, 188–9, 238 Sloane, Daniel 191, 194, 203 Smith, Judge John 212 South Sea Bubble 238, 240 Spain 150–1 Spanish Succession, War of the 178, 231 Sprat, Thomas 212 squares 232–3, 240–7 Stanley, Rowland 103 Stawker, Robert 33, 34 Strype, John 116–17, 123–4 Stukeley, Dr William 136 suburbs 38, 56, 68, 69, 119 Summerson, Sir John 245 Sydenham, Thomas 37 syndicates 121–3 Taswell, William 50, 52–3, 54 Tate, Francis 141 Temple, Sir William 71, 75 Test Act (1678) 101, 103 Thomas, Cadogan 122, 123 Thornton, Alice 127–8 Tonkin Liu 257 trade 13–14, 16, 100, 113 Tregonwell, John (stepfather) 47–8, 49–50, 64, 74, 78–9, 85 Tregonwell, Mary (mother) 6, 43–5, 47–8, 169, 180, 222 and daughter 144, 145, 166–7, 168, 218–19 and death 236 and Manor of Ebury 123–4 and motherhood 59–61, 63, 64, 70, 71 Trelawney, Charles 124 Trial of the Seven Bishops, The (Herbert) 187, 188 true mile 18 Turnour, Mr 139, 146, 147, 191–2 Turnour, Mrs 129–30, 139, 145, 147, 151 and trial 174, 189 urban planning 57 usury 15–16 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 231 Versailles 82, 149, 150, 151 Vincent, Thomas 37, 52, 53 Vitruvius Britannicus (Campbell) 234 Ward, Sir Edward 212 Ward, Ned 65–6 Watts, William 35 wealth 252 Weights and Measures Act (1593) 18 West End (London) 115–16 Westminster, Dukes of 10, 249 Westminster Abbey (London) 22, 32 Westminster Diocese 170–1 Westminster Hall (London) 5–6, 184–8 Whigs 101, 105, 109–10, 124 widows 43, 44–5 William II of England, King 185–6 William III of England, King 111, 131, 150, 153, 178 Willis, Thomas 136–7 women 43, 44–7, 88–9 and childbirth 125–9 and education 63–4 and Grosvenor Estate 246–7 and marriage 71, 90–1 and mental health 137–8, 217 and religion 106–7 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 19–20 Wood, Ralph 19 Worcester, Battle of (1651) 32 Wren, Christopher 56, 57, 68, 69–70 Wright, Nathan 173 Wyndham, Jane 229 Wyndham, William 229, 230 Wynne Rees, Peter 254 York, James, Duke of, see James II of England, King York, Robert 191 A Oneworld Book First published by Oneworld Publications in 2021 This ebook published 2021 Copyright © Leo Hollis 2021 The moral right of Leo Hollis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78607-995-4 eISBN 978-1-78607-996-1 Illustration credits: All images author’s own or Creative Commons unless otherwise stated.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

As Packer himself put it in a PBS interview, the “unwinding” is that of America’s “contract that said if you work hard, if you essentially are a good citizen, there will be a place for you, not only an economic place, you will have a secure life, your kids will have a chance to have a better life, but you will sort of be recognized as part of the national fabric.”14 Despite earning seemingly good paychecks and owning their homes in pleasant suburbs, much of America is victim to “median wage stagnation”: for the past 40 years, everyone but the top 10% has experienced flat annual incomes, with paychecks no better in real dollars than they were in 1973. As Luce writes, “That means that most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation.”15 Even more alarming, Paris School economist Thomas Piketty argues in his runaway 2014 hit Capital in the Twenty-first Century that the period of relative equality between World War I and the early 1970s was an anomalous period of capitalism. Using detailed data from countries around the world across a 200-year period, Piketty makes a compelling case that for the years between 1914 and 1973, a series of government policies and global crises flattened out the gap between rich and poor and prevented the rich from getting greater returns on capital.

Retrieved from http://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/. Pezinni, M. (2012). An emerging middle class. OECD Observer. http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3681/An_emerging_middle_class.html. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piore, M. J., & Sabel, C. F. (1984). The second industrial divide: Possibilities for prosperity. New York: Basic Books. Postrel, V. (2008, July 8). Inconspicuous consumption: A new theory of the leisure class. Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/inconspicuous-consumption/306845/2/.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Various “social indicators” have been constructed since the 1960s, such as “quality of life,” to challenge the dominance of economic measures in public policy debate. The “radical statistics” movement was founded in the 1970s, to channel statistical expertise toward specifically progressive political goals. The French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated the unrivaled power of statistics to draw public attention to a moral concern, with his best-selling 2015 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, consisting largely of statistical analysis of inequality. And activist movements dedicated to counting things that are otherwise never counted—such as missing migrants around the world or the civilian death toll in Iraq—offer hard facts where there is otherwise just general moral concern.

A/B testing, 199 Acorn, 152 ad hominem attacks, 27, 124, 195 addiction, 83, 105, 116–17, 172–3, 186–7, 225 advertising, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 178, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 aerial bombing, 19, 125, 135, 138, 143, 180 Affectiva, 188 affective computing, 12, 141, 188 Agent Orange, 205 Alabama, United States, 154 alcoholism, 100, 115, 117 algorithms, 150, 169, 185, 188–9 Alsace, 90 alt-right, 15, 22, 50, 131, 174, 196, 209 alternative facts, 3 Amazon, 150, 173, 175, 185, 186, 187, 192, 199, 201 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 24 American Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 American Pain Relief Society, 107 anaesthetics, 104, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 87 Anthropocene, 206, 213, 215, 216 antibiotics, 205 antitrust laws, 220 Appalachia, 90, 100 Apple, 156, 185, 187 Arab Spring (2011), 123 Arendt, Hannah, xiv, 19, 23, 26, 53, 219 Aristotle, 35, 95–6 arrogance, 39, 47, 50 artificial intelligence (AI), 12–13, 140–41, 183, 216–17 artificial video footage, 15 Ashby, Ross, 181 asymmetrical war, 146 atheism, 34, 35, 209 attention economy, 21 austerity, 100–101, 225 Australia, 103 Australian, 192 Austria, 14, 60, 128, 153–75 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 153–4, 159 authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 108, 114, 118–19, 211–12 autocracy, 16, 20, 202 Babis, Andrej, 26 Bacon, Francis, 34, 35, 95, 97 Bank of England, 32, 33, 55, 64 Banks, Aaron, 26 Bannon, Steve, 21, 22, 60–61 Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Beck Depression Inventory, 107 Berlusconi, Silvio, 202 Bernays, Edward, 14–15, 16, 143 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud), 110 Bezos, Jeff, 150, 173 Big Data, 185–93, 198–201 Big Government, 65 Big Science, 180 Bilbao, Spain, 84 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 127 Birmingham, West Midlands, 85 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 Blackpool, Lancashire, 100 blind peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 blue sky research, 133 body politic, 92–119 Bologna, Italy, 96 bookkeeping, 47, 49, 54 Booth, Charles, 74 Boston, Massachusetts, 48 Boyle, Robert, 48–50, 51–2 BP oil spill (2010), 89 brainwashing, 178 Breitbart, 22, 174 Brexit (2016–), xiv, 23 and education, 85 and elites, 33, 50, 61 and inequality, 61, 77 and NHS, 93 and opinion polling, 80–81 as self-harm, 44, 146 and statistics, 61 Unite for Europe march, 23 Vote Leave, 50, 93 British Futures, 65 Brooks, Rosa, 216 bullying, 113 Bureau of Labor, 74 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 77 Bush, George Walker, 77, 136 cadaverous research, 96, 98 call-out culture, 195 Calvinism, 35 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 85 University, 84, 151 Cambridge Analytica, 175, 191, 196, 199 Cameron, David, 33, 73, 100 cancer, 105 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 74 capital punishment, 92, 118 car accidents, 112–13 cargo-cult science, 50 Carney, Mark, 33 cartography, 59 Case, Anne, 99–100, 102, 115 Catholicism, 34 Cato Institute, 158 Cavendish, William, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, 34 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Center for Policy Studies, 164 chappe system, 129, 182 Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 34, 68, 73 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Chelsea, London, 100 Chevillet, Mark, 176 Chicago School, 160 China, 13, 15, 103, 145, 207 chloroform, 104 cholera, 130 Chongqing, China, 13 chronic pain, 102, 105, 106, 109 see also pain Churchill, Winston, 138 citizen science, 215, 216 civil rights movements, 21, 194 civilians, 43, 143, 204 von Clausewitz, Carl, 128–35, 141–7, 152 and defeat, 144–6 and emotion, 141–6, 197 and great leaders, 146–7, 156, 180–81 and intelligence, 134–5, 180–81 and Napoleon, 128–30, 133, 146–7 and soldiers, number of, 133–4 war, definition of, 130, 141, 193 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 Climate Mobilization, 213–14 climate-gate (2009), 195 Clinton, Hillary, 27, 63, 77, 99, 197, 214 Clinton, William “Bill,” 77 coal mining, 90 cognitive behavioral therapy, 107 Cold War, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 180, 182–4, 185, 223 and disruption, 204–5 intelligence agencies, 183 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 nuclear weapons, 135, 180 scenting, 135–6 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 space race, 137 and telepathy, 177–8 colonialism, 59–61, 224 commercial intelligence, 152 conscription, 127 Conservative Party, 80, 154, 160, 163, 166 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 160 consumer culture, 90, 104, 139 contraceptive pill, 94 Conway, Kellyanne, 3, 5 coordination, 148 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 197, 221 corporal punishment, 92 creative class, 84, 151 Cromwell, Oliver, 57, 59, 73 crop failures, 56 Crutzen, Paul, 206 culture war, xvii Cummings, Dominic, 50 currency, 166, 168 cutting, 115 cyber warfare, xii, 42, 43, 123, 126, 200, 212 Czech Republic, 103 Daily Mail, ix Damasio, Antonio, 208 Darwin, Charles, 8, 140, 142, 157, 171, 174, 179 Dash, 187 data, 49, 55, 57–8, 135, 151, 185–93, 198–201 Dawkins, Richard, 207, 209 death, 37, 44–5, 66–7, 91–101 and authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 211, 224 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 and Descartes, 37, 91 and Hobbes, 44–5, 67, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 suicide, 100, 101, 115 and Thiel, 149, 151 death penalty, 92, 118 Deaton, Angus, 99–100, 102, 115 DeepMind, 218 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Delingpole, James, 22 demagogues, 11, 145, 146, 207 Democratic Party, 77, 79, 85 Denmark, 34, 151 depression, 103, 107 derivatives, 168, 172 Descartes, René, xiii, 36–9, 57, 147 and body, 36–8, 91, 96–7, 98, 104 and doubt, 36–8, 39, 46, 52 and dualism, 36–8, 39, 86, 94, 131, 139–40, 179, 186, 223 and nature, 37, 38, 86, 203 and pain, 104, 105 Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 208 Devonshire, Earl of, see Cavendish, William digital divide, 184 direct democracy, 202 disempowerment, 20, 22, 106, 113–19 disruption, 18, 20, 146, 147, 151, 171, 175 dog whistle politics, 200 Donors Trust, 165 Dorling, Danny, 100 Downs Survey (1655), 57, 59, 73 doxing, 195 drone warfare, 43, 194 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 74 Dugan, Regina, 176–7 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 e-democracy, 184 Echo, 187 ecocide, 205 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Mises), 154, 166 economics, 59, 153–75 Economist, 85, 99 education, 85, 90–91 electroencephalography (EEG), 140 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 embodied knowledge, 162 emotion and advertising, 14 artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and crowd-based politics, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 21, 23–7 Darwin’s analysis, 8, 140 Descartes on, 94, 131 and experts, 53, 60, 64, 66, 90 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Hobbes on, 39, 41 James’ analysis, 140 and markets, 168, 175 moral, 21 and nationalism, 71, 210 pain, 102–19 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 and war, 124–6, 142 empathy, 5, 12, 65, 102, 104, 109, 112, 118, 177, 179, 197 engagement, 7, 219 England Bank of England founded (1694), 55 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 civil servants, 54 Civil War (1642–51), 33–4, 45, 53 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 hospitals, 57 Irish War (1649–53), 59 national debt, 55 Parliament, 54, 55 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 208, 218 tax collection, 54 Treasury, 54 see also United Kingdom English Defense League, ix entrepreneurship, 149, 156, 162 environment, 21, 26, 50, 61, 86, 165, 204–7, 213–16 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 flying insects, decline of, 205, 215 Environmental Protection Agency, 23 ether, 104 European Commission, 60 European Space Agency, 175 European Union (EU), xiv, 22, 60 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit and elites, 60, 145, 202 euro, 60, 78 Greek bailout (2015), 31 immigration, 60 and nationalism, 60, 145, 146 quantitative easing, 31 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 Exeter, Devon, 85 experts and crowd-based politics, 5, 6, 23, 25, 27 Hayek on, 162–4, 170 and representative democracy, 7 and statistics, 62–91 and technocracy, 53–61, 78, 87, 89, 90 trust in, 25–33, 63–4, 66, 74–5, 77–9, 170, 202 violence of, 59–61 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, The (Darwin), 8, 140 Exxon, 165 Facebook, xvi, 15, 201 advertising, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 data mining, 49, 185, 189, 190, 191, 192, 198, 219 and dog whistle politics, 200 and emotional artificial intelligence, 140 as engagement machine, 219 and fake news, 199 and haptics, 176, 182 and oligarchy, 174 and psychological profiling, 124 and Russia, 199 and sentiment analysis, 188 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186 and Thiel, 149, 150 and unity, 197–8 weaponization of, 18 facial recognition, 13, 188–9 failed states, 42 fake news, 8, 15, 199 Farage, Nigel, 65 fascism, 154, 203, 209 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 feeling, definition of, xii feminism, 66, 194 Fifth Amendment, 44 fight or flight, 111, 114 Financial Times, 15 first past the post, 13 First World War, see World War I Fitbit, 187 fixed currency exchange rates, 166 Florida, Richard, 84 flu, 67, 191 flying insects, 205, 215 France censuses, 66, 73 conscription introduced (1793), 127 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92 Hobbes in (1640–51), 33–4, 41–2 Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 life expectancy, 101 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), see Napoleonic Wars Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Prussian War (1870–71), 8, 142 Revolution (1789–99), xv, 71, 126–9, 141, 142, 144, 204 statistics agency established (1800), 72 unemployment, 83 Franklin, Benjamin, 66 free markets, 26, 79, 84, 88, 154–75 free speech, 22, 113, 194, 208, 209, 224 free will, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 14, 44, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 114, 139 Friedman, Milton, 160, 163, 166 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 full spectrum warfare, 43 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 140 futurists, 168 Galen, 95–6 Galilei, Galileo, 35 gambling, 116–17 game theory, 132 gaming, 193–4 Gandhi, Mohandas, 224 gate control theory, 106 Gates, Sylvester James “Jim,” 24 Gavotti, Giulio, 143 geek humor, 193 Gehry, Frank, 84 Geller, Uri, 178 geometry, 35, 49, 57, 59, 203 Gerasimov, Valery, 123, 125, 126, 130 Germany, 34, 72, 137, 205, 215 gig economy, 173 global financial crisis (2007–9), 5, 29–32, 53, 218 austerity, 100–101 bailouts, 29–32, 40, 42 and gross domestic product (GDP), 76 as “heart attack,” 57 and Obama administration, 158 and quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 and securitization of loans, 218–19 and statistics, 53, 65 and suicide, 101 and unemployment, 82 globalization, 21, 78, 84, 145, 146 Gonzales, Alberto, 136 Google, xvi, 174, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192 DeepMind, 218 Maps, 182 Transparency Project, 198 Government Accountability Office, 29 Graunt, John, 67–9, 73, 75, 79–80, 81, 85, 89, 127, 167 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 great leaders, 146–8 Great Recession (2007–13), 76, 82, 101 Greece, 5, 31, 101 Greenpeace, 10 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 Grillo, Beppe, 26 gross domestic product (GDP), 62, 65, 71, 75–9, 82, 87, 138 guerrillas, 128, 146, 194, 196 Haldane, Andrew, 32 haptics, 176, 182 Harvey, William, 34, 35, 38, 57, 96, 97 hate speech, 42 von Hayek, Friedrich, 159–73, 219 health, 92–119, 224 hedge funds, 173, 174 hedonism, 70, 224 helicopter money, 222 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 heroin, 105, 117 heroism and disruption, 18, 146 and genius, 218 and Hobbes, 44, 151 and Napoleonic Wars, 87, 127, 142 and nationalism, 87, 119, 210 and pain, 212 and protection, 202–3 and technocracy, 101 and technology, 127 Heyer, Heather, 20 Hiroshima atomic bombing (1945), 206 Hobbes, Thomas, xiii, xvi, 33–6, 38–45, 67, 147 on arrogance, 39, 47, 50, 125 and body, 96, 98–9 and Boyle, 49, 50, 51 on civil society, 42, 119 and death, 44–5, 67, 69–70, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 on equality, 89 on fear, 40–45, 52, 67, 125 France, exile in (1640–51), 33–4, 41 on geometry, 35, 38, 49, 56, 57 and heroism, 44, 151 on language, 38–9 natural philosophy, 35–6 and nature, 38, 50 and Petty, 56, 57, 58 on promises, 39–42, 45, 148, 217–18 and Royal Society, 49, 50, 51 on senses, 38, 49, 147 and sovereign/state, 40–45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 60, 67, 73, 126, 166, 217, 220 on “state of nature,” 40, 133, 206, 217 war and peace, separation of, 40–45, 54, 60, 73, 125–6, 131, 201, 212 Hobsbawm, Eric, 87, 147 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 221 holistic remedies, 95, 97 Holland, see under Netherlands homeopathy, 95 Homer, xiv Hungary, 20, 60, 87, 146 hysteria, 139 IBM, 179 identity politics, 208, 209 Iglesias Turrión, Pablo, 5 imagined communities, 87 immigration, 60, 63, 65, 79, 87, 145 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224 in-jokes, 193 individual autonomy, 16 Industrial Revolution, 133, 206 inequality, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 83, 85, 88–90 inflation, 62, 76, 78, 82 infographics, 75 information theory, 147 information war, 43, 196 insurance, 59 intellectual property, 150 intelligence, 132–9 intensity, 79–83 International Association for the Study of Pain, 106 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 64, 78 Internet, 184–201, 219 IP addresses, 193 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 Ireland, 57, 73 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 43 “Is This How You Feel?


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Andy Stern and Lee Kravitz, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016); Alyssa Battistoni, “The False Promise of Universal Basic Income,” Dissent, Spring 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-universal-basic-income-andy-stern-ruger-bregman; Rana Foroohar, “We’re About to Live in a World of Economic Hunger Games,” Time, July 19, 2016, http://time.com/4412410/andy-stern-universal-basic-income/; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, reprint (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). [back] 15. “Common Ground for Independent Workers,” From the WTF? Economy to the Next Economy (blog), November 10, 2015. https://wtfeconomy.com/common-ground-for-independent-workers-83f3fbcf548f#.ey89fvtnn.

In A Hidden Workforce, 44–65. Women in Society series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19854-2_4. Perez, Tom E., and Penny Pritzker. “A Joint Imperative to Strengthen Skills.” The Commerce Blog. U.S. Department of Commerce website, September 11, 2013. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Poster, Winifred R. “Hidden Sides of the Credit Economy: Emotions, Outsourcing, and Indian Call Centers.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 54, no. 3 (June 2013): 205–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715213501823.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The 2007 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, served as an inflection point that recast top earners as villains who crashed the economy and made out like bandits thanks to the bailouts—a claim repeated not just in the fliers of local socialist clubs, but in mainstream politics. The arguments formulated in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a seminal manifesto by the French economist Thomas Piketty (Belknap Press, 2014), have convinced millions that greatly increased taxes on top earners aren’t just proper, but absolutely necessary to remedy the growing inequality in the West. This renewed antipathy toward the affluent made it easier for regulators to confiscate foreign deposits during the Cypriot debt crisis, and to put wealth taxes back on the agenda in the United States.

., 80–81 bonds, 77–78 books, 191–192 bows, 208–209 brain in a jar, 42 break-ins, 111–112, 201 bromadiolone, 177 bromethalin, 177 Brooks, Max, 30 buckshot, 217 bug-out situations, 165–171 bulletproof vests, 129–130 bullets, 217 Bureau of Justice Statistics, 13 burglaries, 13, 111–112, 201 Butte fire complex, 18 BZK (benzalkonium chloride) wipes, 149 C caffeine pills, 150 California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), 111 California Gun Laws (Michel and Cubeiro), 196 calorie needs, 138–139 calorie restriction, 117–118 cameras, 201 camping, 167–168, 171 Canberra MRAD113, 179 candles, 154 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 72 car accidents, 96–98 car break-ins, 111 car insurance, 51–52 car repairs, 163–164 career planning, 91–93 cash, 49–55, 75–76 Cato Institute, 23 CB (citizens band) radios, 186 CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), 111 CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 13 cell phones, 155–156, 181 cetirizine, 150 chains, 163 chainsaws, 162 Champion generators, 156 Charlie’s Soap, 149 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 20, 31 Chicago Sunday Tribune, 37–38 chlorination, 134 choking, 104 cholecalciferol, 177 Christmas Island, 33 citizens band (CB) radios, 186 class tensions, 72–73 clathrate gun hypothesis, 33 cleaning, 148 climate change, 18, 33–34 clip-on pulse oximeters, 150 CME (coronal mass ejection), 35–36 cocaine, 100 coincidence of wants, 58 coins, 59–63 collectibles, 86–87, 201 Colorado floods, 11 come-alongs, 162–163 commodity futures options, 71, 81–83 commodity money, 60 communications, 181–190 community property, 125 compensation, 50 confiscatory taxes, 72–73 constitutional carry, 206 consumer debt, 53–54 consumer lending, 63 consumer prices, 70–71 contraceptives, 150 convictions, 6–8 cooking, 158 CoreLogic, 110 coronal mass ejection (CME), 35–36 cosmic threats, 35–36 cost of living, 11 cough, 150 court fights, 69–70 coveralls, 175 COVID-19 pandemic, 25–26, 174–176 CPR procedure, 151–152 credit cards, 53–54 Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, 34 criminal victimization, 13 crisis indicators, 124 critical decision points, 124 crony beliefs, 6–8 crossbows, 208–209 cryptocurrencies, 66–68, 84, 87 Cubeiro, Matthew D., 196 currencies, history of, 58–68 customer data, 110 cuts, 150 Cypriot debt crisis, 69, 73 D data brokers, 110 Datrex, 143 d-CON, 177 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), 176 De Waal, Frans, 20 death causes of, 13 planning, 14–15, 124–125 debt, 10–11, 50, 53–54, 59–60 debt crisis, 22 Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber), 59 de-escalation skills, 13 defensive driving, 96–98 dehydration, 134 DeleteMe Help Center, 110 deltamethrin, 176 dental care, 151 dental picks, 151 developing countries, 33–34 dextromethorphan, 150 diarrhea, 150 dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), 176 Didion, Joan, 122 dietary supplements, 180 diets, 115–118 digital communications, 188–189 Digital Mobile Radio (DMR), 188 diindolylmethane (DIM), 179 dinosaurs, 34 diseases, 32–33, 173–177 dishwashing, 148 Diversey Oxivir Five 16, 176 Diversey PERdiem, 148 diversified portfolios, 88–-90 divorce, 69–70 documents, 166–167 Dogecoin, 68 dogs as burglary deterrent, 112 domestic terrorism, 26–27 driving habits, 96–98 drowning, 104 drugs, 99–101, 150 D-STAR, 188 “duck and cover,” 39 DuPont Tychem coveralls, 175 dust storms, 18 duty to retreat, 205 Dynarex, 149 E earthquake probabilities, 19 Ebola, 26, 32 economic crises, 22–24 economic hardships, 10–11 economic persecution, 72 ecosystem collapse, 34 Ehrlich, Paul R., 7–8, 30 elastic bandages, 150 electricity, 36, 152–159 electrolyte imbalance, 150 emergency ration bars, 143 emergency repairs, 162–163 EMP (electromagnetic pulse), 40–41 employment, 91–93 encephalitis lethargica, 25 Energizer Ultimate batteries, 155 entertainment, 191–192 epinephrine inhalers, 150 Epsilon Data Management, 110 Equifax, 110 equities, 79–81 escheatment, 77 eugenics, 37 eugenol, 151 evacuation, 165–171 exercise, 117–118 expenses, 51–52 Experian, 110 Expose, 176 extinction, 34 extraterrestrial life, 43 extreme weather, 18, 156–158, 168 F Facebook, 109, 110, 155 fall injuries, 98–99 false vacuum decay, 35 Family Radio Service (FRS), 186–187 farming, 137 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 19, 132 fever, 150 fiat money, 64–65 fiction, 29–30 fighting, 113, 206 financial problems, 10–11 firearms, 196–197, 211–219 fires Butte fire complex, 18 house fires, 11, 18, 103–104 wildfires, 18, 44, 124 firewood, 158, 170 first aid, 149–152 fitness, 115–118 fixed-blade knives, 170 flashlights, 154–155 flat tires, 163 floods, 19, 147–148 floss, 151 flu, 25 fluticasone propionate, 150 FMJ (full metal jacket) bullets, 217 food-borne illness, 141–142 food preparation, 158 food security, 137–144 foraging, 168–169 foreclosures, 10–11 foreign currencies, 78–79 Forgey, William W., 152 Forster, E.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

The phrase ‘cash nexus’ comes from Thomas Carlyle, who used it in Chartism, 1840, and Past and Present, 1843. 196 See Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire, Fritz Stern, Vintage Books, 1979. 197 The British Tax System, Oxford University Press, 1978. 198 Remarks from Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v. Inland Revenue, 1929. 199 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. 200 I owe this insight to Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research. 201 Penguin Classics, 2009, translation by David Constantine. All subsequent quotes from Goethe are from the same source. 202 Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, Yale University Press, 1986. 203 ‘Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei’ in Marx-Engels Werke, Vol. 4, Berlin, 1969.

On this view, politicians and bureaucrats were ‘personal utility maximisers’ who needed to be curbed. Such thinking played a part in the Californian tax revolt in the late 1970s that led to the famous Proposition 13 referendum, which put a curb on property taxes. Now a new challenge has arisen from the left of centre. The French economist Thomas Piketty has advanced a novel theory of capitalist accumulation, backed by a mass of data on income and wealth over three centuries, which asserts that the ratio of capital to income will rise without limit so long as the rate of return on capital is significantly higher than the rate of growth of the economy.


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Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Lastly, we appreciate the care and support of our families and friends throughout the writing of this book. We couldn’t have done any of this without them. Notes and sources Notes 1Frugal innovation: a disruptive growth strategy 1Rosemain, M., “Renault 2013 Sales Gain on Surging Demand for Dacia Cars”, Bloomberg, January 21st 2014. 2Piketty, T. and Goldhammer, A., Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press, 2013. 3Cone, C., global chair, Edelman Business + Social Purpose, interview with Navi Radjou, November 26th 2012. 4European Commission, “Environment: New rules on e-waste to boost resource efficiency”, press release, August 13th 2012. 5Mainwaring, S., We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 6Hatch, M., The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers, McGraw-Hill, 2013. 7Rifkin, J., The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience, J.P.

In Japan, where the poverty rate shot up to a record 16% in 2012, consumers are shifting from premium brands to inexpensive private-label products in retail stores. Rather than eating out, more Japanese workers now pack their own lunch, earning themselves the nickname bento-danshi or “box-lunch man”. These changes are here to stay. Thomas Piketty, a French economist, predicts that income inequality in developed economies will widen in the coming decades, as long-term annual growth rates remain stuck below 2%.2 With inflation outpacing their incomes since 2007, 76% of US adults now believe their children will be financially worse off than them in the future.


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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, 27–41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2013. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pigou, A.C. 1920. The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pitts, Jennifer. 2010. “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism.” Annual Review of Political Science 13: 211–35. Piven, Frances Fox. 1990. “Ideology and the State: Women, Power, and the Welfare State.”

The relations between bankers and governments lead in the short term to reinvestment, in the medium term to the concentration of wealth and returns in the financial sector, and in the long term to the rise and fall of commercial power centered on a city, state, or international regime.82 In that arc, some people benefit a great deal, while others merely get by—or worse. Thomas Piketty’s ideas on how investment return has outstripped GDP growth in the Global North have generated much interest recently, but they belong to an older class of insights about how finance relates to the rest of capitalism’s ecology under successive state regimes.83 Capitalism is not just the sum of “economic” transactions that turn money into commodities and back again; it’s inseparable from the modern state and from governments’ dominions and transformations of natures, human and otherwise.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

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

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

As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially.7 That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too. Even experts repeat the lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.”8 But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”

N. 1994. Bourgeois virtue. American Scholar, 63, 177–91. McCloskey, D. N. 1998. Bourgeois virtue and the history of P and S. Journal of Economic History, 58, 297–317. McCloskey, D. N. 2014. Measured, unmeasured, mismeasured, and unjustified pessimism: A review essay of Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the twenty-first century.” Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics, 7, 73–115. McCullough, M. E. 2008. Beyond revenge: The evolution of the forgiveness instinct. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. McEvedy, C., & Jones, R. 1978. Atlas of world population history. London: Allen Lane. McGinn, C. 1993.

New York: Encounter Books. Lukianoff, G. 2014. Freedom from speech. New York: Encounter Books. Luria, A. R. 1976. Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutz, W., Butz, W. P., & Samir, K. C., eds. 2014. World population and human capital in the twenty-first century. New York: Oxford University Press. Lutz, W., Cuaresma, J. C., & Abbasi-Shavazi, M. J. 2010. Demography, education, and democracy: Global trends and the case of Iran. Population Development Review, 36, 253–81. Lynn, R., Harvey, J., & Nyborg, H. 2009. Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations.


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Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

.* Yet another problem, of course, is paying for these equity endowments. My guess is that redistribution of vast amounts of capital would prove even more politically toxic than would be the case for income. One possible mechanism for prying wealth away from its current owners was proposed by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century: a global tax on wealth. Such a tax would require cooperation between nations in order to avoid massive capital flight into lower-tax jurisdictions. Nearly everyone (including Piketty) agrees that this would be impractical for the foreseeable future. Piketty’s book, which was deluged with attention in 2014, argues that future decades are likely to be marked by an inevitable progression toward increased inequality of both income and wealth.

., 116 business interest lobbying, economic policy and, 57–58 “Busy child scenario,” (Barrat) 238–239 Calico, 236 California Institute of Technology, 133 Canada, 41, 58, 167n, 251 “Can Nanotechnology Create Utopia?” (Kaku), 247n capital individual endowments of, 273–275 taxes on, 277–278 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 275 capitalism, drive to automate and, 255–256 Car and Driver (magazine), 185 carbon-based materials, 70, 70n carbon nanotubes, 70n, 245 carbon tax, 272 Carr, Nicholas, 72, 254, 256, 257 cars, autonomous, xiii, 94, 176, 181–191 cause, big data and correlation vs., 102 CBE.


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Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Brian Hindo and Moira Herbst, “Personal Best Timeline, 1986: ‘Greed Is Good,’” BusinessWeek, http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/06/08/personalbest_timeline/source/7.htm. 31. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball, p. 320. 32. Bruck, The Predators’ Ball. 33. FDIC v. Milken, pp. 70–71. 34. Alison Leigh Cowan, “F.D.I.C. Backs Deal by Milken,” New York Times, March 10, 1992. 35. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 291, fig. 8.5, and p. 292, fig. 8.6. 36. Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, “The Takeover Wave of the 1980s,” Science 249, no. 4970 (1990): 745–49. Chapter Eleven: The Resistance and Its Heroes 1. For 2013. World Bank, “Life Expectancy at Birth, Male (Years)” and “Life Expectancy at Birth, Female (Years),” accessed March 29, 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN/countries and http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN/countries. 2.

Last accessed April 30, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/washington/18cnd-medicare.html?_r=0. “The Personal Reminiscences of Albert Lasker.” American Heritage 6, no. 1 (December 1954). Accessed May 21, 2015. http://www.americanheritage.com/content/personal-reminiscences-albert-lasker. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pizzo, Stephen, Mary Fricker, and Paul Muolo. Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. “Poor Beer vs. Pure Beer.” Advertisement reproduced in Current Advertising 12, no. 2 (August 1902): 31.


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The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

The show was an ambitious hour-long special in front of a studio audience during which various worthies would discuss why inequality in the UK mattered. In early discussions with the program’s production team, I pointed them toward the World Inequality Database, a resource that was originally put together by the economists Tony Atkinson and Thomas Piketty. Piketty, of course, was the superstar author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century; Sir Tony, who died in 2017, was one of his academic mentors. The two of them favored stiff redistributive taxes and wide-ranging government intervention in the economy. Like many economists, I’m quite wary of that sort of policy, but I recommended their database anyway.

See also choice research Bell, Vanessa, 256–57 Bem, Daryl, 111, 113–14, 119–23 benefits of statistical analysis, 9 Berti, Gasparo, 172 Bevacqua, Graciela, 194–95, 212 Beyth, Ruth, 248–49, 251, 254 biases biased assimilation, 35–36 confirmation bias, 33 current offense bias, 169 and motivated reasoning, 27–29, 32–36, 38, 131, 268 negativity bias, 95–99 non-response bias, 146–47 novelty bias, 95–99, 113, 114, 122 optimism bias, 96 and power of doubt, 13 publication bias, 113–16, 118–23, 125–27 racial bias in criminal justice, 176–79 in sampling, 135–38, 142–45, 147–51 selection bias, 2, 245–46 survivorship bias, 109–10, 112–13, 122–26 systematic bias in algorithms, 166 and value of statistical knowledge, 17 big data and certification of researchers, 182 and criminal justice, 176–79 and excessive credulity in data, 164–67 and found data, 149, 151, 152, 154 and Google Flu Trends, 153–57 historical perspective on, 171–75 influence in today’s world, 183 limitations and misuse of, 159–63, 170–71 proliferation of, 157–59 and teacher evaluations, 163–64 See also algorithms Big Data (Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger), 148, 157 “Big Duck” graphics, 216–18, 217, 229–30 Big Issue, The, 226n “Billion Pound-O-Gram, The” (infographic), 223 billionaires, 78–80 binge drinking, 75 Bird, Sheila, 68 bird’s-eye view of data, 61–64, 203, 221, 265 BizzFit, 108 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 101 Blastland, Michael, 10, 68, 93 blogs, 76 Bloomberg TV, 89 body count metrics, 58 Boijmans Museum, 20 Boon, Gerard, 19, 30–31 border wall debate, 93–94 Borges, Jorge Luis, 118 Boyle, Robert, 172–75 brain physiology, 270 Bredius, Abraham, 19–23, 29–32, 35, 43–45, 78, 242, 262 Bretton Woods conference, 262 Brettschneider, Brian, 224 Brexit, 71, 277 British Army, 213–14, 220–21 British Election Study, 145–46 British Medical Journal, 6, 67 British Treasury, 256–57 Broward County Sheriff’s Office, 176 Brown, Derren, 115 Brown, Zack “Danger,” 108 Buchanan, Larry, 229, 232 budget deficits, 188, 192–93, 195 Buffett, Warren, 259 Bureau of Economic Analysis, 190, 205 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 190, 205, 212 business-cycle forecasting, 258–59 business writing, 123–24 Butoyi, Imelda, 62–63 Cairo, Alberto, 227 Cambridge Analytica, 158 Cambridge University, 162. See also King’s College, Cambridge Cameron, David, 146 camouflage, 218–19 campaign finance, 274–75 Campbell, Donald T., 59 Campbell Collaboration, 134 Canada, 196–97, 209, 211 cancer diagnoses and research, 3–6, 24, 97, 241, 248, 279 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 83 capital punishment, 35–36 Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 30–31 carbon emissions, 272–73 Carter, Jimmy, 188 casualty statistics, 58, 231–37, 234, 235 categorization of statistical data, 68–70 causation vs. correlation, 15, 64, 156–57, 275 Census Bureau, 190, 205 census data, 147–48, 196–99, 205–6 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 153, 154, 155 Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, 128 certification of researchers, 182 Chalmers, Iain, 133 Chambers, David, 259 charts, 215–16, 218n, 224, 227–29, 232–36, 232, 234, 235.


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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

While a higher score over time tells us that inequality has risen, it's difficult to understand what that means in practice. In the US, for example, the Gini coefficient rose from its low point of 0.43 in 1971 to a post-war high of 0.58 today.40 It is an increase, of course, but precisely how good or bad is either number? Thomas Piketty, a French economist, laid out the problem in a better way. In his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,41 he revealed how the share of income that went to the top 10 percent of earners evolved over time. In 1971, his data showed the top 10 percent earners took home one third of national income. In the early 2010s, they took half of income.

See West Germany BYD (“Build Your Dreams”), 60 ByteDance, 61 C Caballero, Sandra, 163–164 California efforts to reduce emissions in, 167 Gig Workers Rising in, 241 Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 rejected Proposition (2020) designating gig workers as employees, 187–188 Rideshare Drivers United advocacy group, 187 See also United States Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 38 Capitalism the golden age (1945–early 1970s) of, 8 history of medieval, 131 ideological battle between communism and, 7 Marc Benioff's speech (2020) on, 164, 211 productivity growth during golden age of, 33–34 shareholder, 171–172, 173 state, 171, 172–173, 193 See also Stakeholder capitalism Capitalism, Alone (Milanovic), 173 Carbon footprints finding hope for lowering, 159 no magic formula for lowering, 157 Paris Agreement aim to lower, 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 urbanization and increased, 159–160 Carnegie, Andrew, 132 Carnegie Hall, 132 Carney, Mark, 162 Carroll, Aaron E., 231 Case, Anne, 42 Castro, Fidel, 76 Central European University, 113 Central European Warsaw Pact, 77 CEO Climate Leaders, 167 Checks and balances, 185, 193–198 Chevron, 134 Chiang Kai-shek, 56 Chicago School, 14, 136, 140 Chile copper exports, 64 China (People's Republic) age/gender representation political issues in, 188 becoming an upper-middle-income country, 36 Chinese Dream in, 184 city of Shenzhen of, 55, 57–61 continued trust in public institutions in, 196 demographic changes in, 161 one-child policy of, 161 People's Republic established by CPC, 56–57 Sham Chun River in, 55, 61 World Inequality Lab (WIL) on rising inequality in, 72–73fig World Trade Organization membership of, 18 WTO membership of, 18, 59, 64 ZF Drivetech Co.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

While a higher score over time tells us that inequality has risen, it's difficult to understand what that means in practice. In the US, for example, the Gini coefficient rose from its low point of 0.43 in 1971 to a post-war high of 0.58 today.40 It is an increase, of course, but precisely how good or bad is either number? Thomas Piketty, a French economist, laid out the problem in a better way. In his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,41 he revealed how the share of income that went to the top 10 percent of earners evolved over time. In 1971, his data showed the top 10 percent earners took home one third of national income. In the early 2010s, they took half of income.

See West Germany BYD (“Build Your Dreams”), 60 ByteDance, 61 C Caballero, Sandra, 163–164 California efforts to reduce emissions in, 167 Gig Workers Rising in, 241 Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 rejected Proposition (2020) designating gig workers as employees, 187–188 Rideshare Drivers United advocacy group, 187 See also United States Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 38 Capitalism the golden age (1945–early 1970s) of, 8 history of medieval, 131 ideological battle between communism and, 7 Marc Benioff's speech (2020) on, 164, 211 productivity growth during golden age of, 33–34 shareholder, 171–172, 173 state, 171, 172–173, 193 See also Stakeholder capitalism Capitalism, Alone (Milanovic), 173 Carbon footprints finding hope for lowering, 159 no magic formula for lowering, 157 Paris Agreement aim to lower, 150, 165, 182, 183, 189, 198 urbanization and increased, 159–160 Carnegie, Andrew, 132 Carnegie Hall, 132 Carney, Mark, 162 Carroll, Aaron E., 231 Case, Anne, 42 Castro, Fidel, 76 Central European University, 113 Central European Warsaw Pact, 77 CEO Climate Leaders, 167 Checks and balances, 185, 193–198 Chevron, 134 Chiang Kai-shek, 56 Chicago School, 14, 136, 140 Chile copper exports, 64 China (People's Republic) age/gender representation political issues in, 188 becoming an upper-middle-income country, 36 Chinese Dream in, 184 city of Shenzhen of, 55, 57–61 continued trust in public institutions in, 196 demographic changes in, 161 one-child policy of, 161 People's Republic established by CPC, 56–57 Sham Chun River in, 55, 61 World Inequality Lab (WIL) on rising inequality in, 72–73fig World Trade Organization membership of, 18 WTO membership of, 18, 59, 64 ZF Drivetech Co.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

However, the US rate has expanded in recent years, while the Mexican rate dropped noticeably over two decades but still remained high. See Mark Deen, “Chile, Mexico, U.S. Have Highest Inequality Rates, OECD Says,” Bloomberg, November 24, 2016. On growing inequality in the United States, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). On Mexico, see Gerardo Esquivel, Desigualdad extrema en Mexico (Mexico City: Oxfam, 2015). Medium enterprises with more: Eduardo Bolio et al., “A Tale of Two Mexicos: Growth and Prosperity in a Two-Speed Economy,” McKinsey Global Institute, March 2014, http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/americas/a-tale-of-two-mexicos (podcast also available).


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

My healthcare coverage is too expensive.’” He told the New Yorker that it was not fair for employees of a Fortune 50 company to be struggling to make ends meet, and explicitly linked the decision to the broader debate about inequality, mentioning that he had given copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to all his top executives. “Companies are not just money-making machines,” he told the magazine. “For the good of the social order, these are the kinds of investments we should be willing to make. There definitely is a moral component and, you know, I had plenty of arguments that the spreadsheet wouldn’t pencil out.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

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

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

They are seen as profiting from speculative activities based on little more than buying low and selling high, or buying and then stripping productive assets simply to sell them on again with no real value added. More sophisticated analyses have linked rising inequality to the particular way in which the ‘takers' have increased their wealth. The French economist Thomas Piketty's influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century focuses on the inequality created by a predatory financial industry that is taxed insufficiently, and by ways in which wealth is inherited across generations, which gives the richest a head start in getting even richer. Piketty's analysis is key to understanding why the rate of return on financial assets (which he calls capital) has been higher than that on growth, and calls for higher taxes on the resultant wealth and inheritance to stop the vicious circle.

Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare (Oxford: University Press, 2006), p. 53; almost 80 per cent of the total increase in US demand from 1995 to 2000 is represented by household spending on consumption and residential investment. 43. A. Barba and M. Pivetti, ‘Rising household debt: Its causes and macroeconomic implications - a long-period analysis', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33(1) (2009), pp. 113-37. 44. Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, p. 7. 45. T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), p. 438. 46. Source: A. Haldane, Labour's Share (London: TVC, 12 November 2015), p. 32, adapted from J. P. Pessoa and J. Van Reenen, ‘The UK productivity and jobs puzzle: Does the answer lie in labour market flexibility?', Centre for Economic Performance Special Paper 31 (2013), compared to 65-70 per cent during similar periods at the end of the 1960s and during the 1980s. 47.

., ‘Finance vs Wal-Mart: Why are financial services so expensive?', in Blinder, A., Lo, A. and Solow, R. (eds), Rethinking the Financial Crisis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012): http://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Rethinking- Finance/Philippon_v3.pdf Pigou, A. C., The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1926). Piketty, T., Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Pisano, G., Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).


pages: 504 words: 126,835

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

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

As the managerialist disposition for predictability and preservation seized the corporate world, capitalism lost its orientation. It wrecked its compass for economic dynamism and competition that contests markets. Now capitalism is challenged, not from outside competition, but by the four horsemen of capitalist decline. The existential challenge of capitalism in the twenty-first century is a growing inability to foster contestable innovation and entrepreneurial competition. The importance can hardly be exaggerated: reversing capitalism’s decline is pivotal to stopping the growing populist unrest in the West. Capitalism is no longer what most people think it is. 2 WHEN CAPITALISM BECAME MIDDLE-AGED The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity … are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

While, for instance, the growth in net worth of US nonfinancial company holdings in foreign subsidiaries accelerated from the late 1980s up to the late 1990s, a trend decline followed and its trend growth in the past ten years has been lower than from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. 47.PR Newswire, “Dealogic Data.” 48.M&A activity is generally higher in periods of high stock market valuation. 49.Doidge, Karolyi, and Stulz, “The US Listing Gap.” 50.Litan, “Among Ingredients Needed for Faster Growth?” 51.The Economist, “Corporate Cocaine.” 3 The Color of Capitalism Is Gray 1.Team, “Harley-Davidson’s Success.” 2.Gross et al., “The Turnaround at Harley-Davidson.” 3.Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 4.Kohn and Yip-Williams, “The Separation of Ownership from Ownership.” 5.Beetsma and Vos, “Stabilisers or Amplifiers.” 6.Vitali, Glattfelder, and Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control.” 7.Minsky, “Uncertainty and the Institutional Structure of Capitalist Economies,” sec. 4. 8.Kay, Other People’s Money, 1–2. 9.Greenwood and Scharfstein, “The Growth of Modern Finance”; Weissmann, “How Wall Street Devoured Corporate America.” 10.Federal Reserve, “Assets and Liabilities.” 11.Harris, Schwedel, and Kim, “A World Awash in Money.” 12.Greenwood and Scharfstein, “The Growth of Modern Finance.” 13.Roxburgh et al., “The Emerging Equity Gap.” 14.Awford, “Room for a (Souped-up) Ford Fiesta?”

49.Haldane, “Patience and Finance.” 50.Zweig, “Why Hair-Trigger Traders Lose the Race.” 51.NYSE, “Fact Book Online: Interactive Viewer.” 52.MoneyBeat, “Why Hair-Trigger Traders Lose the Race” and NYSEData.com Factbook, “Interactive Viewer.” 53.Philippon and Reshef, “Wages and Human Capital in the US Financial Industry.” 54.Greenwood and Scharfstein, “The Growth of Modern Finance.” 55.Cecchetti and Kharroubi, “Why Growth in Finance Is a Drag on the Real Economy.” 56.Arcand, Berkes, and Panizza, “Too Much Finance?”; Cecchetti and Kharroubi, “Reassessing the Impact of Finance on Growth.” 57.Swagel, “The Financial Crisis.” 58.Cecchetti and Kharroubi, “Why Growth in Finance Is a Drag on the Real Economy.” 59.Christensen, Kaufman, and Shih, “Innovation Killers,” 1–2. 60.Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 264–81. 4 The Rise and Rise Again of Corporate Managerialism 1.Martti, Nokia: The Inside Story. 2.Steinbock, The Nokia Revolution. 3.Ahmad, Nokia’s Smartphone Problem. 4.Kuittinen, “Nokia Sells Handset Business to Microsoft.” 5.Lomas, “Nokia’s $7.2BN Devices & Services Exit.” 6.Cheng, “It’s Official: Motorola Mobility Now Belongs to Lenovo.” 7.Bass, “Microsoft’s Concept Videos.” 8.Jenkins, “Jenkins: Only Bill Gates Can Change Microsoft.” 9.Yarow, “Here’s What Steve Ballmer Thought about the iPhone.” 10.A good survey of companies failing at exits is McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage. 11.Steinberg, “Among the First to Fall at I.B.M.” 12.Crainer, “‘Saving Big Blue.’” 13.Clinch, “How Apple Prompted This Country’s Downgrade.” 14.Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 132. 15.Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” 388. 16.Oliver Williamson, who received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on economic governance, developed the idea of firm boundaries and put the emphasis on the internal or endogenous capacity of the firm to generate output that is more competitive than the market. 17.Santos and Eisenhardt, “Organizational Boundaries and Theories of Organization,” 491. 18.Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” 390. 19.Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” 404–5. 20.Zenger, Felin, and Bigelow, “Theories of the Firm–Market Boundary.” 21.Tett, The Silo Effect. 22.Morieux, “How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You from Getting Things Done.” 23.See, for instance, Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg, “The Impact of Trade on Organization and Productivity.” 24.Zhou, “Coordination Costs, Organization Structure and Firm Growth.” 25.Langlois and Everett, “Complexity, Genuine Uncertainty, and the Economics of Organization”; Joskow, “Vertical Integration.” 26.Strom, “Big Companies Pay Later.” 27.Rajan and Zingales, “The Firm as a Dedicated Hierarchy.” 28.Bhide, The Origin and Evolution of New Business, 94. 29.Rajan and Zingales, “The Firm as a Dedicated Hierarchy,” 7. 30.Teece, “Profiting from Technological Innovation.” 31.Jensen, “Agency Cost of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers.” 32.Stein, “Agency, Information and Corporate Investment”; Matvos and Seru, “Resource Allocation within Firms.” 33.See Berger and Ofek, “Diversification’s Effect on Firm Value”; Rajan, Servaes, and Zingales, “The Cost of Diversity.” 34.Scharfstein and Stein, “The Dark Side of Internal Capital Markets.” 35.Scharfstein and Stein.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

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

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

It requires a growth-and-development strategy focused on creating economic opportunities for the majority of people (including the poor), coupled with strategic investments in health, education, and infrastructure, and well-designed safety nets. That the dominant trend across developing countries has been little change in inequality will come as a surprise to those who have been following the big debates about growing income inequality in rich countries. Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century sparked widespread debate on the nature of economic growth and income distribution in the world’s richest countries, especially the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The debates start with the fact—and it is a well-documented fact—that income inequality improved between the end of World War II and the late 1970s but has worsened in many rich countries since then.

Abacha, Sani, 99, 113 Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 187 Abu Dhabi, 159 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), 300 Acemoglu, Daron, 13, 129, 140, 249 Achebe, Chinua, 72 Aden, Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Afghanistan, 9, 208, 285 education in, 215 as landlocked, 202, 205 Soviet invasion of, 134, 146 US war in, 8, 10, 118, 119, 141, 146 Africa, 37, 44, 46 agriculture in, 261 climate change and, 284 democracy in, 108, 110–11 GMOs in, 172 Green Revolution and, 170–73 growth in, 50, 189 malaria in, 211–13 megacities in, 277 mobile phones in, 157 pessimism about, 12 protests in, 102 resources in, 261 Africa Betrayed (Ayittey), 140 African National Congress Party (ANC), 143, 182, 185 agricultural productivity, 22, 25, 38, 305 agriculture, 37, 44, 45, 56–57, 166, 258, 283, 293 in Africa, 261 in Asia, 201 in China, 35 geography and, 204–5 Green Revolution and, 38, 79, 170–73, 204 growth in production of, 273–74 improvements in, 194–95 trade in, 273 AIDS, 20, 75, 81–82, 83, 94, 95, 173, 174–75, 182, 205, 214, 221, 246, 266 air defense identification zone (ADIZ), 288 air travel, 168–69, 169 Aker, Jenny, 177 Akuffo, Fred, 189 Albania, 50, 108, 159 Algeria, 114 life expectancy in, 78 poverty in, 36 Allende, Salvador, 143–44 aluminum, 53 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 172, 281–82 American Indians, 112, 142 American Medical Association, 172 Amin, Idi, 127 Andes, University of the, 247 Andropov, Yuri, 134 Angola, 114, 145 forest loss in, 280 war in, 100 antibiotics, 77, 94, 267 antimicrobial resistance, 267 antiretroviral therapy (ART), 174, 214 apartheid, 44, 57, 68, 100, 103, 135, 141, 180, 182 Apple, 46 Aquino, Benigno, 143, 149 Aquino, Cory, 17, 104, 109, 184, 185, 186 Arabian Peninsula, 152 Arab Spring, 255, 263 Aral Sea, 285 Argentina, 100 financial crisis in, 255 slowing of progress in, 250, 262 Arias, Oscar, 18, 149, 184 Armenia, 113 and democracy, 248, 263 economic problems in, 255 Army Air Corps, US, 210 Arndt, Channing, 226, 227 Arnquist, Sarah, 176–77 Arrow, Kenneth, 62–63 artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), 213, 267 Asia, 79 education in, 201 financial crisis in, 38, 39, 126, 144 health in, 201 megacities in, 277 values in, 121, 122–23 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 259 assassinations, 118 assembly, freedom of, 198–99 Australia, 25, 78, 167, 231, 281, 291 malaria in, 210 Austria, as landlocked, 202 authoritarianism, 3, 8, 22, 99, 101–3, 106, 107, 109, 120, 121–22, 125–29, 141, 146, 149, 188, 222, 224, 249–51, 255, 263–66 Ayittey, George, 140 Azerbaijan, 114 Babangida, Ibrahim, 99 Bali, 286 Bamako, 265 Banerjee, Abhijit, 14, 31 Bangladesh, 18, 37, 45, 127, 144, 159, 271 building collapse in, 162 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 124 education in, 87 garments from, 59 growth in, 6, 45, 238, 242, 271 inequality in, 67 jeans from, 56 MAMA in, 178 threats to gains in, 271–72 war in, 145 Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Ban Ki-moon, 284–85 banks, 56, 154, 241, 303 technology for, 175, 179 Bǎè Chuán, 152 bar associations, 110 Barlonyo camp, 287 Barre, Mohammed Siad, 99 Barro, Robert, 87 Bashir, Omar al-, 185 Batavia, 137 Bauer, Peter, 213, 220, 221 Bazzi, Sami, 225 bed nets, 94, 213 Belarus, 114, 185 Belgian Congo, 13, 140 Belize, 56, 69–70 benign dictators, 125–26 Benin, 103, 144, 216 Berlin Wall, fall of, x, 103, 123, 134, 143, 148 Bermeo, Sarah, 223 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 115 Bhavnani, Rikhil, 225 Bhote Koshi River, 203 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 95, 161, 171, 212 biodiversity loss, 9, 63 biofuels, 281 Birdsall, Nancy, 298 Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, King of Nepal, 122 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 146 Black Death, 276 black markets, 192 Boeing 707, 168 Boğaziçi University, 247 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 222 Boko Haram, 287 Bolivia, 162, 202, 205, 280 Bollyky, Thomas, 268 Boone, Peter, 225 border disputes, 288–91 Borlaug, Norman, 170 Botchwey, Kwesi, 189 Botswana, 9, 37, 207 aid to, 214, 216 as democracy, 98, 263 education in, 190 growth in, 5, 7, 15, 50, 126, 128, 141, 236 as landlocked, 202 life expectancy in, 81, 266 Bottom Billion, The (Collier), 118, 188, 202, 205, 217, 303 Bourguignon, François, 25, 27, 28 Brazil, 20, 22, 36, 38, 45, 155, 186 coastal vs. isolated areas in, 201 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 123 economic problems in, 186, 255 future of, 234 growth in, 6, 7, 20, 22, 45, 58, 235, 262 household income in, 50 inequality in, 66–67 infrastructure financing in, 259–60 innovation in, 302 natural capital in, 63 protests in, 263 reforms in, 186, 192 trade encouraged by, 155 universities in, 247 breast feeding, 178 British Royal Society, 172 British Shell Transport and Trading Company, 138 British South Africa Company, 180 Brown, Drusilla, 165 Brükner, Markus, 226 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 166, 300 budget deficits, 295 Buenos Aires, 201 Bulgaria, 7, 134, 143 Burkina Faso: demonstrations in, 281 education in, 87 as landlocked, 205 Song-Taaba Yalgré women’s cooperative in, 178 Burnside, Craig, 225 Burundi, 49 inequality in, 69–70 lack of growth in, 50 as landlocked, 202 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 185 Cabbages and Kings (O. Henry), 97 Cairo, 206, 216 California, 281 call centers, 56, 178, 262 Cambodia, 11, 36, 106, 114, 159 camels, 152 Cameroon, 281 Canada, 47, 210, 231 Cape Town, University of, 247 capitalism, 122, 146, 147–48, 149, 156, 162, 163, 250, 264, 303 in Asia, 155–57 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 68–69 capital markets, 164 carbon dioxide, 278, 282 carbon emissions, 297 Cardoso, Fernando, 186–87 Caribbean, 36 Carnation Revolution, 105 Carothers, Thomas, 112 Case Studies in Global Health, 214 cash transfer programs, 38 cassava, 171, 215 Castro, Fidel, 100, 144 Catholicism, 120–21, 123 cattle plague, 215 CD4 cell count, 175 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 143 Center for Global Development, 298 Center for Systemic Peace, 107 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US, 210 Central Africa, 205 Central African Republic, 49, 50, 222 Central America: crime in, 264 megacities in, 277 wars in, 81, 141 Central Asia, 36, 141, 147 Central Bank, Gambia, 190 Central Military Commission, 134 Chad: child mortality in, 84 health improvements in, 93 as landlocked, 205 war in, 145 Chandy, Laurence, 42, 243–44 Chavez, Hugo, 113 Chen, Shaohua, 27, 29 Chernenko, Konstantin, 134 Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 134 childbirth, 74, 75–82 child mortality, 24, 72–96, 74, 85, 93, 246 Chile, 47, 127 coup in, 100 democracy in, 104, 123 growth in, 6, 7, 45, 128, 147 individual leadership in, 187 life expectancy in, 78 malaria in, 210 Pinochet’s rule in, 107–8, 122, 141, 143–44 trade encouraged by, 155 Chiluba, Frederick, 133 China, ix–x, 3, 7, 20, 22, 106, 126, 144, 203, 292, 298, 300 authoritarian capitalism in, 147, 265–66 Coca-Cola in, 46 in confrontations with neighbors, 273 demand in, 53 demographic dividend in, 236 and dictatorships, 222 emigration from, 284 exploration by, 151–53 exports from, 154 future of, 234, 249–52 growth in, 6, 8–9, 15, 17, 21, 35–36, 45, 50, 62, 71, 125, 128, 147, 154, 201, 232, 233, 235–37, 242, 269 health in, 201 income in, 201 individual leadership in, 187 inequality in, 66, 69–70 infrastructure financing in, 259–60 innovation and technology in, 154–55, 302 market reforms in, 35, 102, 134–35, 192 natural capital in, 63 opening of, 5 per capital income in, 153 pollution in, 62 poverty reduction in, 201, 244 savings and investment in, 235 slowdown in growth of, 235–37, 249, 255, 257, 293 universities in, 247 US relationship with, 298–99 cholera, 77 Chun Doo-hwan, 99 Churchill, Winston, 97 civil liberties, 99, 199 civil rights, 112 civil servants, 102 civil war, 7 in Africa, 12 decline in, 115–16, 116 Civil War, US, 142 Clemens, Michael, 225 climate change, 4, 9, 19, 21, 63, 233, 234, 256, 272–73, 278, 281–84, 285–86, 296–97, 301, 305 coal, 44, 53, 278 Coca-Cola, 46, 159 cocoa, 163, 189 Cold War, 4, 7, 11, 16, 44, 52, 81, 100, 103, 115, 116, 131, 135, 144, 145, 146, 150, 156, 183, 184, 214, 223 Collier, Paul, 14–15, 118, 188, 202, 205, 213, 217, 227, 292, 303 Collins, Daryl, 32, 33–34 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 186 Colombia, 22, 237 data entry firms in, 178 universities in, 247 colonialism, 43–44, 52, 140, 147, 148, 149, 156 and independence, 140–43 of Indonesia, 136–40 Columbus, Christopher, 152 Coming Anarchy, The (Kaplan), 11 Commission on Growth and Development, 86, 165–66, 188 commodities, 53–57, 55, 163 Communism, 4, 11, 124, 125, 135, 139, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 184, 250 demise of, 16, 183 Communist Party, China, 123, 138, 250 Communist Party, Indonesia, 138 Communist Party, Soviet, 133, 138 comprehensive capital, 62–63 conflict, see violence Confucianism, 122 Congo, 114, 144, 185, 213, 243, 285 child mortality in, 84 civil war in, 181, 206 coup in, 100 education in, 190 lack of growth in, 50 war in, 81 Congress, US, 298 construction, 37, 45 consumption, 40–41, 40 Contingent Reserve Arrangement, 259 contract enforcement, 261 Converse, Nathan, 198 copper, 53 corn, 162, 281 corruption, 112, 261, 264 in Brazil, 186 in Thailand, 254 in US, 142 Costa Rica, 18, 58, 159 aid to, 223 as democracy, 7, 98, 123 growth in, 50 costume jewelry, 56 Côte d’Ivoire, 163, 263 cotton, 25 creative destruction, 249 Cuba, 22, 141, 145 and democracy, 248 dictatorship in, 100, 106, 144 Cultural Revolution, 35, 128, 153, 185 currencies, and resource curse, 206 Cuyamel Fruit Company, 97–98 Czechoslovakia, 143 protests in, 134 Velvet Revolution in, 103 Czech Republic, 184 da Gama, Vasco, 152 dairy products, 280 Darfur, 8, 10, 206 Dasgupta, Partha, 62–63 data entry firms, 178 Davies, Sally, 267 DDT, 212 Deaton, Angus, 89, 213 debts, 11, 193 in Africa, 12 deficits, 101 dehydration, 94, 173 de Klerk, F.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

America’s massively skewed distribution of income and wealth was the product of inherited assets, amplified by pervasive technological and economic change and Warren Buffett’s “class war,” which extended to every facet of the political regulation and deregulation of the economy. If this was so, what would it take to counteract the imbalance and to redress the astonishingly one-sided outcomes? A polite European social democrat like Thomas Piketty inferred from his inequality data that what the world needed was a global wealth tax. This was the message of his remarkable global bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which redefined the public debate about inequality in 2014.42 That would certainly help to offset the tendency toward massive inequality. But in a system as starkly polarized and lopsided as that of the United States, what relevance did such well-meaning suggestions have?

Schwartz, “Wealth and Secular Stagnation: The Role of Industrial Organization and Intellectual Property Rights,” Russell Sage Foundation Journal 2.6 (2016): 226–249. 40. J. Kollewe, “‘Political Crap’: Tim Cook Condemns Apple Tax Ruling,” Guardian, September 1, 2016. 41. P. Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. 42. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 43. R. Reich, “Income Inequality in the United States” (testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, January 16, 2014). 44. E. McMurry, “Fox’s Hasselbeck Knocks Obama’s ‘Class Warfare’ Speech: ‘He Is the System’ He Criticizes,” MEDIAite, December 5, 2013. 45.

., 131, 135, 136, 192 supports Paulson’s bailout plans, 173 UN General Assembly address of, 1–2 Bush, Jeb, 568 Bush administration budget deficits of, 27–29, 30, 36, 282–83 defense and security spending during, 28 G20 formation and, 262–63 loses support of congressional Republicans, 170 tax cuts passed by, 27–28 BZW, 83 Cable, Vince, 273 California, 65–66 CalPERS, 209 Cameron, David, 350, 354, 417, 538, 540, 543, 545, 546 Canada, 594 Cantor, Eric, 182–83, 353, 568 capital controls, 475 capital flows, 11 collapse in, 2008-2009, 162–63 cross-border, in eurozone, 103–5 into developing economies, 473–74 into Eastern Europe, 126–28 into Orban’s Hungary, 492 into Ukraine, 493–94 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 462 Capital Purchase Program facility, 196–97 capital ratios, 85, 303, 312 capital requirements, 84–88 Basel I accord, 85 Basel II accord, 86 Basel III requirements, 313–14 Dodd-Frank Act requirements, 307 Carney, Mark, 402, 404, 555 Carrier, 577 Carville, James, 29 Case, Anne, 457 CDOs.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

The challenge faced by opponents of rampant capitalism was how to focus their rage coherently against increasingly pervasive forces. The study of capitalism is soaring at universities across America, indicating the desire on the part of tomorrow’s graduates to understand the tenuous connection between democracy and the capitalist economy.12 The phenomenal success of French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century—a work arguing that social discord is the likely outcome of surging financial inequality —indicates that the public knows there is a problem and is in search of clear accounts of it. Piketty advocates a global system of taxation on private property. “This is the only civilized solution,” he told the Observer newspaper.13 In 2014, even the world’s leading economic think-tank, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, urged higher taxes for the rich to help the bottom 40 percent of the population.

Index Abbott, Tony 279, 286 Abdul (asylum seeker) 286 Abu Ghraib prison 15 abuse 258–62 aid 123 child 102 drug 37–9 human rights 110 labor 29 outsourced 260–1 in prisons 216–17, 218 sexual 252–8, 280–1 accountability 16, 30–1, 180, 277, 291, 310 Adam, Harry 118 AECOM 53–4 Aegis Defence Services 33 Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies 44 Afghanistan 12, 19–56, 59–63, 117, 175 arrival of PMCs 20 asylum seekers from 69–70 Australian contractors 60 casualties 32, 326n27 Chinese support for 37 contractors 28–31 corruption 22, 24, 27, 42, 45, 328n48, 329–30n58 counterinsurgency 43, 52–3 departure of foreign troops 62–3 dependence on America 45 development support 62–3, 324n2, 324n3 drug economy 37–9 election, 2004 31–2 election, 2009 32 election, 2014 32 entrepreneurs 56 fear of resurgent Taliban 44–5 financial situation 62–3 future of PMCs in 23 GDP 330n61 human rights 42 inequality 56 insurgency 12, 32 intelligence gathering 51–6 intelligence-sharing nations 21 invasion of 20, 31 labor abuses 29 laws against PMCs 21 locals’ view of 48 mineral rights 24, 330n65 mining industry 24, 49–50, 330n65 Ministry of Interior 21, 40–2 Ministry of Mines 50 natural resources 49 night raids 43, 46, 52, 54, 55, 328–9n50 occupation of 22, 31–5, 36, 43, 44, 52–3, 63, 325n10 official line 40–3 past conflicts 36–7 PMC numbers 20 population surveys 330–1n66 private military companies 16, 19–25, 33–5, 41–3, 44, 46–8, 48, 50, 59–62, 331n69 propaganda 26 reconstruction 325n11 resource exploitation 49–50 security forces 27, 330n61 Soviet invasion 37 suicide attacks 41 suicide rates 332n83 Taliban rule 25 translators 55, 325n19 USAID 327–28n46 US military bases 28 violence 20 war economy 25–31, 38, 63 warlords 32–3, 44, 326n28, 326–7n30 women in 44, 47–8, 48–9, 50–1, 330n59 Afghanistan Analysts Network 54–6, 328–9n50 Afghanistan Reconstruction Group 26 Afghan police force 27 Afghan Public Protection Force 21 Africa 23 African-Americans, incarceration rates 195, 196 Agility Logistics 124 aid Afghanistan 62–3 Australia 50 contracts 123–5 corruption 126, 171 criticism of process 144–7 food 145–6 fraud 123–4 Haiti 12, 108, 120, 144–7, 340n56, 342n89 human rights abuses 123 NGO-ization of 137–41 Papua New Guinea 13, 158–9, 167, 171–5, 179 profiteering 139 waste 146 aid dependency 121, 126 AIDS 89 Alexander, Michelle 195–6 Alex, Commander 156–7 Al-Hussein, Zeid Ra’ad 277 Al Jazeera America 29 American Correctional Association (ACA) conference, 2014 202–11 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) 201 American University of Afghanistan 43–4 Amnesty International 259 Anastasiou, Vassilis 102 Anti-Defamation League 93 anti-fascist activism 93–4 anti-Semitism 90–1, 93 Arab Spring 97, 127–8 Arawa, Papua New Guinea 158, 167, 180–4 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 26, 112–13, 151 Arizona 200–2 AshBritt 108 Ashton, Paul 201 assassinations 323n33, 331n69 Assessing Progress in Haiti Act (US) 124 Asylum Help 234 asylum seekers abuse 258–62 austerity 69 Australia 269–305 children 249–50 closed hospitality centers 67–8 costs 304 demonization of 77, 288 deportations 258–63 destinations 68 detention centers 13, 64–71, 76, 77–80, 230–5, 245–51, 271 detention costs 281–3 detention network privatization 77 Greece 64–71, 75–7, 77–80, 89 indefinite detention 68 lack of sympathy for 287–8 medical care 77–80, 256–8 mental health 254–5, 285, 286, 295, 302 motivation 68, 302–3 numbers reaching Europe 96 privatized housing 230–5 processing times 300–1 public sympathy 271 racist violence 71 reception centers 67 refugee crisis 95–8 self-harm 295–6 sexual abuse 280–1 Syntagma Square protest, 2014 70 United Kingdom 230–5, 244, 245–51, 252–8, 258–63 women 253–4 Athens 67, 102–3 Metropolitan Community Clinic 80–4 AusAID 158–9, 161, 171–5, 182, 189–91, 331–2n77 austerity, opposition to 72–5 Austin American-Statesman 108 Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility 190 Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) 282 Australia 8, 104 and Afghanistan 50 aid 50 asylum policy development 275–85, 286, 357n4, 357n9 asylum seeker network 269–305 asylum seekers 13 Community Assistance Program 304 complicity with BCL 160 Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) 271, 274, 279, 281–2, 284,286, 289–93, 295, 297–8, 300–1, 303 detention centers 13, 271, 274, 276, 278–9, 280–5, 285–305, 356n2, 357n11 detention costs 281–3 economic reforms 322n16 exploitation of Papua New Guinea 169–75 foreign policy 173–4 goals in PNG 172 immigration policy 278 “Mining for Development” initiative 190 the Pacific Solution 276–81 and Papua New Guinea 154, 160, 163, 167, 169–75, 176–7, 179, 188–91 PMC contractors 60 privatization 361n51 and Rio Tinto 162 state-ownership approach to resources 177 tender process 289–90 turnback policy 280, 286 Australian Mercy 285 Australian Navy 276 Australian Strategic Policy Institute 190 Autonomous Bougainville Government 161, 167, 178–80, 184, 346n33 Avera eCare 205 Avon Protection 203 Bagram prison 31 Bainimarama, Frank 346–7n41 Baker, Charles 117 Baldry, Eileen 285 Balkonis, Thomas 78–80 Bamazon (TV program) 306–7 Bangladesh 341n65 bank bailouts 3 bankers bonuses 4 Ban Ki-moon 113 Bank of America 3 Barnardo’s 249–50, 266 Barrick Gold 174 Batay Ouvriye 126 Bauer, Shane 204, 207–8, 210 bearing witness 9–10 Becket House, London 263 Bedford, Yarl’s Wood detention centre 252–8, 265 Behavioral International 227 Berati, Reza, murder of 283 Berghorn, George H. 204 Berman, Steve 187 BHP Billiton 172–3, 187, 189 Bigio, Gilbert 108 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 114 Bishop, Julie 176, 182 black sites 16 Blackwater 16, 35, 59, 323–4n40, 331n69 Blair, Tony 60, 236 Blanchard, Olivier 99 bloggers 308 Bloom, Devin D. 307 Blue Mountain Group 30 Boeing 15–16 Bolivia 26, 125 Booz Allen Hamilton 15 border controls, privatization 241 Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) 159, 159–61, 162, 163, 184–6, 188, 190, 343n6 Bougainville, Papua New Guinea 154–64, 167–9, 176, 178–80, 184–5 Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) 154–5, 163–4, 176, 343n6 Bougainville Women in Mining 183–4 Bozorg (asylum seeker) 232–3 Brand, Russell 267–8 bribery 22, 38, 41, 329–30n58 Brown, Bob 174 Brown, Michael, killing 203 Buckles, Nick 283 Burma 14 Bush, George W. 7, 25, 43, 118, 149 Cable, Vince 236 CACI 15–16 California 5, 196–7, 208 Callick, Rowan 176 Call Sense 210 Cambodia 276 Cameron, David 50, 62, 243, 244, 252, 263 Campbell, Chad 201 Campbell, David 284, 359n30 Campsfield detention facility 246–9, 266–7 Canada 120, 304 Capita 241–2 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) 6 capitalism 1–2 critiques 361n5 disaster 6–9 Klein’s critique of 7–8 predatory 11, 13–14, 162, 310–11 unregulated 135–6 Caracol industrial park, Haiti 116, 128–33, 133–6, 148 Carol (senior analyst) 54–6 Carr, Bob 188–9 Cash, Linda 279 Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) 124–5 Centre for Public Integrity 34 Chalmers, Camille 151–2 Chaman (Afghan refugee) 64–71 Channel 4 News 253, 267 Chaparro, Enrique Mari 137–9 cheap labor 117, 127, 132, 133, 144 Chemonics 123 Cheney, Dick 28, 30 CHF International 138–9 child abuse 102 children detention 249–50, 272 immigrants 212, 225 malnourished 82 in prisons 208 child slaves 145 China 14, 16, 24, 37, 49, 170 China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) 24 cholera 113–16 Chomsky, Noam 238, 310 Christmas Island 269–75, 356n1 Christmas Island Community Reference Group 356–7n3 Christmas Island detention facility 271, 272–3, 274, 276, 278–9, 285–9, 299–305, 356n2 Chrysohoidis, Michalis 67–8 CIA 15, 59, 110, 331n69, 331n73 Citizens for a Free Kuwait 25 City AM (newspaper) 236–7 civilian casualties, Afghanistan 32 Clarke, Victoria 26 Clayton Homes 118 climate change 1–2, 8 Clinton, Bill 116, 118–19, 122, 123, 135 Clinton Foundation 118, 126, 136 Clinton, Hillary 8, 30, 118, 125, 131, 135, 171 Clive (information management consultant) 51–2 Clive (Serco contractor) 289–92 Coffey International 162 Colas, Landry 131 Cold War 33, 111 Collective Against Mining 121 colonialism 109, 160 Comcast 5 Commission on Wartime Contracting (US) 34 Community Assistance Program, Australia 304 community mapping 58 Conflict Mapping in Afghanistan since 1978 (Independent Human Rights Commission) 32 Congo, Democratic Republic of 120 contractors, Afghanistan 28–31 Conway, Jim 208–9 copper mining, ecological damage of 173 Corcoran, Thomas J. 110–11 Corinth detention centre 64, 78–80 Corizon 209 corporate ideology 14 corporate power 7 Corporate Responsibility Coalition 187–8 Corporate Watch 255, 263 CorrectHealth 199 Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) 13, 197–8, 199, 201–2, 211–22, 227, 228, 284–5 corruption Afghanistan 24, 27, 42, 45, 328n48, 329–30n58 aid 126, 171 Greece 64, 72 Haiti 141 overcharging 240–1 Papua New Guinea 170, 171, 188 price-gouging 292 counternarcotics information campaign 26 Crocker, Ryan C. 43 Crockett, Greg 204–5 Crossbar 204–5 Cuba 122 cultural sensitivity 21 Daily Mail 235 Daily Telegraph (Sydney newspaper) 172 Damana, Chris 184–5 Das, Satyajit 309 Daveona, Lawrence 177–8 David (Serco source) 292 Davis, Raymond 57, 331n73 Davis, Troy 199 Davos conference, 2015 2–3 debtocracies 99 Defence Logistics Agency 29 democracy 16, 311 Democracy Now!

Ashraf 42–3 Haiti 26, 105–53, 175, 308 aid 12, 108, 120, 123–8, 144–7, 342n89 aid delivery failure 340n56 aid dependency 121, 126 American colonialism 109–13 American corporate pillaging 111–12 American investment 116–20 American policy 115–16, 116–20, 134 Aristide rule 112–13 beggars 106 Canadian aid 120 Caracol industrial park 116, 128–33, 133–6, 148 challenge facing 152–3 child slaves 145 cholera outbreak 113–16 CIA involvement 110 and the Cold War 111 corruption 141 coup, 2004 112 death toll, cholera outbreak 113 death toll, earthquake 107, 145 debt 127 Duvalier dictatorship 109–12 earnings 117, 132, 144 earthquake, January 2010 12, 107, 117 earthquake, January 2010, aftermath of 105–7 economic exploitation 132, 133–6 economic fragility 109–13 economic resistance 150 eco-system damage 130 effect of neoliberalism on 112–13 exploitation 107–8 foreign investment 116–18, 121–2, 133–6 French aid 120 historical background 109–13 homelessness 107 housing 129–30, 140, 150–1 human rights 110, 116 indigenous development 147–9, 150–2 job creation 131 leadership 119–20 living conditions 105–7, 141–4 mining regulation 120–1 National Palace demolition 137–9 NGO-ization of 137–41 occupation of 127 organisations populaires 112 paramilitary groups 109 political freedom 109 Presidential elections, 2015 140 reconstruction gold rush 107–9 refugee camps 141–4 religious faith 106 resource exploitation 120–1 revolution 109 rice imports 122–3 sovereignty 135, 146, 152 tourism 152 unemployment rate 127 unregulated capitalism 135–6 UN stabilization force 113, 115–16 women in 142–3 workers’ rights 148 Haiti Economic Lift Program 133 Haiti Grassroots Watch 117, 120 Haiti-Liberte 108–9 Halliburton 28 Hallward, Peter 109, 111–12, 152 Hamburg 84, 311 Hammond, Philip 16 Harding, Richard 284 Hardwick, Nick 263–7 Harper, Stephen 120 Harry (Christmas Islander) 272–3 Hastings, Michael 26 Hayatullah (asylum seeker) 301–3, 360n49 Headley, Linden 220–1 health services privatization, United Kingdom 244–5 heart disease 14 Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation 74 Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy 96 Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund 101–2 helplessness, feeling of 308–9 Higgins, Greg 128 Hill+Knowlton 25–6 History Channel 306–7 homelessness 107 Honduras 225 Howard, John 275–6, 279 humanitarian relief, NGO-ization of 137–41 humanitarian work, military and 58–9 human rights 123 Afghanistan 42 commodification of 308 disregard for 9 and economic freedom 2 Haiti 110, 116 Human Rights Defense centre 216 Human Rights Watch 47, 48, 67, 71, 196, 200 Human Terrain System 53, 331n67 human trafficking 29, 70 Huppert, Julian 249–51 Hurricane Katrina 26, 118, 124, 337n6 Hurricane Sandy 8 Hyman, Christopher 290 identity, questions of 103–4 immigrants children 212, 225 criminalization 198–9 demonization of 226 deportation 212, 227–8 detention centers 211–28 incarceration rates 195 legal representation 217–18 United Kingdom 243–4 United States of America 198–9, 211–28 see also asylum seekers imperialism, legacy of 10–11 Independent Human Rights Commission, Conflict Mapping in Afghanistan since 1978 32 Independent Timbers and Stevedoring 344n19 IndustriALL 187 inequality 2–4, 56, 242–3, 302–3 information management consultancy 51–6 Innocent, Alix 130–2 Integrity Watch Afghanistan 24 intellectuals, responsibility of 310 intelligence gathering, privatization 51–6 Inter-American Development Bank 123, 130 Interfaith Prison Coalition 216 Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) 118 International Criminal Court (ICC) 43 International Health and Medical Services 295 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 4–5, 62, 72, 99, 112, 127 International Organization for Migration 74 International Relief and Development (IRD) 28 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 32 interrogators and interrogation, privatization 15 Inter-Services Intelligence 56, 331n73 “Invisible Suffering” (MSF) 75 Iran 23, 49 Iraq 12, 14, 25, 27, 28, 323n33 Islamabad 56, 57 Islamic State (ISIS) 16, 41 Jack (PMC owner) 20–5 Jalalabad 38 Japan 11 Jean, Arnolt 121 Jean, Wyclef 141 job creation 131 John (BCL manager) 160–1, 164–5, 166–7 John (detention center guard) 296–8 Jones, Justin 198 Josephine (teacher, PNG) 183 Josh (PMC contractor) 59–60 journalism, usefulness of 309 J/P Haitian Relief Organization 137–9 JSOC 59 Jubilee 159 Jubilee Australia 190–1 Justice Police Institute (JPI) 201 Justinvil, Pierre 130 Kabul 19, 36 drinking holes 59–62 drug abuse 38–9 population 45 private military companies 19–25 suicide attacks 41 women in 47–8 Kambana, Adrienne Makenda 258–9 Kampagiannis, Thanasis 93–5 Kandahar 55 Karachi 56 Karunakara, Unni 139 Karzai, Ahmed Wali 41 Karzai, Hamid 27, 31–2, 41, 44, 47 Katz, Jonathan 119, 139–40 Kauona, Samuel 161, 178–80, 346n35 Kavo, Havila 186 KBR 28 Keerfa, the Movement United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat 93 Kelleher, Joan 285–6 Keller, Ska 97 Kemish, Ian 189 Kentucky 205, 228 Kerry, John 30, 62 Khalilzad, Zalmay 50 Khan, Muhammad Alamgir 57 Khogyani, Saima 48–50 Khyber News Bureau 58–9 Kilcullen, David 53 Kim Woong-ki 133 Kirra, Bernadine 185 Klein, Naomi 6–8, 11 KOFAVIV 142–3 Koim, Sam 188 Koofi, Maryam 50–1 Korean Peninsula 23 Kosovo 26 Kotsioni, Ioanna 76–7 Krugman, Paul 243 Kuwait 25 labor abuses 29 Laleau, Wilson 116–17 Lamothe, Laurent 120 landowner rights 177 Langdon, Robert 60, 332n82 Lasslett, Kristian 159–60, 161 Lebrun, Jean Robert 148 Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin 96–7 Leonard (teacher, PNG) 181 Lepani, Charles 189 Libby Sacer Foundation 103–4 Libya 16, 30 Limits to Growth, The (Randers) 1–2 Lloyds Banking Group 16 lobbying 124 Lockheed Martin 31 Logan, Steve 198–9 London, Becket House 263 Louisiana 200 Lucke, Lewis 108–9 Lujan, Nathan K. 306–7 Lumpkin, Georgia, USA 222–3 Stewart immigration detention center 211–22 McDowall, Paul 252 McDowell, Janine 252 McFate, Sean 16 McGregor-Smith, Ruby 242, 245–9 McKibben, Bill 8–9 McLean, Murray 11 Malmström, Cecilia 98 Management and Training Corp 218–19 Management Today 242 Manjoo, Rashida 252 Manus Island 276–7, 280, 281, 282–3, 297, 357n11 market principles, application of 14–15 market system 2 Marr, David 282 Martelly, Michel 106, 110, 116, 117, 140, 339n34 Mason, Paul 73, 267 MASS Design Group 114–15 Matheson, Scott 299 Maywood, California 5 Médecins de Monde (MdM) 77–80 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 75–7, 114, 183 media outlets, ownership of 5 Medical Association of Athens 84 medical care asylum seekers 77–80, 78–80, 256–8 detention centers 77–80, 266, 295 Germany 84 Greece 80–4 prisons 205, 209, 214–15, 215–16 Medical Justice 256–8, 260 Medina, Roberto Martinez 218 Meek, James 234, 239 Mehmood, Tahir, death of 241 mental health 254–5, 285, 286, 295, 302 mentally disturbed people, incarceration rates of 201 mercenaries 20, 59 Merkel, Angela 73 Merten, Kenneth 107–8, 339n34 Metropolitan Community Clinic, Athens 80–4 Michael (asylum seeker) 230–2 Migration Policy Institute (MPI) 212 MiHomecare 255 military ideology 15 Miller, Phil 263 “Mining for Development” initiative, Australia 190 Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, Greece 76 MINUSTAH 113, 115–16 Mitie 242, 245–9, 255 Mlotshwa, Emma 255–8 Moise, Rosembert 150 Momis, John 159, 161, 169 Monaghan, Karon 260 Monbiot, George 9, 236 Money Morning 49 Monsanto 267 Moradian, Davood 44–6 Morales, Evo 125 Morales, Pablo 107 Morauta, Mekere 188 Morrison, Scott 279–80 Mortime, Antonal 140 Morumbi 346n33 MSS Security 296–8 Mubenga, Jimmy, killing of 258–60 Mudd, Gavin 185 Mundell, Robert 84 Munnings, Kate 358n25 murders, private military companies 15, 46, 57, 60, 323–4n40 Murdoch, Rupert 5, 41, 359n30 Musharraf, Pervez 57 MWH Americas 124 Nader, Ralph 173 Namaliu, Sir Rabbie 160, 343n6 Namorong, Martyn 190 Nashville, Tennessee 209 Nathan (PNG resident) 167–8 National Audit Office 236 National Health Service 244–5 National Institute of Money in State Politics 201 National Research Council 198 nation building 23 Nation (magazine) 118 Nation (newspaper) 57 NATO 32, 55, 63 Nauru 275–6, 276, 276–7, 280–1, 283, 296 Needham, Emma 299 neo-colonization 190 neoliberalism 83, 112–13 New Economics Foundation 243 Newmont Mining 120 News Corporation 5 New York Times 8, 38, 101, 113, 115, 118, 131, 141, 199, 212, 226, 243, 284, 340n56 New Zealand 361n51 New Zealand Aid Programme 158–9 Nicaragua 134 Nicholls, Adelina 224–6 No Logo (Klein) 7–8 non-government organizations, and humanitarian relief 137–41 North American Free Trade Agreement 225 Northrop Grumman 35 Norway 2, 186–7 Obama, Barack 3, 31, 35, 45, 118, 124, 149, 195, 212, 221–2, 224 obesity 14 Occupy movement 5–6, 309 Occupy Wall Street 3 O’Faircheallaigh, Ciaran 162 Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, United Nations 139 O’Grady, Mary Anastasia 134 Ohio 197–8 oil prices 166 Ona, Francis 169, 178 O’Neill, Peter 159, 166, 171, 186, 188, 347n50 One World 117 Operation Enduring Freedom 31 organisations populaires, Haiti 112 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 6, 267 outsourcing 28–30 outsourcing contractors, United Kingdom 240–2 overcharging 29 overconsumption 8 Oxfam 191, 242–3 Pakistan 12, 56–9, 62 community mapping 58 Federally Administrated Tribal Areas 58 feeling of occupation 59 private military companies 56, 57 state absence 56–7 Taliban in 31 US army action 58 Palast, Greg 84 Panagiotaros, Ilias 91–3 Panguna Landowners’ Association 177 Panguna mine, Papua New Guinea 154–64, 164–5, 167, 168, 177–8, 181, 182, 184–6, 191–2 Panguna town, Papua New Guinea 165–7 Papua New Guinea 11–12, 12, 117, 154–92 agricultural exports 174 aid 13, 167, 171–5, 179 and America 170–1 and Australia 154, 160, 163, 167, 169–75, 176–7, 188, 188–91 Australian exploitation of 169–75 Australian goals 172 Australian government aid 158–9, 171–5, 179, 182, 189–91 Autonomous Bougainville Government 161, 167, 178–80, 184, 346n33 average age 158 baby boom 157 BCL legacy 160–1 Bougainville mining legislation 161 and China 170 civil disturbances 175 civil war 154–5, 158–9, 161, 163–4, 178–80, 180–2, 187 constitutional planning committee 169 corruption 170, 171, 188 desire for independence 176–8 education 158, 166–7, 167–8 environmental destruction 157–8 foreign investment 186–7 forest 336n19 gold panning 164 Grasberg mine 187 independence 169–70 lack of change 167–9 life expectancy 175 maternal mortality rate 183 mining boom 13, 156, 169–76, 184–91, 344n50 mining waste 157 officials’ role 175–6 Ok Tedi Mine 157–8, 173, 188, 345n23 opposition to mining 168–9, 174, 178–80 Panguna Landowners’ Association 177 Panguna mine 154–64, 164–5, 167, 168, 177–8, 181, 182, 184–6, 191–2 Panguna reserves 186 Panguna town 165–7 pollution 157, 164, 173 poverty 175 private military companies 180 Ramu nickel mine 174 reconciliation meeting, February 2013 158–9 resource exploitation 120, 154–64, 176, 184–91, 344n19, 346n33 the Sandline controversy 180 sovereign fund 188 sovereignty 156, 175–6, 176–8, 191, 192 Task Force Sweep 188 weapons decommissioning 181–2 women in 182–4 World War II 170 Papua New Guinea Sustainable Development Program (PNGSDP) 345n23 Partners in Health 113–14 Partners Worldwide 136 Pay Any Price (Risen) 11 Peace and Security Project 98 peace building 54–5 Peck, Raoul 118–19 Penn, Sean 137–9 Pennsylvania 209 Pentagon, the, waste 34–5 people-smugglers 70, 287 Peshawar 57–9 Peter (PMC contractor) 59–60 Petraeus, David 52–3 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century 6 Pilger, John 10, 245 Pindar, Paul 241–2 Pipiro, Moses 184 Pita, Aaron 181–2 Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations 140 Podur, Justin 115, 147 police militarized 203, 238 privatization 240 surveillance 6 police brutality Greece 83 United States of America 203 pollution, Papua New Guinea 157, 164, 173 Port-au-Prince 105–7, 107, 116, 118, 127, 128, 146, 149–50, 150–1 Port Moresby 166 poverty 98–9, 175 PPSS 206 predatory capitalism 11, 13–14, 162, 310–11 press freedom 74, 75 price-gouging 292 Prince, Erik 16 prisons and the prison industry 197, 202–11 abuse 216–17, 218 access 219 American Correctional Association (ACA) conference, 2014 202–11 bed mandate 226–7 children in 208 emotional impact of incarceration 207–8 employee wages 223 exploitation 227 failure of private 200–1 female population 197 food 215 green technology 204 incarceration rates 195–6, 200, 201, 204 inmate labor 205–6, 211, 213 lack of oversight 216, 228–9 lack of transparency 225–6 medical care 205, 209, 214–15, 215–16 money saving 217 occupancy quotas 226–7, 228 opposition to private 223–8 overcrowding 196 phone call costs 214 prisoner costs 200–1 privacy 208–9 private operators 196–8 privatization 13, 195–229, 240, 264–5 profits 197, 201–2 Scandinavian 208–9 solitary confinement 208, 209, 218–19 state oversight 205 Stewart immigration detention center, Lumpkin, Georgia, USA 211–22 suicide rate 209, 217 United Kingdom 240, 264–5 uprisings 208–9 visit 211–22 private military companies 12 accountability 16 Afghanistan 19–25, 33–5, 41–3, 44, 46–8, 50, 59–62, 331n69 Australian contractors 60 casualties 32, 326n27 clients 20–1 connection between 23–4 contractor motivations 59–62 employees 22, 47, 57 exploitation by 22 fees 21 future 23 hiring practices 61 influence 41–2 justifications 22–3 killings 46, 57, 60, 61 lack of state control 34, 47 locals view of 46–8 motivation 23 murders 15, 46, 57, 60, 323–4n40 and nation building 23 need for 21 numbers 20 origins 33 Pakistan 56, 57 Papua New Guinea 180 problem of 42 recruits 20 regulations 21, 22 and sovereignty 22–3 static work 21–2 transparency 34 weapons 20, 21 private power 4, 9 private security contractors, motivations 59–62 privatization asylum seeker detention network 77 Australia 361n51 border controls 241 contractor privacy 248–9 costs 236 detention centers 13, 98, 230–5, 245–51, 280–5, 289–99 disaster relief 108–9 economic logic of 289–99 failure of 239 Golden Dawn and 92–3 Greece 72, 98, 100–2, 307–8 and the IMF 4–5 intelligence gathering 51–6 justification 238–9, 245–6 Klein’s critique of 6–7 opposition to 100, 101, 102–3, 251 overcharging 240–1 prisons 13, 195–229, 240, 264–5 public services 230–68 as recent history 311 resistance to 7 revolving door 197 scale in UK 244 school teachers 4 surveillance 15 tender process 289–90 transparency 246, 290–1 United Kingdom 230–68, 310 of war 7 and waste reduction 30 profit, and poverty-level wages 117 prostitution 102 Psarras, Dimitris 85–7, 93 public services, privatization 230–68 Public Service Strategy Board 245–6 punishment, outsourcing 264–5 Putin, Vladimir 90, 93 racism 80, 259–60, 294 Raleigh, Jeff 26 Ramsbotham, David 260–1 Randers, Jørgen, The Limits to Growth 1–2 rape 47, 142–3, 183 Rau, Cornelia 289 Reagan, Ronald 238 Red Cross 342n89 refugee camps, Haiti 141–4 refugee crisis, Europe 95–8 refugees see asylum seekers Regan, Tony 159, 161 Rendon Group 26 Rene, George Andy 136 Reporters Without Borders 74 resource curse 13 resource exploitation accountability 180 Afghanistan 24, 49–50 Christmas Island 274 as entertainment 306–7 Haiti 120–1 impact 164–5, 166–7, 168 landowner rights 177 opposition to 178–80 Papua New Guinea 120, 154–64, 176, 184–91, 344n19, 346n33 regulation 120–1 responsibility 161 toxic dilemma of 162 and violence 159–60, 163–4, 167–8 “Restore Haiti” conference 136 Rhiannon, Lee 50 Rice, Susan 116 Rio Tinto 154, 157, 159, 162, 180, 186–8, 189 Risen, James, Pay Any Price 11 Roches, James Des 33 Roka, Theonila 159 Rolling Stone 41 Rompos, Antonios 78–80 Rooney, Nahau 281 Roupakias, Giorgos 90 Royal Mail 236 Roy, Arundhati 5–6, 307–8 Rubio, Marco 228 Rudd, Kevin 289, 290 Rumsfeld, Donald 26, 29–30 Saddam Hussein 25 Sae-A 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 148 SAIC 31 Sally (case manager) 300–1, 303–4 Samaras, Antonis 94–5 Sanderson, Janet A. 115 Sandline 180 Sanon, Reyneld 150–1 Sarantou, Elina 66–7 Sarobi 38 Sassen, Saskia 99 Sassine, George 134–6 Sathi (asylum seeker) 253–4 Scahill, Jeremy 15 Scarperia, Annette 206 Schäuble, Wolfgang 75 Schofield, Josh 206 Schuller, Mark 107 Schumer, Chuck 228 Schwartz, Timothy 144–7, 342n92 Schweich, Thomas 38 Sean (Serco source) 292–4 Security and Management Services 57 security, outsourcing see private military companies Sediqqi, Sediq 41–2 sentencing reform, United States of America 198 September 11 terrorist attacks, 2001 7, 33 Serco 13, 232, 235, 240, 248, 252, 264, 270, 271, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 284, 289–99, 359n30 Shah, Rajiv 123 Shahshahani, Azadeh 226–7 Shah, Silky 222, 227–8 Sharon (detention center worker) 298 Sheffield 230–5, 262 Shell 186 Shield Defence Systems 204 shock doctors 8 Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Klein) 6–7, 11 Sideris, Christos 80–4 Simon (teacher) 272 Singer, P.


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Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us by John Hills

Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, credit crunch, Donald Trump, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage debt, pension reform, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, working-age population, World Values Survey

Pensions Commission (2005) A new pension settlement for the 21st century. The second report of the Pensions Commission, London: HMSO. Phillips, D. (2014) ‘Personal tax and welfare measures’, Institute for Fiscal Studies seminar presentation, March, London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the twenty-first century, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Power, A., Provan, B., Herden, E. and Serle, N. (2014) The impact of welfare reform on social landlords and tenants, Report by LSE Housing and Communities for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Rigg, J. and Sefton, T. (2006) ‘Income dynamics and the life cycle’, Journal of Social Policy, vol 35, pp 411–35.

In fact, virtually all of this increase in both the Conservative and Labour years went to the top 10 per cent – from 21 to 26 and then 27 per cent of the total – with little change for the next-to-top-tenth.47 Going beyond that, most of the increase actually went to those in the top 10 per cent who were in the top 1 per cent. Information from the World Top Incomes database, established by Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, shows that the after tax incomes of the top 1 per cent in the UK doubled from 4.7 of the national total in 1979 to 9.5 per cent in 1996 and 12.6 per cent on the eve of the economic crisis in 2007.48 There was a change in definition between 1989 and 1990 (when independent taxation was brought in), but even excluding the change over that period, the overall increase in their share over that period – just under 7 percentage points – was enough to account for the gain of the whole top 10 per cent.


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We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

NOTES PROLOGUE—BRANDS OF WAGE SLAVERY, MARKS OF LABOR SOLIDARITY 1. Material for this reflection derived from interviews conducted between March 2015 and April 2017—in the US and abroad. All interviews cited in the book were conducted by this author. CHAPTER 1—INEQUALITY RISING 1. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944). 3.


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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

., and Fazzari, Steven M. (2016), ‘Inequality, the Great Recession and Slow Recovery’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 40/2, 373–99; Stockhammer, Engelbert (2015), ‘Rising Inequality as a Cause of the Present Crisis’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 39/3, 935–58; Wisman, Jon D. (2013), ‘Wage Stagnation, Rising Inequality and the Financial Crisis of 2008’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 37/4, 921–45. 46 Atkinson; Piketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Stiglitz. 47 This is a simplified summary. People enter the market with different housing assets (some inherit a house) and some prices rise much faster than others, so there can be relative winners and losers from rising average house prices.

There are deeper difficulties with Osborne’s argument, difficulties not widely known even among economists. It is often assumed that if the top 1 per cent are incentivized by income tax cuts to earn more, those higher earnings reflect an increase in productive economic activity. In other words, the pie gets bigger. But some economists (including the influential Thomas Piketty) have shown this is not true for CEOs and other top corporate managers following the tax cuts in the 1980s. Instead, they essentially funded their own pay rises by paying shareholders less – which led in turn to lower dividend tax revenue for the government. Allowing for this and related effects – the rich redistributing the pie rather than making it bigger – Piketty and colleagues have argued that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate may be as high as 83 per cent.37 The income tax cuts for the rich over the past forty years were originally justified by economic arguments: Laffer’s rhetoric was seized upon by politicians.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

., 2003, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, New York, Penguin. p. xxv. 2. Putnam, R.D, 2000, Bowling Alone, New York, Simon and Schuster, brought the concept of social capital and the phrase into wide modern usage. 3. The data in the widely cited book by Thomas Piketty (2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) relies primarily on the first of these approaches – the assessment of physical assets – although much of his discussion would seem to concern the second. 4. The quality of these estimates is not high, especially in relation to long-lived public assets.

., 2012, ‘Wages and Human Capital in the US Financial Industry, 1909–2006’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127 (4): 1551–1609. Philips, C.B., Kinniry Jr, F.M., Schlanger, T., and Hirt, J.M., 2014, ‘The Case for Index-Fund Investing’, Vanguard Research, April, https://advisors.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/advisor/researchcommentary/article/IWE_InvComCase4Index. Piketty, T., 2014, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Porter, G.E., and Trifts, J.W., 2014, ‘The Career Paths of Mutual Fund Managers: The Role of Merit’, Financial Analysts Journal, 70 (4), July/August, pp. 55–71. Potts QC, R., Erskine Chambers, 24 June 1997, para. 5, citing Wilson v.


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Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109 (11): 4086–4091. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Power, Sally, Annabelle Allouch, Phillip Brown, and Gerbrand Tholen. 2016. “Giving Something Back? Sentiments of Privilege and Social Responsibility among Elite Graduates from Britain and France.” International Sociology 31 (3): 305–323. Pratto, Felicia, and Andrew L.

In the past ten years, rich people have faced another symbolic challenge as economic inequality has emerged as a dominant issue on the national stage.26 The 2008 housing market collapse and the subsequent “Great Recession” brought economic struggles front and center. In 2011 the Occupy movement’s critique of “the 1 percent” dominated even the mainstream media. In 2014 French economist Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book on inequality became a bestseller in the United States. Strikes by fast-food workers and prominent debates about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour also put the spotlight on low-wage workers in this period. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, despite their differences, kept outrage about economic disparities in the public eye.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Romer’s analysis tests the mathematical foundations of a number of seminal articles in the field of economics including - Solow’s 1956 mathematical theory of growth, Gary Becker’s 1962 mathematical theory of wages, McGrattan and Prescott’s 2010 paper on price-taking models of growth and Boldrin and Levine’s 2008 paper on Perfectly Competitive Innovation. He also analyses the work of other prominent economists such as Robert Lucas (Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995) and Thomas Piketty (who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century) among others. His analysis shows how Mathiness has been used repeatedly to bend data to fit a model. More disturbingly, these practices have been accepted by the academic community which makes the discipline of economics divergent from Popper’s scientific method of testing.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

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

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

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Since 2010, more countries “New Report: The Global Decline in Democracy Has Accelerated,” Freedom House, March 3, 2021, freedomhouse.org/​article/​new-report-global-decline-democracy-has-accelerated. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A key catalyst of instability See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), for wider surveys. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Between 1980 and 2021 “Top 1% National Income Share,” World Inequality Database, wid.world/​world/​#sptinc_p99p100_z/​US;FR;DE;CN;ZA;GB;WO/​last/​eu/​k/p/​yearly/​s/false/​5.6579999999999995/​30/​curve/​false/​country.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

And billionaires pay lower tax rates than America’s firefighters, nurses, and teachers. Saez has given more thought than most to what a just taxation system might look like. Now a household name in the economics field, Saez got his start by collaborating with Thomas Piketty, who made waves with his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Later, Saez was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” and the John Bates Clark Medal, which the American Economic Association bestows on a rising star in the field under the age of forty.25 One question Saez has asked is, What is the tax system that maximizes tax revenue—which can then be reinvested in public services?


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Norton, 1991]) who have also written about the integral role the breakdown of the family has played in the collapse of community. So whilst the debate can be characterised along partisan lines, there are obvious exceptions. 4 For the authoritative view of modern inequality and its relationship to neoliberal capitalism, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). On race and neoliberalism, see Darrick Hamilton and Kyle Strickland, ‘The Racism of Neoliberalism’, Evonomics, 22 February 2020, https://evonomics.com/racism-neoliberalism-darrick-hamilton/; or for more detail, see David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Nowak, Martin A., and Roger Highfield. SuperCooperators: Beyond the Survival of the Fittest: Why Cooperation, Not Competition, is the Key of Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 1999). Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014). Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Quart, Alissa. Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (New York: Ecco, 2018).


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109. Piketty, Thomas. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Arthur Goldhammer, trans. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. (2003). Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. Quarterly Journal of Economics 143(1):1–39, http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/118/1/1. Pinker, Steven. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Capitalism is a terrific economic engine, and the developing world could benefit from more for-profit companies. (One problem with firms like Toms is that the owners are rich-world people, while their workers are not.) But capitalism on its own concentrates wealth (and therefore power) in the hands of a few, as so many have noted, from Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty (2014). Other forces are needed to spread growth widely, whether it’s cooperatives, unions, progressive taxation, universal provision of basic needs, private charity, or a combination of these and other factors. Social-enterprise hype glorifies market mechanisms and therefore crowds out important approaches that come with few extrinsic rewards.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Wealthy individuals shell out cash to think tanks who promote their economic interests, after all, and the rise of the New Right has purged dissidents from economic faculties, ensuring that climbing the academic ranks depends on conforming to the line. Yet there remains a diverse range of economists and other experts – some of whom I have interviewed in the course of this book – who refuse to adhere to the status quo. In 2014 the French economist Thomas Piketty caused an intellectual sensation with the publication of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which exposed how inequality perpetuates itself and called for higher income taxes and a global tax on wealth. The problem is that such dissidents are often all too disparate and fragmented, working on individual projects that generally do not receive the attention of a hostile media.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

was from the very beginning David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 16. hijacked … from the landowners Cited in Harrison, Finding a Role?, p. 140. the top 1 per cent Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 17. 30 per cent of the country’s wealth Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), fig. 10.3. The Countryside Alliance Anthony Barnett, ‘Prince named as secret backer of hunt lobby’, Observer, 26 September 1999. fn Lord Peel as its chair Nicholas Schoon, ‘“Secret” pro-hunt group to go public’, Independent, 16 November 1995.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure of the United States at Mid-century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (1992), 1–34; Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, eds., The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). An excellent example of the contemporary belief in the postwar industrial compact is Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 6.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Chapter 11 CULTURE WARS AND CAPITAL The United States…on the one hand this is a country of egalitarian promise, a land of opportunity for millions of immigrants of modest background; on the other hand, it is a land of extremely brutal inequality, especially in relation to race. —Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century “Yes, every life lost is one too many,” the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, radio host Wendy Bell said into her Facebook Live camera on the first Sunday in April 2020, rocking back and forth slightly, apparently gripped by the animating energy of outrage. She appeared before a radio microphone, but her flawless bronzer and constant gestures toward the camera made it clear that she was working for a visual medium.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In the very same week at the beginning of 2011, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council disbanded and the Occupy Wall Street protest was announced. At that moment as well, the star economist Thomas Piketty, French rather than Austrian, was starting to focus people’s attention on the very rich—“transforming the economic discourse,” Krugman has said, especially after his remarkable 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In the 1970s the right coined (and still repeats endlessly) the genius term unelected bureaucrats to focus populist antigovernment blame. The economic left did something similar with the 1 percent (and unelected billionaires) in the 2010s.

Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Pierson, Paul, and Theda Skocpol. The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Piketty, Thomas, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 553–609. Plunkert, Lois M.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

The Earth’s biosphere is hardly present in Rosling’s book: there is nothing at all about such key concerns as the loss of biodiversity, and global warming gets 14 lines in 329 pages of the text. And if Rosling’s book is “about the world and how it really is,” why does it say nothing about increasing inequality of income and wealth distribution? This is a curious omission in a book that was published four years after Thomas Piketty’s much publicized Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014). I am well aware that Piketty’s conclusions have been questioned—notably, Auten and Splinter (2018) had convincingly demonstrated that not all of his claims about the shifts in the United States withstand a critical inquiry—but many other recent studies have shown that inequality has been on the rise around the world, perhaps most notably in China.

Nature 458:1009–1013. Pichard, P. and F. Lagirarde, eds. 2014. The Buddhist Monastery: A Cross-Cultural Survey. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Piers, L.S. and P.S. Shetty. 1993. Basal metabolic rates of Indian women. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 47:586–591. Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pimm, S.L. et al. 2014. The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection. Science 344. doi: 10.1126/science.1246752 Pinker, S. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin Books. Pinker, S. 2018.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Finance and Economics Discussion Series, Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC. Pike, A., D. MacKinnon, M. Coombes, T. Champion, D. Bradley, A. Cumbers, L. Robson, and C. Wymer. 2016. “Uneven Growth: Tackling City Decline.” York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Piketty, T., E. Saez, and G. Zucman. 2017. “Economic Growth in the US: A Tale of Two Countries.” Vox, March 29. https://voxeu.org/article/economic-growth-us-tale-two-countries. ———. 2018. “Distributional National Accounts; Methods and Estimates for the United States.”

Wolfgang Münchau has argued that the curse of our time is fake math. “Think of it,” he says, “as fake news for numerically literate intellectuals: it is the abuse of statistics and economic models to peddle one’s own political prejudice. … Fake maths has given us, the liberal establishment, the illusion of certainty.”28 He may well be right. Thomas Piketty has argued that “to put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves.


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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

It is no doubt striking that multibillionaires like Bill Gates and Carlos Slim routinely see their fortunes fluctuate by hundreds of millions on any given day, but it signifies nothing in particular. Only in the broader year-to-year changes does the information get interesting. Lately some of this billionaire data has surfaced in serious economic discussions. In his generally admiring review of Thomas Piketty’s 2013 international best seller on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers questioned the French author’s claims about the enduring power of inherited wealth in the United States by pointing to the high degree of churn among American billionaires. Summers highlighted the fact that only one out of every 10 names on the original Forbes list in 1982 were still on the list in 2012.

“Sustainable Economics: Mind the Inequality Gap.” Morgan Stanley Research, 2015. Pani, Marco. “Hold Your Nose and Vote: Why Do Some Democracies Tolerate Corruption?” International Monetary Fund, 2009. Parks, Ken. “Argentina Moves to Trim Costly Utility Subsidies.” Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2014. Pikkety, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. “Putin Publicly Humiliates Business Tycoons Solving Social Crisis in Russian Town.” Pravda, June 5, 2009. Robertson, Charles. “Will Anti-Corruption Legislation Prolong Corruption?” Renaissance Capital, December 5, 2012. Sharma, Ruchir.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

‘China Overtakes Japan as World’s Second-Biggest Economy’, BBC News, accessed 20 February 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12427321. See also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 78 and 585, and Jude Woodward, The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) for a general account of both the geopolitics and the economics. 5Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 31 and 412. 6‘Notice of the State Council: New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’, Foundation for Law and International Affairs, accessed 12 December 2020, https://flia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/A-New-Generation-of-Artificial-Intelligence-Development-Plan-1.pdf (translation by Flora Sapio, Weiming Chen, and Adrian Lo), ‘Home’, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, accessed 13 December 2020, https://www.baai.ac.cn/en, and Sarah O’Meara, ‘China’s Ambitious Quest to Lead the World in AI by 2030’, Nature 572 (2019). 7‘New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’, and Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 227. 8Huiying Liang et al., ‘Evaluation and Accurate Diagnoses of Pediatric Diseases Using Artificial Intelligence’, Nature Medicine 25 (2019), and Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, ‘IBM AI Algorithms Can Read Chest X-Rays at Resident Radiologist Levels’, IBM Research Blog, accessed 16 December 2020, https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/11/ai-x-rays-for-radiologists/. 9Lee, AI Superpowers, 14–17, and Drew Harwell and Eva Dou, ‘Huawei Tested AI Software That Could Recognize Uighur Minorities and Alert Police, Report Says’, Washington Post, accessed 16 December 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/08/huawei-tested-ai-software-that-could-recognize-uighur-minorities-alert-police-report-says/. 10Karen Hao, ‘The Future of AI Research is in Africa’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 16 December 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/21/134820/ai-africa-machine-learning-ibm-google/, and ‘Moustapha Cissé’, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, accessed 13 December 2020, https://nexteinstein.org/person/moustapha-cisse/. 11Shan Jie, ‘China Exports Facial ID Technology to Zimbabwe’, Global Times, accessed 14 December 2020, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1097747.shtml, and Amy Hawkins, ‘Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces’, Foreign Policy, accessed 14 December 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-big-brother-tech-needs-african-faces/. 12Elizabeth Gibney, ‘Israel–Arab Peace Accord Fuels Hope for Surge in Scientific Research’, Nature 585 (2020). 13Eliran Rubin, ‘Tiny IDF Unit is Brains behind Israel Army Artificial Intelligence’, Haaretz, accessed 12 December 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tiny-idf-unit-is-brains-behind-israeli-army-artificial-intelligence-1.5442911, and Jon Gambrell, ‘Virus Projects Renew Questions about UAE’s Mass Surveillance’, Washington Post, accessed 12 December 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/virus-projects-renew-questions-about-uaes-mass-surveillance/2020/07/09/4c9a0f42-c1ab-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html. 14Agence France-Presse, ‘UAE Successfully Launches Hope Probe’, The Guardian, accessed 20 November 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/20/uae-mission-mars-al-amal-hope-space, and Elizabeth Gibney, ‘How a Small Arab Nation Built a Mars Mission from Scratch in Six Years’, Nature, accessed 9 July 2020, https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-020-01862-z/index.html. 15Gibney, ‘How a Small Arab Nation’, and Sarwat Nasir, ‘UAE to Sign Agreement with Virgin Galactic for Spaceport in Al Ain Airport’, Khaleej Times, accessed 16 December 2020, https://www.khaleejtimes.com/technology/uae-to-sign-agreement-with-virgin-galactic-for-spaceport-in-al-ain-airport. 16‘UAE Successfully Launches Hope Probe’ and Jonathan Amos, ‘UAE Hope Mission Returns First Image of Mars’, BBC News, accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56060890. 17Smriti Mallapaty, ‘How China is Planning to Go to Mars amid the Coronavirus Outbreak’, Nature 579 (2020), ‘China Becomes Second Nation to Plant Flag on the Moon’, BBC News, accessed 4 December 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55192692, and Jonathan Amos, ‘China Mars Mission: Tianwen-1 Spacecraft Enters into Orbit’, BBC News, accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56013041. 18Çağrı Mert Bakırcı-Taylor, ‘Turkey Creates Its First Space Agency’, Nature 566 (2019), Sanjeev Miglani and Krishna Das, ‘Modi Hails India as Military Space Power after Anti-Satellite Missile Test’, Reuters, accessed 16 December 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-india-satellite/modi-hails-india-as-military-space-power-after-anti-satellite-missile-test-idUKKCN1R80IA, and Umar Farooq, ‘The Second Drone Age: How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power’, The Intercept, accessed 16 February 2021, https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/. 19John Houghton, Geoffrey Jenkins, and J.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Yet it was especially notable that the fissures the crisis produced did not take the form of conflicts between capitalist states, but of social conflict within them. The significance of the fact that the political fault-lines of global capitalism run within states rather than between them is, we suggest, replete with implications for the American empire’s capacity to sustain global capitalism in the twenty-first century. It is also pregnant with possibilities for the emergence of new movements to transcend capitalist markets and states. I PRELUDE TO THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE 1 The DNA of American Capitalism The role that the United States came to play in the making of global capitalism was not inevitable, but nor was it accidental.

Quoted in Russell Jacoby, “Politics of the Crisis Theory,” Telos, Spring 1975, p. 35. 97 See Simon Mohun, “Distributive Shares in the US Economy 1964–2001,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 30: 3 (2006). 98 For wages and labor compensation, see Economic Report of the President, Washington, DC, 2002, Tables, B-47, B-48, and B-60. For CEO compensation, see Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118: 1 (2003), Table b4, column 6, updated at elsa.berkeley.edu. 99 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, International Labor Comparisons: Productivity and unit labor costs in manufacturing, Table 1, available at bls.gov.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

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

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

James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 41–42; Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 2007), 337; Oxfam, “An Economy for the 99%,” in Oxfam Briefing Paper: Summary (Oxford: Oxfam, 2017); Royal Society, People and the Planet (London: Royal Society, 2012), 52; OECD,“Total Population,” in OECD Factbook 2011–2012: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/factbook-2011-9-en. See also Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 33. “Pollution and the Poor: Lawrence Summers’ Memo,” Economist, February 8, 1992, 66. The Economist, a magazine known for supporting the underlying values of capitalism, published Summers's memo and, while objecting to his explicit language, subsequently endorsed his position that migration of polluting industries to developing countries was “desirable.” 34.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

.), Slavery and the Atlantic System (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp. 43–61. Pierre, M. ‘La Transportation’, in J.-G. Petit et al. (eds), Histoire des galères, bagnes et prisons xii-xxes siècles: Introduction à l’histoire pénale de la France (Toulouse: Privat, 1991), pp. 231–59. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014). Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019). Pimlott, J.A.R. The Englishman’s Holiday (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976). Pines, Yuri et al. (eds). Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

China, too, deserves special attention, and very recently even India. This does not mean that nothing has changed on the European continent. The welfare state has clearly lost part of its pretensions, certainly after the deep financial crisis of 2008. The outcome is an increase in social inequality, as pointed out effectively by the French economist Thomas Piketty, who indicates the drop in the share of national income going to labour.164 To be clear, this is primarily about the widening gap and less about the stagnation of incomes at the bottom, in particular of wages over the past four decades. Despite the widespread availability of mobile phones and other electronic devices, Piketty believes that the real available income per household of ‘the bottom 50 per cent by income’ barely grew, if at all, in these years, certainly in the US.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

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

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

Reifner & Springeneer, ‘Private Überschuldung im internationalen Vergleich’; and Ramsay, ‘Comparative Consumer Bankruptcy’. 94. James D. Davies, ‘Wealth and Economic Inequality’, in: Wiemer Salverda, Brian Nolan & Timothy M. Smeeding, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (Oxford, 2009), ch. 6. And see now at length: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014). In this section, I am focusing on income inequality (not wealth), because earned income, rather than inherited country houses, became the main marker in the twentieth century. Piketty focuses on capital’s share of income (such as dividends and capital gains) and argues that we are seeing a return to a widening gulf between capital and labour that scarred the nineteenth century.