Diane Coyle

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GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

GDP GDP A BRIEF BUT AFFECTIONATE HISTORY DIANE COYLE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2014 by Diane Coyle Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket typography by Jerome Corgier/Marlena Agency. Jacket design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coyle, Diane.

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All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coyle, Diane. GDP : a brief but affectionate history / Diane Coyle. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-15679-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gross domestic product—History. 2. Economic history. 3. Economics—History. 4. Econometrics—History. I. Title. HC79.I5C725 2014 339.3′109—dc23 2013022478 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS Introduction 1 ONE From the Eighteenth Century to the 1930s: War and Depression 7 TWO 1945 to 1975: The Golden Age 41 THREE The Legacy of the 1970s: A Crisis of Capitalism 59 FOUR 1995 to 2005: The New Paradigm 77 FIVE Our Times: The Great Crash 93 SIX The Future: Twenty-first-Century GDP 119 Acknowledgments 141 Notes 143 Index 153 GDP Introduction “In Greece, statistics is a combat sport.”

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Nordhaus, “The Progress of Computing,” Department of Economics, Yale University, August 2001. 13. William J. Baumol, The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 14. Mark Bils and Peter J. Klenow, “The Acceleration in Variety Growth,” American Economic Review 91, no. 2 (2001): 274–280. 15. Diane Coyle, The Weightless World (Oxford: Capstone, 1996). CHAPTER 5: OUR TIMES: THE GREAT CRASH 1. James Glassman and Kevin Hassett, Dow 36,000 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999). 2. Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. See John Kay, Obliquity (London: Profile Books, 2010). 4.

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

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

These are the issues at the heart of my current academic research at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute but informed of course by my interests and experience of the policy world over many years—in fact, over almost a quarter of a century. 1. https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/millennialsurvey.html. 2. These chapters use material from a lecture at the Oxford Martin School in June 2019, https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/changing-technology-changing-economics-with-prof-diane-coyle/ and at Nottingham Trent University in February 2020, https://www.ntu.ac.uk/about-us/events/events/2020/02/professor-diane-coyle-cbe. 5 Changing Technology, Changing Economics My first book on the digital economy was published almost a quarter of a century ago (Coyle 1997). Engrossed in the research and writing in the year or so prior to its publication, I enthused about the revolutionary prospects of the internet to a very distinguished economist.

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COGS AND MONSTERS Cogs and Monsters What Economics Is, and What It Should Be Diane Coyle PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission.

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Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coyle, Diane, author. Title: Cogs and monsters : what economics is, and what it should be / Diane Coyle. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021017044 (print) | LCCN 2021017045 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691210599 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780691231037 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Electronic commerce—History—21st century. | Digital media—History—21st century. | Economics—History—21st century. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economics / General | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Public Finance Classification: LCC HF5548.32 .C69 2021 (print) | LCC HF5548.32 (ebook) | DDC 330—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017044 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017045 Version 1.0 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Editorial: Hannah Paul, Josh Drake Production Editorial: Terri O’Prey Jacket/Cover Design: Karl Spurzem Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: James Schneider, Kate Farquhar-Thomson Jacket image by Ryger / Shutterstock Dedicated to the memory of Peter Sinclair, 1946–2020 CONTENTS     Introduction: Economics Today and Tomorrow      1 1    The Public Responsibilities of the Economist      15 Intermission      83 2    The Economist as Outsider      87 Intermission      112 3    Homo Economicus, AIs, Rats and Humans      116 Intermission      131 4    Cogs and Monsters      135 Intermission      163 5    Changing Technology, Changing Economics      168 6    Twenty-First-Century Economic Policy      182 Afterword      211 Acknowledgements      217 References      221 Index      241 COGS AND MONSTERS Introduction ECONOMICS TODAY AND TOMORROW Economics comes in for plenty of criticism.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

Praise for the first edition “If you ever thought that economic policy could never make for gripping drama, try reading this book.” — Khurram Husain, Dawn “Masood covers decades of challenges to GDP conventions that make for a fascinating institutional and human story.” — Diane Coyle, Nature “Masood’s highly readable book is a useful reminder of what GDP is and what it isn’t.” — N. Gregory Mankiw, Science “Ehsan Masood unveils the genesis of GDP and how it shaped the modern economic paradigm. It comes at a time when a growing number of people are questioning this flawed metric.” — Down to Earth “Fascinating.

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Researchers increasingly are questioning whether GDP is fit for purpose: if the world is at risk of ecological grief, why are we still following its formula, they rightly ask. In The Value of Everything, Mariana Mazzucato of University College London illustrates how GDP incentivizes those economic sectors that will push the index ever higher, regardless of whether they are causing planetary harm, or widening inequality. Meanwhile, Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge and Benjamin Mitra-Kahn of Australia’s Intellectual Property Office have a two-step proposal. Firstly, to amend GDP by incorporating what it currently undervalues5 and then to move away from using GDP and instead valuing different kinds of “capital,” including human capital and natural capital as well as financial capital.6 A joint US–China team of researchers—Zhiyun Ouyang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gretchen Daily of Stanford University, and Jack Liu of Michigan State University—have been involved in implementing a concept they call Gross Ecosystem Product,7 in which the value of the natural world is quantified in dollars and cents, so that the world knows what it is losing each time something like a forest or a wetland is cleared to make way for industrial activity.

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Mustafa had come back to Pakistan after a spell studying and teaching in the United States, determined to make a difference in an otherwise lackluster education system. His college is still going strong. 2. In GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), Diane Coyle, professor of economics at the University of Manchester, says that GDP can be measured in three ways. The first is by adding up everything that an economy produces. The second is by adding together spending (or expenditures). The third method is to calculate incomes. Offices for national statistics in most countries will report on the results of all three methods.

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

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

“A wave of euphoria swept over Italians,” reported The New York Times, “after economists recalibrated their statistics taking into account for the first time the country’s formidable underground economy of tax evaders and illegal workers.”4 And that’s to say nothing of all the unpaid labor that doesn’t even qualify as part of the black market, from volunteering to child care to cooking, which together represents more than half of all our work. Of course, we can hire cleaners or nannies to do some of these chores, in which case they count toward the GDP, but we still do most ourselves. Adding all this unpaid work would expand the economy by anywhere from 37% (in Hungary) to 74% (in the UK).5 However, as the economist Diane Coyle notes, “generally official statistical agencies have never bothered – perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women.”6 While we’re on the subject, only Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7 – about the size of China’s military budget.8 The GDP also does a poor job of calculating advances in knowledge.

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David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology Review (June 12, 2013). http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs 22. Quoted in: Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, p. 27. 23. Ian Morris, Why The West Rules – For Now (2010), p. 495. 24. Morris, Why The West Rules, p. 497. 25. Diane Coyle, GDP. A Brief but Affectionate History (2014), p. 79. 26. Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, The New Division of Labor (2004). 27. There are indications that even jobs for the highly-skilled have come under pressure since 2000, leading them to snap up the less-skilled jobs. Increasingly, employees are overqualified for their jobs.

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Merijn Knibbe, “De bestedingsgevolgen van de watersnoodramp: een succesvolle ‘Keynesiaanse’ schok,” Lux et Veritas (April 1, 2013). http://www.luxetveritas.nl/blog/?p=3006 3. Frédéric Bastiat, “Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas” (1850). http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html 4. Quoted in: Diane Coyle, GDP. A Brief but Affectionate History (2014) p. 106. 5. OECD (2011), “Cooking and Caring, Building and Repairing: Unpaid Work around the World,” Society at a Glance 2011, p. 25. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/society-at-a-glance-2011/cooking-and-caring-building-and-repairing_soc_glance-2011-3-en Also see: Coyle, GDP, p. 109. 6.

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

In 1934, long before the Bretton Woods Agreement, Kuznets warned US Congress not to focus too narrowly on GNP/GDP: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,” he said.6 In this he was right. GDP tells us about consumption, but it does not tell us about well-being. It tells us about production but not pollution or the resource use. It tells us about government expenditure and private investments but not about the quality of life. Oxford economist Diane Coyle told us in an August 2019 interview7 that, in reality, GDP was “a war-time metric.” It tells you what your economy can produce when you're in war, but it does not tell you how you can make people happy when you're at peace. Despite the warning, no one listened. Policymakers and central banks did everything they could to prop up GDP growth.

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The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

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Because this balance sheet would also need to include human capital, we could incorporate all of the relevant elements in one composite scorecard.30 And a third, concrete option is to include the Climate Action Tracker in the dashboard of governments, as it shows each country's progress toward meeting its national commitments under the Paris agreement.”31 Some of these proposals are developed by the Wealth Project, a group consisting of economists including Diane Coyle and Mariana Mazzucato,32 who have long expressed their concern of the dominance of GDP. Companies, too, should expand their horizon beyond the profit-and-loss statement—and they are increasingly willing to do so. Ahead of the 50th Annual Meeting in Davos, I presented companies with a “Davos Manifesto 2020,” which describes “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”33 The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation.

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

In 1934, long before the Bretton Woods Agreement, Kuznets warned US Congress not to focus too narrowly on GNP/GDP: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,” he said.6 In this he was right. GDP tells us about consumption, but it does not tell us about well-being. It tells us about production but not pollution or the resource use. It tells us about government expenditure and private investments but not about the quality of life. Oxford economist Diane Coyle told us in an August 2019 interview7 that, in reality, GDP was “a war-time metric.” It tells you what your economy can produce when you're in war, but it does not tell you how you can make people happy when you're at peace. Despite the warning, no one listened. Policymakers and central banks did everything they could to prop up GDP growth.

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The Nobel Prize, “Simon Kuznets Biographical,” 1971, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/biographical/. 4 “GDP: A brief history,” Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, January 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/gdp-a-brief-history/. 5 Ibidem. 6 “Beyond GDP: Economists Search for New Definition of Well-Being,” Der Spiegel, September 2009, https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html. 7 Phone interview with Diane Coyle by Peter Vanham, August 18, 2019. 8 Measured in constant 2010 US dollars. 9 World Bank, GDP Growth (annual %), 1961–2018, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG. 10 “What's a Global Recession,” Bob Davis, The Wall Street Journal, April 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/04/22/whats-a-global-recession/. 11 United States Census Bureau, International Data Base, September 2018, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/informationGateway.php. 12 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, Updated July 2019, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/07/18/WEOupdateJuly2019. 13 “World Economic Outlook,” International Monetary Fund, April 2019, Appendix A https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WEO/2019/April/English/text.ashx?

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Because this balance sheet would also need to include human capital, we could incorporate all of the relevant elements in one composite scorecard.30 And a third, concrete option is to include the Climate Action Tracker in the dashboard of governments, as it shows each country's progress toward meeting its national commitments under the Paris agreement.”31 Some of these proposals are developed by the Wealth Project, a group consisting of economists including Diane Coyle and Mariana Mazzucato,32 who have long expressed their concern of the dominance of GDP. Companies, too, should expand their horizon beyond the profit-and-loss statement—and they are increasingly willing to do so. Ahead of the 50th Annual Meeting in Davos, I presented companies with a “Davos Manifesto 2020,” which describes “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”33 The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

But it was with the emergence of dynamic market economies (growing rapidly on the basis of an increased population), global trade, modern banking, and industrialization that the tension between the professed moral values of Christianity and the economic needs of society became seriously stretched. Today, the belief that economic growth is a good thing is a basic assumption shared by the great majority of economists, political theorists, and politicians. As economist Diane Coyle remarks, “virtually every society in the modern world has come to be focused on the achievement of economic growth.”10 This is what most people everywhere seem to want, and no mainstream politician, whether democratically elected or not, would dream of opposing this goal. Since the end of the Second World War, the single most important statistic used for measuring economic growth has been a country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within the country over a specified period of time.

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Yet in spite of all these criticisms, reservations, and alternative indexes, GDP remains important for economists and policy makers because it is a single number that, even if it oversimplifies matters, provides some sort of basic unit with which to make comparisons between countries and over time. And the assumption that there is some correlation between GDP and general well-being isn’t fanciful; countries with the highest GDP per capita typically rank high on other positive indexes, while those with relatively low GDP per capita typically don’t. This is Diane Coyle’s view: Economic growth contributes to happiness, and GDP growth should remain a policy target. . . . There’s no doubt that in a number of ways GDP is a flawed statistic as a measure of welfare. But any replacement would be flawed too, not to mention much harder for many countries to collect and measure; at least with the familiar GDP statistics we know what we’re getting.15 The argument about the usefulness of GDP, or per capita GDP, as an indicator of individual or social well-being is really a technical debate within a larger philosophical discussion about values and goals.

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People in wealthy countries (those with a relatively high per capita income) are not on the whole happier than people in less wealthy (but not impoverished) countries. And although per capita income in the United States rose steadily over three decades following World War II, individuals in the 1970s did not report being any happier than individuals in the 1940s.16 Naturally, these claims have been disputed. Diane Coyle, for instance, writes: “The new conventional wisdom about happiness and growth is mistaken. Growth does make us happier, easily seen perhaps as the mirror of the unhappiness caused by economic recession.”17 But Easterlin and others reject this argument. They agree that in the short term, economic upturns or downturns produce corresponding swings in the levels of reported happiness.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

Praise for The Hidden Half ‘Brilliant. Blastland provides an explanation of the need for humility in the face of the inevitable limits to knowledge.’ Diane Coyle – Bennett Professor of Public Policy, Cambridge University ‘Fascinating... As John Wooden said, it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’ Andrew Gelman – author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State ‘Beautifully written and often very funny.’ Dame Frances Cairncross – Chair, Executive Committee of the Institute for Fiscal Studies ‘Packed with fascinating examples of our shaky understanding of ourselves and the world.’

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If the detailed, small pictures of people’s personal lives aren’t consistent with the big picture drawn by the state, will they trust what the state tells them? Or will they reject the institutions that proclaim it and say instead: ‘I’m not like that; my family is not like that.’ The big picture falls into disrepute: ‘That’s your bloody GDP. . .’ Is Brexit another consequence of what happens when we overlook irregularity? The economist Diane Coyle says the variation between places was ‘hidden from public debate because regional and social inequalities tend to be obscured by the headline growth in GDP. In the UK, there were not even any up-to-date regional GDP figures available ahead of the Brexit referendum; they are only now starting to be published.’15 The Bank of England and the Office for National Statistics have begun to worry about what some call ‘granularity’ – how the right-here-right-now is missed by aggregated data – and to explore ways of showing that the economic story is not one story but many.

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Their words, ideas and influence permeate the book. I hope I’ve done them justice and caused no embarrassment. There are many more whose work I’ve drawn on with interest, respect and pleasure: Nick Chater, Glenn Begley, Wendy Johnson, Mervyn King, John Laub and Robert Sampson, Tom Gash, Dorothy Bishop, Diane Coyle, Tim Harford, Stephen Senn, Andrew Gelman, Angus Deaton, Paul Johnson, Orazio Attanasio, Chris Dillow, Raymond Hubbard, Andy Haldane, Marcus Munafò, Nessa Carey, Helen Pearson, Philip Ball, Onora O’Neill, Judith Rich Harris, Ray Pawson, Noah Smith, to name a few. Thanks to still more who have educated me – up to my limited point – in subjects such as chaos theory, causality, research design, as well as specific ideas in economics, policy-making, education, international development, and so on; to various groups to whom I’ve presented at conferences and elsewhere who answered back.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The Economics of Enough THE ECONOMICS OF ENOUGH HOW TO RUN THE ECONOMY AS IF THE FUTURE MATTERS DIANE COYLE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2011 by Diane Coyle Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Julee Holcombe, Babel Revisited, copyright © 2004.

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The Economics of Enough THE ECONOMICS OF ENOUGH HOW TO RUN THE ECONOMY AS IF THE FUTURE MATTERS DIANE COYLE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2011 by Diane Coyle Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Julee Holcombe, Babel Revisited, copyright © 2004. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coyle, Diane. The economics of enough : how to run the economy as if the future matters / Diane Coyle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14518-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Economic policy. 2. Values. 3. Happiness. I. Title. HD87.C69 2011 330—dc22 2010041654 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon and Futura Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Overview PART ONE: CHALLENGES ONE Happiness TWO Nature THREE Posterity FOUR Fairness FIVE Trust PART TWO: OBSTACLES SIX Measurement SEVEN Values EIGHT Institutions PART THREE: MANIFESTO NINE The Manifesto of Enough Acknowledgments Notes References Illustration Credits Index The Economics of Enough OVERVIEW In mid-september 2007 my sister phoned me to ask whether she should withdraw her savings from the bank and put the money somewhere else—and if so, where would be safe.

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“Social Wants and Dismal Science: The Curious Case of the Climbing Costs of Health and Teaching.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137:4, pp. 419–40. Baumol, William, with William Bowen. 1966. Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and the Twentieth Century Fund. Beck, Thorsten, Diane Coyle, Mathias Dewatripont, Xavier Freizas, and Paul Seabright. 2010. “Bailing out the Banks: Reconciling Stability and Competition.” London: Centre for Economic Policy Research. Becker, Sasha, Karolina Ekholm, and Marc-Andreas Muendler. 2009. “Offshoring and the Onshore Composition of Tasks and Skills.”

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar

active transport: walking or cycling, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, BRICs, congestion charging, Crossrail, Diane Coyle, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Network effects, railway mania, trade route, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

Are Trams Socialist? Series editor: Diane Coyle The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis — Andrew Sentance Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin Identity Is The New Money — David Birch Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy Christian Wolmar Copyright © 2016 Christian Wolmar Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-907994-57-9 (epub) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Candara Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com Preface Gothenburg tram.

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Why Britain Has No Transport Policy Christian Wolmar Copyright © 2016 Christian Wolmar Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-907994-57-9 (epub) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Candara Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com Preface Gothenburg tram. Photo by Diane Coyle. Transport was a bit of an afterthought in the creation of the UK’s system of governance. There was no government department responsible for all aspects of transport until the creation of the Ministry of Transport in the aftermath of World War I, and in its various successive incarnations the transport ministry has never been granted the kind of importance that such weighty matters as finance, defence or home ­affairs have been accorded.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers. The Weightless World Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy Diane Coyle Copyright © Diane Coyle 1997 The right of Diane Coyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First Published 1997 Capstone Publishing Limited Oxford Centre for Innovation Mill Street Oxford OX2 0JX United Kingdom All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Finally, I’d like to express heartfelt gratitude to those people at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development who went out of their way to look up all sorts of figures and publications for me, in a true spirit of wanting to further our understanding of the world. Responsibility for the finished product, with all its infelicities, warts and omissions, is mine. Diane Coyle June 1997 Chapter One. The Weightless World A single imported greetings card with a microchip that plays Happy Birthday when the card is opened contains more computer power than existed on the planet 50 years ago. It weighs a gram or so. This might seem an odd choice of example to illustrate economic progress, but weightlessness is the key to understanding the new industrial revolution we are living through.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

The Currency Cold War Series editor: Diane Coyle The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis — Andrew Sentance Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin Identity Is The New Money — David Birch Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart?

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Birch Published by London Publishing Partnership www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk Published in association with Enlightenment Economics www.enlightenmenteconomics.com All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-913019-09-9 (epub) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book has been composed in Candara Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com Cover design by James Shannon www.jshannon.com Dedicated to the person who first encouraged me to write a book at all: Diane Coyle. It is because of her that this book went from concept to manuscript in a time I would not have thought possible a few years back! Contents Foreword by Michael J. Casey Preface Introduction Part 1 Digital Currency Chapter 1 What is digital currency? Chapter 2 Technology as catalyst Chapter 3 Anyone can make money Part 2 Drivers for change Chapter 4 What problem will digital currency fix?

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6 However, there is also a good reason why smart observers do not dismiss it: ‘censorship-resistant’ implies an open, neutral platform that could be a driver of permissionless innovation. 7 John Cryan, while CEO of Deutsche Bank, was famously quoted in the Financial Times as saying that his bank would shift from employing people to act like robots to employing robots to act like people. 8 As I asked at Digital Jersey’s Annual Review in 2018, in an echo of Fred Schwed’s 1940s financial services classic … where are the customers’ bots? 9 AlphaGo Zero, which taught itself to play, has already beaten AlphaGo, which was taught to play by humans, by a hundred games to zero. You heard that right: zero. 10 As the economist Diane Coyle pointed out in a Financial Times article (published 26 January 2017), it may be that transparency is the key to making this work, which highlights at least one area where the technology of shared ledgers and machine learning – blockchains and bots – may come together. 11 At the time of writing, the trading of tokens has just overtaken the trading of cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. 12 They go on to say, and I strongly agree, that this means it is important to achieve a social consensus on how such smart money should be integrated into the existing financial system.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

PERSPECTIVES DRIVERLESS CARS: ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE C H RIS TIA N WO L M A R Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere PERSPECTIVES Series editor: Diane Coyle The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis — Andrew Sentance Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin Identity Is The New Money — David Birch Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart?

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By Editor5807 (own work) [GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 (https://commons.wikimedia. org/​w iki/​C ommons:GNU_Free_Documentation_License,_version​ _1.2)] via Wikimedia Commons. 120 PERSPECTIVES Centennial Scholar are at essays the Brookings Institution, and co-author of The Perspectives on big ideas by leading writers, each given Revolution free rein and a modest word limit to reframe an issue of Metropolitan great contemporary interest. Diane Coyle, Series Editor ‘This is just what the robot evangelists don’t want you to read: a rational, levelheaded, compelling yet cheerful analysis of why the driverless car‘s route to success is so uncertain. Wolmar has simmered the hype to reveal real-world motorindustry paranoia and tech-sector hubris, and he explains why autonomous cars probably aren’t coming to a street near you anything like as soon as you’ve been led to believe.’

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Anyway, to restore fair contributions, some years later EU statisticians revised their methodologies to treat the black economy equally in all EU countries and things like software and drug dealing and prostitution were added to the figures in 1991, which in turn boosted the UK economy significantly. Diane Coyle explores this statistical revision in her book GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, saying that ‘the largely cash-based informal economy of moonlighting, avoiding taxes and regulations, but creating work and output, has been placed inside the production boundary’ (Coyle 2014). So it is measured, but the people in that economy are not contributing their fair share to the national piggy bank.

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In this category, e-cash is really a symptom of fundamental change: as the developed economies have become information economies, the problem of trying to measure, assess and control those economies has sharpened. Economists already wonder about existing measures. Figures that may have understated actual growth and productivity gains over the past few years could have sent the wrong signals to both policy makers and financial markets. In what economist Diane Coyle called the ‘weightless economy’ (Coyle 1997a) the task of measuring and managing economic activity may well move beyond the bounds of what is possible through traditional structures, and electronic money could contribute to (but not create) a real problem for governments: the lack of intermediaries for reporting on monetary flows.

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And if they cannot be accounted, how are they to be managed? Since the government cannot simply measure all the money flows in the economy and use that actual data instead of ancient statistical estimates that often need to be revised, it has, in essence, no idea what is going on. This was observed most famously, as Diane Coyle has noted, when Denis Healey went cap in hand to the IMF because Britain was in recession – only to discover, when the figures were later updated, that it hadn’t been. This led me to reflect on the old Robert Heinlein science fiction novel Beyond This Horizon, in which cash is extinct and all payments run through computers and all the computers are connected to the government computer so the government can twiddle the knobs and dials to keep the economy on course.

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

A commission from Ryan Avent of the Economist gave us the idea of writing something for a wider audience. We are also grateful to the people who challenged us to think about the broader implications of intangibles for the economy and for society and who patiently commented on drafts. Particular thanks go to Diane Coyle, for her insightful advice and comments throughout the project, and to Alex Edmans, Fernando Galindo Rueda, Neil Lee, Mike Lynch, David Pitt Watson, and Giles Wilkes, who commented on particular chapters, and Simon Haskel, who read the text in its entirety. Other readers and discussants to whom we are very grateful include Hasan Bakhshi, Daniel Finkelstein, Tom Forth, John Kay, Juan Mateos Garcia, Ramana Nanda, Paul Nightingale, Robert Peston, and Bart van Ark.

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Business gurus urged managers to think about how to thrive in a knowledge economy. Economists began to think about how research and development and the ideas that resulted from it might be incorporated into their models of economic growth, an economy parsimoniously encapsulated by the title of Diane Coyle’s book The Weightless World. Authors like Charles Leadbeater suggested we might soon be “living on thin air.” The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 dampened some of the wilder claims about a new economy, but research continued among economists to understand what exactly was changing. It was in this context that a group of economists assembled in Washington in 2002 at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth to think about how exactly to measure the types of investment that people were making in what they were calling “the new economy.”

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In the next chapter, we will look in more depth at how to measure intangible investment in the economy. 3 How to Measure Intangible Investment This chapter explains how intangible investment can be measured, and how economists worked it out. How Is Investment Measured and Why? The story of how economists and statisticians came to measure intangible investment is a late episode in a much bigger story: the invention of GDP and systems of national accounts.1 This story is engagingly told in Diane Coyle’s GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History and Ehsan Masood’s The Great Invention: The Story of GDP. One of the biggest conceptual challenges involved in the creation of GDP was deciding what to count. This was an old problem. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, puzzled over whether England was producing more than it did at the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Expect organisations to publish their policies on flexible working which go beyond the formal legal ‘right to request’ and to state a suite of options ranging from the four-day week to Arup’s seven-day ‘Work Unbound’ to Fujitsu’s ‘Shift’ model.8 6. Pricing in Purpose I certainly agree with the economists Diane Coyle of the University of Cambridge and Leonard Nakamura of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Research Department who believe that ‘a measure of welfare should become part of a system of accounts’.9 In practice this means that root and branch reform of the way organisations run needs to continue so that inequalities are addressed and the workforce can trust that there is a point to their time and expertise.

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See ‘Arup Embraces Seven-Day Work Week With Flexible Hours’, Consultancy.uk, 21 May 2021, https://www.consultancy.uk/news/27991/arup-embraces-seven-day-work-week-with-flexible-hours; and Karen Thomson, ‘Work-Life Shift: Making Flexible Working the Norm’, Fujitsu UK, 12 February 2021, https://blog.uk.fujitsu.com/responsible-business/work-life-shift-making-flexible-working-the-norm/#.YYFtgp7P2Uk 9. Diane Coyle, ‘A Time-Based Approach to Measuring Economic Welfare’, Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, 22 January 2019, https://www.escoe.ac.uk/a-time-based-approach-to-measuring-economic-welfare/ 10. See Glassdoor, a leader on insights into jobs and companies, https://www.glassdoor.com/about-us/ 11.

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

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

It is just a clever way of measuring some of the stuff that we humans get up to. Growth was a great invention. Now get over it. NOTES THE CULT OF GROWTH 1. See Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017; Ed Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Little, Brown, 2017. 2. Borrowed from Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 124. 3. I’ve always attributed this phrase to Bill Emmott, former editor of The Economist. Whether or not he invented it, he uses it frequently. 4. “Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe the Shit He Makes for Americans,” Onion, June 15, 2005: www.theonion.com. 5.

…

Liabilities, on the other hand, are the monies deposited with a bank, which one day it will have to give back. 15. Andrew Haldane, “The $100 Billion Question,” 2010: www.bankofengland.co.uk. 16. Haldane, Brennan, and Madouros, “What is the contribution of the financial sector,” p. 92. 17. Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, Princeton University Press, p. 99. 18. Haldane, Brennan, and Madouros, “What is the contribution of the financial sector,” p. 88. 19. Coyle, GDP, p. 102. CHAPTER 5: THE INTERNET STOLE MY GDP 1. Sir Charles Bean, “Independent Review of UK Economic Statistics,” Cabinet Office, HM Treasury, March 2016. 2.

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

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

Transport for Humans Series editor: Diane Coyle The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis — Andrew Sentance Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin Identity Is The New Money — David Birch Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier — Danny Dorling Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar Travel Fast or Smart?

…

We are inspired by the fact that travellers and transport operators have historically demonstrated a remarkable capacity to innovate and cooperate. We hope that what we are learning now, combined with the insights in this book, will make travel a little more human in future. Acknowledgements We are indebted to Diane Coyle for proposing that this book was even a possibility and for having the perseverance to reshape several drafts over its four-year development. Upon her recommendation, brilliant editing by Tim Philips has made the text more precise and much more enjoyable to read. We thank Richard Baggaley and Sam Clark, who have both gone above and beyond with their tenacity to bring the book into existence.

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

Naidu and his colleagues, in their paper on labour market power, forcefully make this general case, highlighting, among companies that seemingly ‘have achieved such powerful monopsonies that they should be broken up … platform-based firms that receive vast flows of valuable data services without any compensation (such as Facebook and Google)’.68 Diane Coyle makes the UK case, albeit more tentatively, flagging as a potential concern for policymakers ‘the theoretical scope for platforms to become monopsony buyers in the labour market. The discussion of their market dominance in the literature focuses on the product market side. However, it would also be possible for them to become dominant in certain geographic labour markets.’69 To be sure, the notion that the digital-platform space might be the locus of rapidly escalating inequalities between capital and labour clashes with the popular image of ‘tech bros’ setting up platform companies, taking them to IPO (initial public offering), and earning vast financial rewards in the process.

…

“The problem is that the regulator spends all its time talking to the company and its investors,” says [the academic David] Hall.’55 And there are certainly those who believe that, in the eternal interregnum preceding the promised emergence of competition, the UK’s privatized network industries have indeed to some extent captured their respective regulators. One of them is Diane Coyle, who has noted the fact that entire teams are employed by infrastructure companies to handle regulatory relations.56 Nevertheless, whether or not capture has taken place is almost beside the point if one is primarily interested, as we are here, in the substance of regulation – and, more importantly still, its effects.

…

An extraordinary range and wealth of key assets have been privatized, including most notably land and housing (Chapter 7), infrastructures for the provision of public utilities (Chapter 6) and contractual responsibility for carrying out tasks previously discharged by the public sector (Chapter 5); as the economist Diane Coyle has observed, ‘the belief the public sector should own as little as possible’ has become nothing less than an ‘article of faith’ among successive administrations in Whitehall, New Labour included.43 At the same time, the rights attached to the burgeoning stock of privately owned assets, from natural resource reserves (Chapter 2) to IP assets (Chapter 3), and from radio spectrum (Chapter 6) to rental housing (Chapter 7), have been widely strengthened, in the process changing the practical meaning and substance of ‘ownership’.

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

Brain Arthur, Doyne Farmer, Andreas Antonopoulos, Satyajit Das, Joyce Appleby, Yanis Varoufakis, Patrick O’Sullivan, Nigel Allington, Mark Esposito, Sitabhra Sinha, Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, Andy Stern, Alan Kirman, Neel Kashkari, Danny Dorling, David Graeber, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Vitalik Buterin, Andy Haldane, Gillian Tett, Martin Sandbu, Robert Reich, Kenneth Rogoff, Paul Beaudry, Michael Kumhof, Diane Coyle, Ben Dyson, Dirk Helbing, Guy Michaels, David Autor, Richard Gendal Brown, Tim Swanson, David Andolfatto, Paul Pfleiderer, Zoltan Pozsar, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, César Hidalgo, and Robin Hanson, among others. An equal measure of thanks also needs to be given to all the academics and researchers whom I had the chance to meet via the Institute of New Economic Thinking.

…

Yet in recent times, its ability to appropriately represent the true productivity of a country is increasingly criticized. While writing a critique on this topic is beyond the scope of this book, readers are invited to look at other indicators such as the Social Progress Index and the OECD Better Life Index. Another excellent resource is Diane Coyle’s, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, which shows why this statistic was invented, how it has changed, what are its pros and cons and why it is inappropriate for a 21st century economy driven by innovation, services, and intangible goods. 22The concept of technological underemployment and unemployment has been explored in detail by Guy Standing in his very excellent book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, (2011). 23Overt Money finance is the act of creating new money and giving it to people via spending or tax cuts. 24Tax expenditures: when the government spends revenue via the tax system by giving a deduction on taxable income.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

In truth we do not know how well our economy or our society is really growing at any given time, even in economic terms, let alone human well-being. A Second Curve badly needs a more satisfactory measure of a society’s growth. In her illuminating book GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, the economist Diane Coyle suggests that policymakers should adopt a dashboard of different measures. Sadly, politicians and the public yearn for the simplicity of a single number and, says Coyle, GDP is the best we have. Unfortunately it is used in public debate as the only measure in common use to assess our progress as a society.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

The rest of the world will then have to catch up. Acknowledgements A multidisciplinary team was needed to make this book happen. Emer Coleman, Russell Davies and Giles Turnbull provided us with wise advice on the words, and made sure that we annoyed fewer people unnecessarily. Diane Coyle was an excellent and patient editor (as well as being kind enough to ask us to write this book in the first place). Richard Baggaley, Jon Wainwright and Sam Clark helped us navigate the unfamiliar world of publishing without too many missteps. Francis Maude was generous enough to find the time to write us a foreword.

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

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

*Argentina, famously, was one of the richest countries in the world at the beginning of World War I, only to stumble into a seemingly endless series of policy errors that have ended with it left in the dust by Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and essentially all of Eastern Europe, to say nothing of the truly rich countries of North America and Western Europe. *Lyman Stone, “American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They’d Like,” New York Times, February 13, 2018. *See Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), for the development of the economic data we take for granted today. *The standard source is Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), table A.4.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

I would also like to thank the following people for providing assistance with resources, added explanation, logistical support, research guidance, editing, encouragement, and invaluable criticism: Aaron Ernst, Adam Rogers, Aiichiro Kurata, Aimee Geissler, Allen Kupetz, Andrew Steckl, Andy Jordan, Anil Kakani, Anne Marie DiStefano, Anthony Effinger, Astrid Mitchell, Carlson Chambliss, Carol B., Charlotte Webb, Coert Voorhees, Daniel Lowther, David Abrams, David Tidmarsh, Diane Coyle, Einar Baldvin Stefánsson, Erik Jensen, Erik Steiner, Frederick Reimers, Glenn Wood, Greg Lastowka, Hannes van Rensburg, Heather Wax, Heidar Gudjonsson, James Grant, Jan S., Jason Jarrell, Jim Bruene, Jim Rosenberg, Jonathan Carver, Jonathan Lipow, Joshua Davis, Julian Smith, Kabir Kumar, Kakha Bendukidze, Kathleen Vohs, Kiera Butler, Lee Voo van der, Lewis Iadarola, Liana McCabe, Lisa Rutherford, Mark Pickens, Mark Robinson, Marta Peiret, Matt Dill, Matteo Chiampo, Michael Linton, Michael Salmony, Mugdha Bhargava, Neha Mehra, Nick Hughes, Nick McKenzie, Oakley Brooks, Ólafur Ísleifsson, Pallab Mitra, Paul Collins, Paul Makin, Peter Fishman, R.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Platforms, regulation and competition 191 24 See https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/smartphone-suit-against-google-plays-101909548. html, 18 July 2014. 25 White Paper: Regulation, the Internet Way: A Data-First Model for Establishing Trust, Safety, and Security, Nick Grossman, 8 April 2015. 26 See A. Stemler, ‘Regulation 2.0: The Marriage of New Governance and Lex Informatica’, Kelley School of Business Research Paper No. 16-25, March 2016. 27 See, for example, ‘The Sharing Economy in the UK’, report commissioned by Airbnb, Diane Coyle, 18 January 2016. Chapter 14 Competing against platforms We have seen how platforms are designed, ignited, scaled-up and defended once mature, but what about traditional businesses facing increased competition and disruptions from platform entrants? How to deal with platform disruption is a question often asked by leaders of large established organizations.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

This pseudoscientific logic helped assuage any guilt and deflected brickbats from critics such as Mark Twain. During the Reagan era, similar pseudoscientific rationale was provided by the themes of shareholder capitalism, and especially by Ayn Rand. The outcome is that business leaders are constantly driving one another to garner more income. As Diane Coyle, visiting professor at the University of Manchester, wrote: “[The] banking bonus culture validated making a lot of money as a life and career goal…. Remuneration consultants … helped ratchet up the pay and bonus levels throughout the economy.”13 “Too much” became “never enough.” In hindsight, it’s clear that CEOs pursuing their own magnified self-interest within this new environment enabled business leaders to engage in de facto class warfare as they strove to seize a larger share of the gains from growth.

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Nabil Al-Najjar, Sandeep Baliga, and David Besanko, “Market Forces Meet Behavioral Biases: Cost Misallocation and Irrational Pricing,” Rand Journal of Economics 39, 214–237, 2008. 9 Richard Roll, “The Hubris Hypothesis of Corporate Takeovers,” Journal of Business 59, 197–216, 1986. 10 Mark Armstrong and Steffen Huck, “Behavioral Economics As Applied to Firms: A Primer,” January 2010. 11 Robert Reich, Supercapitalism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2008), 108. 12 David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal (New York: Portfolio/Penguin Group, 2003), 240. 13 Diane Coyle, The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy As If the Future Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 14 Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancata, Stephane Cote, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences, February 27, 2012. 15 For example, see: Randall Morck, Andrie Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Alternative Mechanisms for Corporate Control,” American Economic Review, 1989, 79:842–852. 16 Ian Austen, “Shake-Up at Canadian Pacific Railway As Activist Investor Takes Control,” New York Times, May 18, 2012. 17 Peter Whoriskey, “The Lake Wobegon Effect Lifts CEO’s Pay,” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2011, and Ryan Chittum, “Cronyism and Executive Compensation,” The Audit, Columbia Journalism Review, Oct. 4, 2011. 18 Whoriskey, Ibid. 19 Heather Landy, “Executives Took, But the Directors Gave,” New York Times, April 5, 2009. 20 David Cay Johnston, Perfectly Legal, 2003, 250. 21 David Carr, “Why Not Occupy Newsrooms?

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Hobhouse, who believed that liberty depended, in all its domains, on equality – equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality of parties to a contract.395 Employee-ownership provides a way of increasing liberty and equality together. RUNNING WITH THE TECHNOLOGICAL TIDE In her book, The Weightless World, Diane Coyle points out that although people in most industrialized countries experienced something like a twentyfold increase in their real incomes during the twentieth century, the weight of all that was produced at the end of the century was roughly the same as it had been at the beginning.396 She also says that the average weight of one dollar’s worth of US exports (adjusted for inflation) fell by a half between 1990 and 1996.

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

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

Of particular value have been regular meetings at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (OeKB) in Vienna and the Accumulation Society in London. I have also benefited from my occasional involvement with the Business Council for Britain. Those who offered encouragement when the book was merely a vague concept include Diane Coyle, Hamish McRae and Martin Wolf. All three know a lot more than I do about writing books and all were kind enough to steer me in the right direction. I am enormously grateful to the people at Yale University Press. Special thanks go to Phoebe Clapham, my editor, who was dogged in her determination to turn my scribblings into a coherent final manuscript.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Among the many people who have over the years given me ideas, information, inspiration, knowledge, feedback, or encouragement are Dimitra Alexopoulou, David Autor, Richard Baldwin, Torsten Bell, Jared Bernstein, Michael Goldfarb, Heather Grabbe, Jason Furman, Arancha Gonzalez, Sandra Kanthal, Joris Luyendijk, Philippe Martin, Branko Milanovic, Karl Ove Moene, Yascha Mounk, Christian Odendahl, Jan Piotrowski, Dani Rodrik, John Springford, Simon Tilford, Kevin O’Rourke, Betsey Stevenson, Arvind Subramanian, Adam Tooze, Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe, Anne Case, Diane Coyle, Angus Deaton, Swati Dhingra, Ben Friedman, Marcel Fratzscher, David McWilliams, Halvor Mehlum, Adrian Wood, and many, many more. I thank them all and apologise for the many names I have surely left out. First and last comes family. My wife, Ana, has shown admirable tolerance when my attention has been monopolised by the writing.

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

FIXING OUR CHANGED ECONOMY     119 4    “The Progress of Science and Useful Arts”: Reforming Public Investment and Intellectual Property     121 5    Financial Architecture: Finance and Monetary Policy in an Intangibles-Rich Economy     148 6    Making Cities Work Better     183 7    Reducing Dysfunctional Competition     211 Conclusion: Restarting the Future     240 Notes     263 References     279 Index     297 FIGURES AND TABLES Figures   1.1  Output per Capita Relative to Prefinancial Crisis Trends   1.2  Tobin’s Q in the United States   1.3  Growth by Income Group in the World, 1980–2016   1.4  Performance Gaps   1.5  Average Global Markup, 2000–2015   1.6  Interest Rates since 1980, Advanced Countries   1.7  Growth in the Frontier Economies since 1300   1.8  Estimated Markups Excluding Cost of Goods Sold (United States, Firms in Compustat)   1.9  US Investment Rates, 1977–2017 1.10  Tangible and Intangible Investment, Major Developed Economies 1.11  Intangible Investment: Actual Growth versus Trend Growth (Trend from 1997–2007) 1.12  Capital Service Growth Trends   2.1  TFP and Intangible Capital Services Growth   2.2  Rates of Return in the United States with and without Intangibles   2.3  Evolution of Concentration (Share of Top Eight Firms) by Intangible Intensity   2.4  Evolution of Productivity Dispersion by Intangible Intensity   3.1  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Governance on Siena and Its Territory, Public Palace, Siena   4.1  The Tabarrok Curve   5.1  Yields on Safe Assets and Capital, 1995–2015   5.2  Intangible Intensity and the Return on Capital Spread   6.1  Percentage Intending to Use Increased Home Working as a Permanent Business Model   6.2  Net Percentage Expecting Increased Home Working as Permanent versus Net Percentage Reporting Increased Productivity from Home Working   7.1  Top Eight Industry Concentration since 2002: Share of Top Eight Firms in Industry Sales in Thirteen Developed Countries   7.2  Profit Shares Inside and Outside the United States   C.1  Providing Centralised Goods: The Constraint   C.2  How Intangibles Affect the Trade-Off Tables   1.1  Sources of per Capita Growth in the Euro Area, the United Kingdom, and the United States   3.1  Conditions Needed for Exchange and Types of Institutions That Support Them   3.2  Exchange and Types of Institutions PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has its origins in the thought-provoking conversations we had after the publication of Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy in 2017. We are very grateful for the insightful and generous comments we received from Martin Brassell, Stephen Cecchetti, Tyler Cowen, Diane Coyle, Chris Dillow, Daniel Finkelstein, Martin Fleming, Rana Foroohar, Bill Gates, John Harris, Constance Hunter, Richard Jones, John Kay, William Kerr, Saul Klein, Arnold Kling, Baruch Lev, Yuval Levin, Ehsan Masood, George Molloan, Ataman Ozyilidirim, Robert Peston, Reihan Salam, Michael Saunders, Dan Sichel, David Smith, Tom Sutcliffe, Bart Van Ark, Callum Williams, Martin Wolf, and many others.

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

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

I am particularly grateful to John Llewellyn, Peter Hennessy (or, to give him his full title, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield), Chris Brown-Humes and Karen Ward for their extraordinary generosity in reading drafts of the entire book, in the process saving me from otherwise inevitable logical or factual embarrassment. Diane Coyle was a source of inspiration when the book was in its planning stages. Later, as she launched her own quest into the usefulness of economics, she encouraged me to think more deeply about the relationship between economics and history (her edited book What's the Use of Economics? is essential reading for anyone wondering how to rebuild the reputation of our profession).

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

O. xiv, 97 wind farms 57, 124 wolves 1, 107, 108 woodland 8, 45, 57, 63, 79, 107, 109, 110, 124, 160, 169, 180, 185, 186, 226, 247 woodpigeon 80, 115 World War II (1939–45) xii, 80, 99, 100, 166, 182 Yellowstone National Park 116 Yorkshire Moors 120 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is my own take on the prize of a green and prosperous land and how to get there, and not that of the NCC or of its individual members. In writing this book, I have been greatly influenced by my fellow NCC colleagues: Melanie Austen, Ian Bateman, Christopher Collins, Diane Coyle, Paul Leinster, Georgina Mace, Colin Mayer and Kathy Willis. Henry Dieudonné-Demaria leads the secretariat to great effect, ably supported by Maja Kent and Vladimir Novatchev. Nick Barter and Julian Harlow drafted the 25 Year Environment Plan, and both have helped me enormously. Between them they have made a major impact on Britain’s environmental policies, in the best traditions of the civil service.

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

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

We just have to accept on trust the ‘inescapable economic logic’, or similar threatening phrase, which leads to a particular conclusion, however unpalatable. Black box economics is not just the creation of policy entrepreneurs. Serious economists who make a virtue of their political neutrality can also unintentionally reinforce the black box image, because of their astonishing arrogance. For instance, Diane Coyle, formerly of The Independent, concludes her book with ‘ten rules of economic thinking’, one of which is ‘where common sense and economics conflict, common sense is wrong’.3 This imperious tone does not encourage people to embrace the wisdom of economists. People feel they are being told what to think, rather than encouraged to understand.

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

For discussion and the full Trump tweets, see Matthew Yglesias, “Trump Just Tweeted That ‘Crime in Germany Is Way Up.’ It’s Actually at Its Lowest Level Since 1992,” Vox, June 18, 2018; and Christopher F. Schuetze and Michael Wolgelenter, “Fact Check: Trump’s False and Misleading Claims about Germany’s Crime and Immigration,” New York Times, June 18, 2018. 15. Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 3–4. 16. European Commission, Report on Greek Government Deficit and Debt Statistics, January 2010, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/6404656/COM_2010_report_greek/c8523cfa-d3c1-4954-8ea1-64bb11e59b3a. 17.

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

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

Beyond this, many others have helped, perhaps unknowingly, through their discussions with me, including Rumman Chowdhury, Bill Janeway, Anders Wijkman, Marko Ahtisaari, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, David Kausman, Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Mark Evans, Martin Tisné, Stephanie Hare, Reid Hoffman, Tom Loosemore, Celine Herweijer, Dan Elrond, Nicolaus Hencke, Ivan Ostojic, Diana Foltean, Ray Eitel Porter, Barney Pell, Elisabeth Ling, Raj Jena, Manar Hussain, Christopher Mims, Benedict Evans, Nick Russell, Nat Bullard, Matthew Stoller, John Battelle, Velimir Gašparović, Farhan Lalji, James Wang, Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, Salman Malik, Tom Kelley, Simon Daniel, Gerd Leonhard, Rob McCargow, David Galbraith, Tabitha Goldstaub, David Giampaolo, Ed Vaizey, Paul Nemitz, Wendy Hall, Tim Gardam, Mayra Valderama, Adrian Weller, Eleanor O’Keeffe, Tom Standage, Jerry Li, Reema Patel, Jeni Tennison, Nigel Shadbolt, Blair Sheppard, Horace Dediu, Ramez Naam, Diane Coyle, Nicolas Colin, Christian Printzell Halvorsen, Terje Seljeseth and Brett Frischmann. Many investors, over the decades, helped me understand the market, including Leila Zenga, Chrys Chrysanthou, Russell Buckley, Liz Broderick, Albert Wenger, Saul Klein, Reshma Sohoni, Hussein Kanji, Sean Park, Ciaran O’Leary, Jason Whitmire, Christian Hernandez, Eileen Tso, Yann Ranchere, Ash Fontana and Jim Pallotta.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

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

The result is a truly inspirational book’ Robert Matthews, BBC Focus ‘Never has the challenge of saving the world felt as simple’ Edmund Conway, Daily Telegraph ‘Lively, provocative and readable … will make the world a better place’ Tim Congdon, Spectator ‘Genuinely impressive … Sachs stands in the great tradition of campaigning intellectuals and has been an effective advocate of urgent policy action’ Diane Coyle, Independent ‘A manifesto for securing a bright future for Earth’ Michael Sargent, Nature ‘Packed with statistics and carefully worded arguments’ Economist ‘A vital read … Common Wealth is full of big ideas and is written by a star in the constellation of gurus … a serious book that deserves to be widely read and debated’ Management Today ‘One of America’s most prominent economists’ Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph ‘Common Wealth explains the most basic economic reckoning that the world faces … Despite the rearguard opposition of some vested interests, policies to help the world’s poor and the global environment are in fact the very best economic bargains on the planet’ Al Gore ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeffrey D.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

It is compiled from data collected in a range of surveys and represents the total value of goods (how many shoes were manufactured) and services (how many meals were served at restaurants) a country produces. It also includes how much we all got paid and how much we (including governments and businesses) have all spent. It all sounds very scientific, but the truth is that GDP has a woman problem. The formulation of a country’s official GDP figure is an inherently subjective process, explains Diane Coyle, professor of economics at Manchester University. ‘A lot of people think that [GDP] is a real thing. But actually, it’s a confection, with lots of judgments that have gone into its definition. And a lot of uncertainty.’ Measuring GDP is, she says, ‘not like measuring how high the mountain is’. When you see headlines proclaiming that ‘GDP went up 0.3% this quarter’, she cautions, you should remember that that 0.3% ‘is dwarfed by the amount of uncertainty in the figures’.

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

The main criticism of the Green Book of late is that it does not give enough weight to rebalancing or ‘levelling up’ regional economies. The rules are blunt and too rigid and there is in-built bias in favour of wealthier areas receiving more infrastructure. In their paper ‘The Imperial Treasury: appraisal methodology and regional economic performance in the UK’, Diane Coyle and Marianne Sensier proposed: ‘Infrastructure investments also need to be based on a strategic view about economic development for the whole of the UK.’20 Civil Service World is a notable media outlet. In a piece entitled ‘Is Whitehall’s obsession with business cases getting in the way of delivery?’

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

He judged that such disposal appeared to be ‘based on ideological prejudice’.2 Much more recently, looking back specifically to Thatcher’s (and Cox’s) 1980s, Michael Rosen concurred: ‘Behind these sell-offs was an ideology. The Tories then as now thought public property, funded publicly, used by the public, bred Labour voters’.3 Also recently, the economist Diane Coyle remarked that in Britain ‘the belief the public sector should own as little as possible’ – of land, but also, one imagines, of everything else – is essentially ‘an article of faith’.4 She is right; and so too, surely, was Cox. CHAPTER 4 Carrots and Sticks: Privatizing the Land In a liberal democracy such as the United Kingdom, making a series of arguments in support of a major policy initiative – which the privatization of public land, for nearly forty years now, has undoubtedly been – is typically necessary to the achievement of that initiative; but it is by no means sufficient.

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

Wellbeing is more telling’, Guardian, 10 June 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/10/uk-obsessing-gdp-wellbeing-new-zealand; for more on the legacy of the Sarkozy Commission, see Paul Allin and David J. Hand, The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive, and Measurement (New York: Wiley, 2014). 20 Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover (Random House, 2002), 17–20. 21 See here too Diane Coyle’s work in this area, e.g., GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014). 22 ‘Business Roundtable Members’, Business Roundtable, https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us/members. 23 Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits,’ New York Times magazine, 13 September 1970. 24 ‘Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote “An Economy That Serves All Americans”’, Business Roundtable, 19 August 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans. 25 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’, Guardian, 3 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo. 26 Chris Smalls, ‘Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus’, Guardian, 2 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/dear-jeff-bezos-amazon-instead-of-firing-me-protect-your-workers-from-coronavirus. 27 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’. 28 ‘AG James’ Statement on Firing of Amazon Worker Who Organized Walkout’, Office of the New York State Attorney General, https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/ag-james-statement-firing-amazon-worker-who-organized-walkout. 29 Brad Smith, ‘As we work to protect public health, we also need to protect the income of hourly workers who support our campus’, Microsoft, 5 March 2020, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/05/covid-19-microsoft-hourly-workers/. 30 See for example Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s bill in July 2019 to curb smartphone addiction by banning the ‘infinite scroll’ of social media feeds, and limiting an individual’s social media usage to thirty minutes a day across all devices, Emily Stewart, ‘Josh Hawley’s bill to limit your Twitter time to 30 minutes a day, explained’, Vox, 31 July 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/31/20748732/josh-hawley-smart-act-social-media-addiction); or EU industry chief Thierry Breton’s warnings in February 2020 that should major tech platforms fail to adequately curb hate speech and disinformation, tougher rules and penalties would be forthcoming (‘EU threatens tougher hate-speech rules after Facebook meeting’, DW, 17 February 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/eu-threatens-tougher-hate-speech-rules-after-facebook-meeting/a-52410851). 31 ‘Camden Council tackles the climate crisis’, see video at: https://youtu.be/JzzWc5wMQ6s.

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

Thank you to Frédéric Michel for his kindness and support over the years and for introducing me to so many interesting people. Thank you to Peter Mandelson, Ben Wegg Prosser (a very old friend), Stephen Adams and everyone at Global Counsel. David Bowers and Dominic White at Absolute Strategy Research are always insightful and David has been particularly kind; thank you to Beth McCann for introducing us. Diane Coyle at Enlightenment Economics is lovely. Varun Chandra has been very kind. I have had many stimulating conversations with Gene Frieda at Moore Capital Management. Among bank economists, Stephen King at HSBC, Willem Buiter at Citi, Erik Nielsen at Unicredit and George Magnus, formerly of UBS, stand out.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

It found a wide audience after the New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley bankrolled a second edition, in part to rebut an 1858 speech by the South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond, titled “Cotton Is King,” in which he presented data purporting to show the superior productivity of the southern economy. By the time of the Civil War, more than 200,000 copies of Helper’s book had been sold. De Bow’s contribution was ironic; he was an ardent proponent of both slavery and secession. See Cook, The Pricing of Progress. 25. Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 13. 26. Arnold Harberger, “Sense and Economics: An Oral History with Arnold Harberger,” conducted by Paul Burnett in 2015 and 2016, Oral History Center, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 27.

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

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

My first exposure to continuous-time econometrics was as his research assistant, and I have very fond memories of sitting side by side with Jerry in the basement of the Harvard Science Center debugging Fortran code for estimating the parameters of a Brownian motion with an absorbing barrier. And I benefited greatly from the advice, guidance, and inspiration of many other faculty and students during this period, including Dick Caves, Diane Coyle, Ben Friedman, Dale Jorgenson, Nobu Kiyotaki, Whitney Newey, Pat Newport, the late David Pickard, Tom Sargent, Mike Spence, Phil Vasan, and Mark Watson—it’s only through the passage of time that I’ve come to realize just how much impact they had on me. But my biggest single intellectual debt during this time was to Bob Merton, to whom I owe my career in academic finance.