Tyler Cowen

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Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction vii Stephen Macedo Author’s Preface xix 1 When the Market Was “Left” 1 2 Private Government 37 Comments 3 Learning from the Levellers? 75 Ann Hughes 4 Market Rationalization 89 David Bromwich 5 Help Wanted: Subordinates 99 Niko Kolodny 6 Work Isn’t So Bad after All 108 Tyler Cowen Response 7 Reply to Commentators 119 Elizabeth Anderson Notes 145 Contributors 183 Index 185 Introduction Stephen Macedo The two lectures that are the centerpiece of this volume call for a radical rethinking of the relationship between private enterprise and the freedom and dignity of workers.

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And, finally, workplace governance is ultimately subject to political rule, and so, “controlled from a standpoint of [democratic] equality.” In the end, therefore, how troubled should we be that “our rights as employees are not like our rights as citizens?” Kolodny does not hazard an answer but underlines these questions’ importance. Finally, Tyler Cowen, an economist and a public commentator, advances a broad critique of Anderson’s claims about the extent of worker domination in today’s workplaces. He denies—on both theoretical and empirical grounds—the accuracy of describing private business firms as “communist dictatorships in our midst.” He doubts that the costs of worker exit are as high as Anderson claims, and further doubts that individual firms enjoy much “monopsony” power over the workers they employ.

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I wish to thank Princeton University for inviting me to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2015, and the Tanner Lectures corporation for supporting my work. Don Herzog read the first draft of my lectures and provided very helpful comments that enabled me to polish my lectures for delivery. My commentators David Bromwich, Tyler Cowen, Ann Hughes, and Niko Kolodny, along with two anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press, supplied splendid comments that enabled me to sharpen my ideas and clarify them for a broader readership. Alex Gourevitch, Stephen Macedo, and my editor, Rob Tempio, also made helpful suggestions. I thank them all for being such wonderful interlocutors.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

—Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures “The modern world bombards us with data just begging to be organized, from iPod playlists to digital vacation photos. Tyler Cowen offers an entertaining guided tour of our unprecedented information age, pondering implications for how creative we are, how long our attention span is, how our politics work, and the future of our economy.” —Samuel R. Sommers, assistant professor of psychology, Tufts University ALSO BY TYLER COWEN Discover Your Inner Economist THE AGE OF THE INFOVORE SUCCEEDING IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY Tyler Cowen Previously published as Create Your Own Economy A PLUME BOOK PLUME Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition as Create Your Own Economy. First Plume Printing, July 2010 Copyright © Tyler Cowen, 2009 All rights reserved REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows: Cowen, Tyler. Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-43299-0 1. Economics—Psychological aspects. 2. Creative thinking. I. Title. HB74.P8C68 2009 330.01’9—dc22 2009006935 Original hardcover design by Daniel Lagin Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A PLUME BOOK THE AGE OF THE INFOVORE TYLER COWEN, a professor of economics at George Mason University, writes regularly for the New York Times and Money, and has contributed to numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Slate.com. Praise for The Age of the Infovore “Engaging, creative, and every page makes you think differently about the world. The book quickly surprised me. I read Tyler every day and didn’t anticipate the turn it took on page one. It was so surprising—and the surprise is a pleasant one—that I don’t feel I should say more. Except: Recommended.”

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to sustain our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of twenty years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society.

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Special thanks go to my agent, Teresa Hartnett, to Brianna Wolfson for her work on the publishing side, to Tyler Thompson and Kevin Wong for the design of the book, to Rebecca Hiscott for editing, and to Patrick Collison for his interest in publishing this book with Stripe. Biography Tyler Cowen is a Holbert L. Harris Professor at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best seller.

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He also cowrites a blog at marginalrevolution.com, runs a podcast series called “Conversations with Tyler,” and has cofounded an online economics education project, mruniversity.com. His most recently published book was The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals © 2018 Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by Stripe Press / Stripe Matter Inc.

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

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

Indeed, the upheaval and distress caused by technological change eventually contributed to the case for the welfare state, perhaps the most radical invention of the twentieth century. None of what has been said about displaced workers eventually finding new jobs feels like cause for celebration. To paraphrase the economist Tyler Cowen, perhaps the future will be like the past—and that is why we ought not to be optimistic about the future of work.24 Figure 1.2: The Unemployment Rate in Britain, 1760–190023 Nor is it the case, at a quick glance, that those who worried there might actually be less work in the future were completely wrong.

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In rich corners of cities like London and New York it is possible to find odd economic ecosystems full of strange but reasonably well-paid roles that rely almost entirely on the patronage of the most prosperous in society: bespoke spoon carvers and children’s playdate consultants, elite personal trainers and star yoga instructors, craft chocolatiers and artisanal cheesemakers. The economist Tyler Cowen put it well when he imagined that “making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future.”41 What is emerging is not just an economic division, where some earn much more than others, but a status division as well, between those who are rich and those who serve them.

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Yet after only a day of self-training, it was able to achieve unparalleled performance, beating the best existing chess-playing computer in a hundred-game match—without losing a single game.6 After that trouncing, it is hard to see what role human players might have alongside a machine like this. As Tyler Cowen put it, “the human now adds absolutely nothing to man-machine chess-playing teams.”7 There is a deeper lesson here. Kasparov’s experiences in chess led him to declare that “human plus machine” partnerships are the winning formula not only in chess, but across the entire economy.8 This is a view held by many others as well.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

America’s per-capita rate of triadic patent applications – those that are filed in the US, Europe and Japan, which screens out the frivolous ones – has fallen by a quarter since 2000.25 The fastest-growing units in the big Western companies are the legal and public relations departments. Big companies devote the bulk of their earnings to buying back shares and boosting dividend payments. They no longer invest anything like what they used to in research and development. The future loses out. Tyler Cowen, who is perhaps the most lateral-thinking economist I know, talks of the rise of America’s ‘complacent classes’ – the creep of a risk-averse and conformist mindset. In a supposed age of hyper-individualism, eccentricity is penalised. Software screens out job applicants before they have a chance to show their faces.

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The number of unoccupied apartments in New York rose by almost three-quarters at the turn of the century to thirty-four thousand in 2011.49 London has witnessed similar growth. The new residents then lock in their gains by restricting land use, which keeps values high. Richard Florida calls them the ‘new urban Luddites’, who exploit an ‘enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations’ to keep the others out. Tyler Cowen has coined a new acronym to replace Nimbys (Not in My Backyard): Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).50 Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes.

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The future is not what it used to be, he says. The peak age of high growth and disruptive technology is behind us. Forget the power of the iPhone. Stop exulting about Google’s driverless car. Such wonders pale beside the changes felt by earlier generations. They are unlikely to be matched by our age. Gordon’s thesis is not entirely new. Tyler Cowen made a similar argument with his sparkling monograph The Great Stagnation (ironically first published as an ebook). Nor is it as counterintuitive as it sounds to our app-crowded, WiFi-saturated twenty-first-century brains. Gordon points out that for most of history, growth was absent. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages there was basically none.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

ALSO BY TYLER COWEN An Economist Gets Lunch The Great Stagnation The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist DUTTON Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com. Copyright © 2013 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

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Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. Average is over : powering America beyond the age of the great stagnation / Tyler Cowen. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-698-13816-2 1. Economic forecasting—United States. 2. United States—Economic conditions—2009- 3. United States—Economic policy—2009- I. Title. HC106.84.C69 2013 330.973—dc23 2013016255 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to their work and thinking on this very important subject. I also recommend to the reader Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine, a book that came out while I was doing the research and writing on this one. I have benefited considerably from reading their work and from conversations with them. Contents Also by Tyler Cowen Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PART I Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy 1 Work and Wages in iWorld 2 The Big Earners and the Big Losers 3 Why Are So Many People Out of Work? PART II What Games Are Teaching Us 4 New Work, Old Game 5 Our Freestyle Future 6 Why Intuition Isn’t Helping You Get a Job 7 The New Office: Regular, Stupid, and Frustrating 8 Why the Turing Game Doesn’t Matter Part III The New World of Work 9 The New Geography 10 Relearning Education 11 The End of Average Science 12 A New Social Contract?

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.

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In addition, in recent years economists have documented an increase in the markup between prices and marginal costs that firms appear to be earning (figure 1.5).13 This work is nicely summarised in an excellent book, The Great Reversal, by the economist Thomas Philippon.14 At the level of individual workers, the data show signs of declining dynamism. Contrary to popular myths about job-hopping millennials, younger workers change employers significantly less frequently than previous generations did. They are also less likely to move from one city to another for work. Economist Tyler Cowen describes these tendencies as symptoms of an emerging “complacent class” that is “working harder than ever to postpone change.”15 FIGURE 1.5: Average Global Markup, 2000–2015. Source: Diez, Fan, and Villegas-Sanchez 2019. But there’s something incongruous here. If you present the average worker or manager with evidence that markets are becoming less competitive and workers more complacent, they will respond with something ranging from surprise to disbelief.

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But it also taps into the much older human story of a Lost Golden Age when ease and prosperity reigned, and which has given way through bad luck or bad conduct to a modern age of toil and scarcity. Once the gods favoured us, but their favour has now been withdrawn, and we find it difficult to restore the golden age of prosperity. Some economic explanations for the current productivity downturn pin the blame on exogenous events. The influential narratives of growth slowdown by Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth) fit into this time-honoured tradition.23 Both argue that a range of headwinds meant that growth, both from technological progress and from human factors such as improvements in education, had slowed down; Gordon in particular remains pessimistic that it will speed up again in the future.

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

.); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, August 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Copyright © 2007 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved I REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. Discover your inner economist: use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and motivate your dentist / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-525-95025-7 (hardcover) I. Economics-Psychological aspects. 2. Incentive (Psychology) I. Title. HB74.P8C69 2007 330.01'9-dc22 2007016161 Printed in the United States of America Set in Fairfield Designed by Vicky Hartman Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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DISCOVER YOUR INNER ECONOMIST Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist TYLER COWEN I DUTTON DUTION Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-I 10 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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To check up on this hunch, the researchers looked at economics faculty at different institutions. Who uses titles such as "Dr." and "Professor" in voicemail greetings and on course syllabi? Their study considered twentysix different economics curricula, and counted the eight with doctoral programs as of higher status. The results do not surprise Mr. Tyler Cowen. The authors, Harbaugh and To, tell us: "For voice-mail greetings, the use of a title is far less common at doctoral universities. Less than 4 percent of faculty use a title at doctoral universit,ies while about 27 percent use a title at non-doctoral universities. A similar pattern holds in course syllabi.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

Wittman, The Myth of Democratic Failure: Why Political Institutions Are Efficient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 8. Donald Wittman, “Why Democracies Produce Efficient Results,” Journal of Political Economy 97, no. 6 (1989): 1395–1424. 9. Tyler Cowen, “The Wisdom of Garett Jones, a Continuing Series,” Marginal Revolution, January 26, 2010, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/the-wisdom-of-garett-jones-a-continuing-series.html. 10. Tyler Cowen, “Congress Needs to Bring Back Earmarks,” Bloomberg Opinion, January 9, 2018. 11. Cowen, “Congress Needs to Bring Back Earmarks.” 12. Rauch, Political Realism, 7. 13. Rauch, Political Realism, 11. 14.

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Congress, with the decline of earmarks, the biggest games left in town are ideological outrage, social media grandstanding, and other behaviors that make individual politicians more willing to stand up to party leaders. Earmarks and other targeted goodies that the late University of Maryland economist Mancur Olson called “selective benefits” are important for cutting everyday political deals—for giving politicians something to work for beyond another viral appearance on social media. My colleague Tyler Cowen and I have discussed earmarks off and on since 2010; he wrote a column in 2018 on the still-underappreciated merits of earmarks. Here’s what he had to say: “Most of all, I think of earmarks as recognizing that compromise and messiness are bound to remain essential features of American government, and that, whether we like it or not, there is something inherently transactional [emphasis added] about being governed.”¹¹ And in order to stick, these transactions need some distance from the voters.

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Back-scratching and logrolling are signs of a healthy political system, not a corrupt one. Transactional [emphasis added] politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure.¹² You’ll see that I italicized the word transactional both here and in Tyler Cowen’s quote above. Both scholars think that real-world political success depends on insiders cutting deals, deals that outsiders—regular voters like you and me—might be appalled by. Rauch offers one particular reason why transactional politics tends to enlarge the pie: because often, the political machine—which might include both a formal party apparatus as well as an informal back-scratching operation that spans the world of lobbying, campaign donations, and legislation—has an interest in the long run.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

(Their answer is principally through aggressive tax avoidance, playing off multiple tax havens against one another to get an acceptable deal.) Once enough wealthy people have become sovereign individuals, coerced redistribution will have to end. At this point, governments will have no choice but to dismantle the welfare state. Tyler Cowen, Economics Professor at George Mason University, set out his vision of a free market ‘hyper-meritocracy’ in which poor people will be forced to move to low-cost housing and to accept vastly reduced support, pacified by computer games and digital media: The American polity [political system] is unlikely to collapse, but we’ll all look back on the immediate post-war era as a very special time.

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Yet it will be an oddly peaceful time with the general ageing of American society and the proliferation of many sources of cheap fun. We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx’s Communist utopia, albeit brought on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.14 Of course, we are not there yet. We have not yet attained Tyler Cowen’s utopia. But already, the work of creating a hostile environment for the less well-off is underway. In the UK, for example, benefits for working people have been ‘frozen’ since 201515 – that means that they have been falling in real terms, and they will continue to do so – and the government plans to roll-out Universal Credit, a so-called reform of the benefits system, despite the evidence that it causes enormous hardship to the most vulnerable and has forced many to turn to food banks to survive.16 The Conservative MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg commented that this growth in food banks was rather uplifting: [The State] provides a basic level of welfare, but on some occasions that will not work and to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.17 And there is a growing movement to criminalize homelessness: Despite updated Home Office guidance at the start of the year, which instructs councils not to target people for being homeless and sleeping rough, the Guardian has found over fifty local authorities with public space protection orders (PSPOs) in place.

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Taken together, and pursued to their logical conclusion, these ideas lead to a world like that of Chapter 1. There is power behind these ideas Some of my friends, on reading this, commented, ‘But nobody serious thinks like that.’ Unfortunately, they are wrong. There is a considerable free-market literature, from Hayek and Ayn Rand through Milton Friedman and Davidson and Rees-Mogg to Tyler Cowen. Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

In the realm of logistics: Steven Rosenbush and Laura Stevens, “At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver,” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-ups-the-Algorithm-is-the-driver-1424136536. On the blog Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok refers to this kind of intelligence as “opaque intelligence.” http://marginalrevolution.com/marginal revolution/2015/02/opaque-intelligence.html. the economist Tyler Cowen noted: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 72. “both praised and panned”: Feng-Hsiung Hsu, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). “slow, tortuous reading”: Flood and Goodenough, “Contract as Automaton.”

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And in chess, a realm where computers are more powerful than humans and are able to win via pathways that the human mind can’t always see, the machines’ characteristic game choices are known as “computer moves”—the moves that a human would rarely make, the ones that are ugly but still get results. As the economist Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over, these types of moves often seem wrong, but they are very effective. When IBM’s Deep Blue was playing Garry Kasparov, it made a move so strange that it “was both praised and panned by different commentators,” according to one of Deep Blue’s builders. In fact, this highly odd but potentially brilliant move was eventually found to be due to a bug.

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This play—tweaking a simulation of technological failure and seeing how it responds—can provide a greater comfort with large and unwieldy systems and can help us as we move forward through this world of increasingly complicated technology. We also need interpreters of what’s going on in these systems, a bit like TV meteorologists. Near the end of Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen speculates about this new breed of future interpreters. He says they “will hone their skills of seeking out, absorbing, and evaluating this information. . . . They will be translators of the truths coming out of our networks of machines. . . . At least for a while, they will be the only people left who will have a clear notion of what is going on.”

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Appendix: What Is a Firm, Anyway, and Why Do So Many Workers End Up So Frustrated? Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index Also By Tyler Cowen About the Author Copyright BIG BUSINESS. Copyright © 2019 by Tyler Cowen. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Cover photograph of city © Predrag Vuckovic / Getty Images The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Cowen, Tyler, author. Title: Big business: a love letter to an American anti-hero / Tyler Cowen. Description: New York: St. Martin’s Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Treasury See also T-bills venture capital American innovation and Verizon Vietnam War voice recording Volkswagen wages Walgreens Walmart Warren, Elizabeth Waze wealth management Wells Fargo WhatsApp whistleblowers Wi-Fi-enabled technology WikiLeaks Williamson, Oliver Wilson, David work altruism and economic oppression exploitation flow and human relationships and non-pay-related benefits potential burden of satisfaction of sexual harassment and stress and studies “work as a safe haven” effect work hours workplace freedom WolframAlpha World Bank World Trade Organization World Values Survey World War I World War II X-rays Yahoo YouTube Zak, Paul J. Zawadzki, Matthew J. Zingales, Luigi zombie banks Zuckerberg, Mark See also Facebook ALSO BY TYLER COWEN The Complacent Class Average Is Over The Great Stagnation An Economist Gets Lunch The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist ABOUT THE AUTHOR TYLER COWEN, Ph.D., holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair in Economics at George Mason University. He is the author of a number of explanatory books and textbooks, including The Complacent Class, as well as the most-read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com.

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

“Leeds Woollen Workers Petition, 1786,” Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1786machines.asp 33. Quoted in: Robert Skidelsky, “Death to Machines?” Project Syndicate (February 21, 2014). http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/robert-skidelsky-revisits-the-luddites--claim-that-automation-depresses-real-wages 34. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over. Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (2013), p. 23. 35. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation, p. 172. 36. Quoted in: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2012), p. 226. 37. Thomas Piketty, “Save capitalism from the capitalists by taxing wealth,” The Financial Times (March 28, 2014). http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/decdd76e-b50e-11e3-a746-00144feabdc0.html-axzz44qTtjlZN 5 The End of Poverty 1.

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Inequality will continue to increase and everybody who hasn’t managed to learn a skill that machines cannot or will not be able to master will be sidelined. “Making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future,” writes the American economist Tyler Cowen.34 Though the lower classes might have access to new amenities like cheap solar power and free Wi-Fi, the gap between them and the ultra-rich will be wider than ever. Beyond that, the rich and well-educated will continue to close ranks even as peripheral villages and towns grow more impoverished.

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Heidi Shierholz, “Immigration and Wages: Methodological advancements confirm modest gains for native workers,” Economic Policy Institute (February 4, 2010). http://epi.3cdn.net/7de74e-e0cd834d87d4_a3m6ba9j0.pdf Also see: Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, “Rethinking the Effect of Immigration on Wages.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 39. Frederic Docquiera, Caglar Ozden, and Giovanni Peri, “The Wage Effects of Immigration and Emigration,” OECD (December 20, 2010). http://www.oecd.org/els/47326474.pdf 40. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over (2013) p. 169. 41. Corrado Giulietti, Martin Guzi, Martin Kahanec, and Klaus F. Zimmermann, “Unemployment Benefits and Immigration: Evidence from the EU,” Institute for the Study of Labor (October 2011). http://ftp.iza.org/dp6075.pdf On the U.S., see: Leighton Ku and Brian Bruen, “The Use of Public Assistance Benefits by Citizens and Non-citizen Immigrants in the United States,” Cato Institute (February 19, 2013). http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/workingpaper-13_1.pdf 42.

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

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

He advocates forecasting by means of prediction markets, where people place bets on particular economic or policy outcomes, like the level of unemployment at some future date. He argues that prediction markets give us a financial stake in being accurate when we make forecasts, rather than just trying to look good to our peers. Tyler Cowen A professor at George Mason University and co-author of an extremely popular blog, Tyler Cowen was New Jersey's youngest ever chess champion. He is a man with prodigiously broad knowledge and interests, and although he proposes some key ideas forcefully, there is always some nuance, and he dislikes simplistic and modish solutions. In two recent books, “the Great Stagnation” (2011) and “Average is Over” (2014), he paints a picture of America's future which is slightly depressing, but not apocalyptic.

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Humans can undermine the game of a computer by throwing in some surprise moves which don't make much sense in the short term, or by deploying an intuitive strategy. Matches between humans working with computers are called advanced chess, or centaur chess. Kasparov himself initiated the first high-level centaur chess competition in Leon, in Spain, in 1998, and competitions have been held there regularly ever since. Tyler Cowen (one of the sceptics about machine automation that we met in chapter 3.3) explores this form of chess extensively in his book, “Average is Over”. Some people believe this phenomenon of humans teaming up with computers to form centaurs is a metaphor for how we can avoid most jobs being automated by machine intelligence.

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They think that capitalism should be defended and retained, but they sound less confident about what will happen in the medium term. They argue for an overhaul of the US education system, but they don’t sound convinced that will be enough, and they speculate that a negative income tax may eventually become necessary. Tyler Cowen, whom we encountered in chapter 3.3 as the author of “Average is Over”, is certainly not breezy in his assessment of the outlook, nor is he tentative. He is confident that UBI will not be needed, and he does not expect riots. But his prognosis is lugubrious. He foresees 10-15% of the population being extremely wealthy, and the rest getting by on incomes which are stagnant at best, but putting up with it because many of them are too old to riot, and they are pacified by the excellent cheap entertainment that technology provides.

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

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

If innovation is the primary driver of prosperity, then perhaps stagnant incomes imply that the problem is the rate at which new inventions and ideas are being generated, rather than the impact of technology on the working and middle classes. Maybe computers aren’t really all that important, and the slow rate of progress on a broader front is what matters most. Several economists have made this case. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, proposed in his 2011 book The Great Stagnation that the US economy has run into a temporary plateau after consuming all the low-hanging fruit of accessible innovation, free land, and underutilized human talent. Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University is even more pessimistic, arguing in a 2012 paper that economic growth in the United States, hampered by a slow pace of innovation and a number of “headwinds”—including excessive debt, an aging population, and shortfalls in our educational system—may essentially be over.1 In order to gain some insight into the factors that influence the pace of innovation, we may find it useful to think in terms of the historical path that nearly all technologies follow.

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Again, this scenario is nothing new. And, more importantly, it doesn’t really involve any new people. The individuals that businesses are likely to hire and then couple with the best available technology are the same people who are largely immune to unemployment today. It is a small population of elite workers. Economist Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book Average Is Over quotes one freestyle chess insider who says that the very best players are “genetic freaks.”54 That hardly makes the machine collaboration idea sound like a systemic solution for masses of people pushed out of routine jobs. And, as we have just seen, there is also the problem of offshoring.

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As we’ve seen, visual recognition (of types of garbage, in this case) remains a daunting challenge for computers, so people are employed to perform this task. The very fact that this service is economically viable should give you some idea of the wage level for this kind of work. * In Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen estimates that perhaps 10–15 percent of the American workforce will be well equipped for machine collaboration jobs. I think that in the long run, even that estimate might be optimistic, especially when you consider the impact of offshoring. How many machine collaboration jobs will also be anchored locally?

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, February 2011 Copyright © 2010 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved <Dutton logo> REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA eISBN : 978-1-101-50225-9 Chart on page 14 reprinted from Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Vol 72/Issue 8, Jonathan Huebner, “A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation,” Copyright (October, 2005), with permission from Elsevier.

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On job creation and the iPod, see Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod,” 2008, available at http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2009/InnovationAndJobCreation.pdf. Chapter 4 The Government of Low-Hanging Fruit On who pays how much of the tax burden, see Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, New York: Worth Publishers, 2009, ch. 16, p. 340. The historian S. E. Finer first suggested that technology was behind the rise of big government, though he did not consider this claim in the context of public-choice issues. See S. E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

What America has been experiencing since 2007, in short, is another case of the business cycle in action, albeit a particularly painful one. A second explanation for current hard times sees stagnation, not cyclicality, in action. Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. Economist Tyler Cowen articulates this view in his 2010 book, The Great Stagnation: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. … Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.

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On balance, the official productivity data likely underestimate the true improvements of our living standards over time. Stagnant Median Income In contrast to labor productivity, median family income has risen only slowly since the 1970s (Figure 3.2) once the effects of inflation are taken into account. As discussed in Chapter 1, Tyler Cowen and others point to this fact as evidence of economy-wide stagnation. In some ways, Cowen understates his case. If you zoom in on the past decade and focus on working-age households, real median income has actually fallen from $60,746 to $55,821. This is the first decade to see declining median income since the figures were first compiled.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

See also crime wages and collectibles and gender and living standards and matching and mobility and outsourcing and productivity Wang, Ben Wang Wenyin War on Drugs Warner, Michael Washington, DC Watts riots Weather Underground Wikipedia YouTube. See also social media Zuckerberg, Mark ALSO BY TYLER COWEN Average Is Over The Great Stagnation An Economist Gets Lunch The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist ABOUT THE AUTHOR TYLER COWEN (Ph.D.) holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. He is the author of a number of textbooks and other thought-provoking works and writes the most-read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com.

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Why Americans Stopped Rioting and Legalized Marijuana 7. How a Dynamic Society Looks and Feels 8. Political Stagnation, the Dwindling of True Democracy, and Alexis de Tocqueville as Prophet of Our Time 9. The Return of Chaos, and Why the Complacent Class Cannot Hold Notes References Index Also by Tyler Cowen About the Author Copyright THE COMPLACENT CLASS. Copyright © 2017 by Tyler Cowen. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Cover photographs: American flag © Photoline/Shutterstock; deflated ballon © Jeff Wasserman/Shutterstock.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Bradford DeLong has suggested that the more central a role information technology plays in traditionally skillful professions like law or medicine, the fewer jobs there might be.75 Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, two economists from the University of Chicago’s business school, have found that since the mid-1970s, the relative amount of income going to workers has been in decline around the world.76 Meanwhile the research of three Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand, found a similarly steep decline of midlevel jobs—a depressing development that MIT’s David Autor, Northeastern University’s Andrew Sum, and the president of the Economic Policy Institute, Larry Mishel, have also discovered with their research.77 Many others share this concern about the destructive impact of technology on the “golden age” of labor. The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, in his 2013 book, Average Is Over, concurs, arguing that today’s big economic “divide” is between those whose skills “complement the computer” and those whose don’t. Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel.

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In our digital age, the personal is the economic. And there’s nothing liberating about it at all. Just as the Kodak tragedy decimated the economic heart of Rochester, so the Internet is destroying our old industrial economy—transforming what was once a relatively egalitarian system into a winner-take-all economy of what Tyler Cowen calls “billionaires and beggars.” Rather than just a city, it’s a whole economy that is losing its center. For all Silicon Valley’s claims that the Internet has created more equal opportunity and distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a donut—with a gaping hole in the middle where, in the old industrial system, millions of workers were once paid to manufacture valuable products.

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Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show Keen On . . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

And herein lies the paradox of the democratic star: While it ostensibly seems much easier to get one’s foot in the door, keeping oneself in the limelight is much harder. Hollywood is difficult to break into, but Hollywood stardom has a longer life span. If everyone has a chance to attain celebrity through democratic stardom, keeping people interested over time becomes that much harder. As the economist Tyler Cowen remarked, “It’s never a secure position, precisely because entry is easy.”23 In its early stages (before agents are hired and Perez Hilton is blogging about you), democratic celebrity is different in how it is maintained. Hollywood, sports, and political celebrity have their own built-in vetting processes.

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Vivian is a doctoral student at USC, and her attention to detail, intelligence, and ability to work under pressure are impressive and bode well for her own future career as a scholar. My scholarly colleagues and mentors Harvey Molotch, Susan Fainstein, Richard Florida, Lance Freeman, David Galenson, Tyler Cowen, Michael Storper, Allen Scott, and Dalton Conley were thoughtful and generous in the time they gave me to talk about my ideas for this book. I am fortunate to have Leo Braudy as my colleague at USC. His The Frenzy of Renown is the original treatise on the topic of fame, and his insights into my own work have been essential.

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So a very interesting way to capture where celebrity emerges is to look at who gets written about. Sure enough, merit-driven industries are less likely on the whole to have a preponderance of biographies. Barring the truly exceptional, most biographies are written about individuals in ambiguously measured industries. As the economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out in What Price Fame? there has been a massive transformation of biographies from being serious treatises on the life and times of people of obvious merit, such as philosophers or political leaders, to books on entertainment figures and those with spectacular personal lives. Cowen notes that in the early 1900s, 46 percent of all biographies published in the United States were of political leaders.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Some of this can be laid to historical timing: world-changing breakthroughs are a lot harder to come by these days in part because the easy ones have already been made. In times past, we were able to get massive increases in productivity by eliminating large and obvious inefficiencies—moving from animal-powered farming to mechanization, for instance, or switching from manure to synthetic fertilizers. But as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has argued, most of that “low-hanging fruit” has all been picked and eaten, and today it’s simply much harder, and more costly, to achieve similarly epoch-defining breakthroughs. But it’s not just that innovation has gotten harder. One can also make the case that, under the financialized business models that emerged with the Impulse Society, the way we pursue innovation has gotten weaker.

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The other, larger wing of the legal profession will be a sort of mass-production, Walmart model that digitally processes hundreds of thousands of simple cases, like uncontested divorce or mortgage contracts. This two-tier market is the pattern that some economists foresee for the entire job market. The scenario is most graphically laid out by Tyler Cowen, the economist, in his recent book Average Is Over. In Cowen’s version of the future, the top 15 percent of the workforce will be made up of what he calls “hyperproductives”—individuals who are extremely bright and who either know how to use the latest technologies or know how to manage other hyperproductives, and for whom each new generation of corporate efficiencies will mean an ever-larger slice of the pie.

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Given the huge development costs these medical technologies will require, and the industry’s ever-more-intense need for prompt returns, it’s not so hard to imagine a medical future that looks an awful lot like the medical present—that is, where more and more of the truly life-altering benefits of innovation flow to the part of the market that can most afford them. Even if we managed to enact a single-payer system, we’d still be looking at a health culture very much along the lines of Tyler Cowen’s bifurcated, end-of-average society, where the wealthy get not only better health care but also more access to the sorts of innovations that are likely to dramatically extend life spans. What will society look like in thirty years, when Cowen’s hyperproductives are not only wealthier than everyone else, but living much longer?

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

In addition, Taylor’s methods of using stop watches and other forms of quantification led to laborers producing more in less time for less pay. Some opulence. See Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures 14–16 (Princeton University Press, 2002), for a discussion of the different ways the term diversity is used. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/walt_whitman/quotes. “If I had gone directly to the people, read my poems, faced the crowds, got into immediate touch with Tom, Dick, and Harry instead of waiting to be interpreted, I’d have had my audience at once,” quoted in David Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography 339 (1995,Vintage Books). Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures 3 (Princeton University Press, 2002).

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See The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity 8–9 ( James Kaufman and Robert Sternberg editors, 2010, Cambridge University Press). 7. See Ruth Towse, Creativity, Incentive and Reward: An Economic Analysis of Copyright and Culture in the Information Age 6 (2001, Edward Elgar). Even those with talent need to learn their craft, a process that can take a lifetime. 8. But see Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000, Harvard University Press). 9. Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics 363 (2010, Cambridge University Press). 10. See Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules 390 (1999, Harvard Business School Press). 11. http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i4ad94ea6265fac02d4c813c0b6a93ca2.

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Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures 3 (Princeton University Press, 2002). Professor Cowen’s book is devoted to refuting de Tocqueville’s and similar theories. See also his In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000, Harvard University Press). Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Culture 103 (2002, Princeton University). Id. at 129. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India 64 (1993, University of Chicago Press). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jab_We_Met. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, India Chapter. See Larry Rohter, Gilberto Gil and the politics of music.

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

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

All that remained after 1970 were second-round improvements, such as developing short-haul regional jets, extending the original interstate highway network with suburban ring roads, and converting residential America from window unit air conditioners to central air conditioning.5 Gordon is far from alone in this view. In his 2011 book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen is definitive about the source of America’s economic woes: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. . . . Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.

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Those benefits start small while the technology is immature and not widely used, grow to be quite big as the GPT improves and propagates, then taper off as the improvement—and especially the propagation—die down. When multiple GPTs appear at the same time, or in a steady sequence, we sustain high rates of growth over a long period. But if there’s a big gap between major innovations, economic growth will eventually peter out. We’ll call this the ‘innovation-as-fruit’ view of things, in honor of Tyler Cowen’s imagery of all the low-hanging fruit being picked. In this perspective, coming up with an innovation is like growing fruit, and exploiting an innovation is like eating the fruit over time. Another school of thought, though, holds that the true work of innovation is not coming up with something big and new, but instead recombining things that already exist.

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The general story is about our research to understand the nature of progress with digital technologies, and its economic and societal consequences. As part of this work, we talked to two main types of geek (a label which, to us, is the highest praise): those who study economics and other social sciences, and those who build technologies. In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

First printing, April 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © 2012 by Tyler Cowen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cowen, Tyler. An economist gets lunch : new rules for everyday foodies / Tyler Cowen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-56166-9 1.

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AN ECONOMIST GETS LUNCH ALSO BY TYLER COWEN The Great Stagnation The Age of the Infovore Discover Your Inner Economist T Y L E R C O W E N A N E C O N O M I S T G E T S L U N C H New Rules for Everyday Foodies DUTTON DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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New Mexico foods are more likely to use fresh green chilies and green tomatillo sauces. Pork is the preferred meat, not beef. Mexican food from California uses more produce, as befits the diversified agriculture of the state. Avocados, sour cream, and Spanish olives are especially common. See Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2002, chapter four, for information on the differential spread of television across the United States and Europe. For the figures on working women, see Martha Hahn Sugar, When Mothers Work, Who Pays?

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

On the contrary, as part II argues, despite its seemingly limited scope, zoning has had a destructive effect on cities, which is why we should abolish it. Acknowledgments Like any work worthy of your time, this book is the result of many minds—I simply have the honor of putting my name on the cover. In late 2019, I sent Tyler Cowen a grant proposal setting out my plan to spend 2020 cranking out blog posts and writing research papers. Since I knew he was interested in moonshot ideas, I tacked on one or two lines about a peculiar little book critiquing an obscure area of policy. Within forty-eight hours, I was on the phone with Tyler sketching out the contours of the book you now hold in your hands.

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Of course, as Alan Mallach points out in The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), this wealth is not always spread equally, but policymakers in growing cities are better positioned to correct these inequities than in stagnant or declining cities. 17. Emily Badger, “Covid Didn’t Kill Cities. Why Was That Prophecy So Alluring?” New York Times, July 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/upshot/covid-cities-predictions-wrong.html. 18. For a comprehensive treatment of the issue of US economic stagnation, the reader is encouraged to see Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (Boston: Dutton, 2011). Real wage growth data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For more on the productivity slowdown, see Robert J. Godon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?

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Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga, “Urban Growth and Its Aggregate Implications,” NBER Working Paper Series (December 2019), https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26591/w26591.pdf. 25. Peter Ganong and Daniel W. Shoag, “Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” NBER Working Paper Series (July 2017), https://www.nber.org/papers/w23609. 26. For a robust defense of growth, see Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018). CHAPTER 5: APARTHEID BY ANOTHER NAME 1. Larry Buchanan, Quotrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 2.

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

This adjustment process takes a while. And while it continues, incomes for many American workers will stagnate, prices for many basic resources will rise, and growth may slow. Ultimately everyone will be better off, but during the transition period some people will be made worse off. - The low-hanging fruit is gone. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the rich world rode a wave of low-hanging fruit to prosperity in the years between the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the chaotic 1970s. Lots of empty land was put to use. Uneducated populations became highly educated. And centuries of revolutionary technological innovations were exploited to their fullest.

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Wolff, Edward, “Spillovers, Linkages, and Productivity Growth in the US Economy, 1958 to 2007”, NBER Working Paper No. 16864, March 2011. Wright, Gavin, “The Economic Revolution in the American South”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 1987. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have done this alone. I am indebted to Zanny Minton-Beddoes for her patience, encouragement, and insight. Tyler Cowen has been a constant source of inspiration and an indispensible resource. I offer sincere thanks to Matthew Yglesias for being a kindred intellectual spirit and a partner in competitive cooperation. I am grateful to Rachel Horwood for her indefatigable research efforts. And I would like to thank and dedicate this book to my wife, Lisa, without whom it, and much else besides, would not have been possible

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Further thanks to my editor Peter Dougherty, anonymous referees for Princeton University Press, research assistants Caleb Fuller, Zac Gochenour, Colin Harris, and Julia Norgaard, and my loyal corps of volunteer spreadsheet checkers: Matthew Baker, David Balan, Nathaniel Bechhofer, Zac Gochenour, Garett Jones, Jim Pagels, and Fabio Rojas. My apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten. My deepest gratitude, though, goes to Nathaniel Bechhofer, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Alex Tabarrok for sharing my intellectual journey, day by day. Whatever they think about education as it really is, these dear friends exemplify education as it ought to be. The Case against Education Introduction Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity.

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With a job at stake, even a slacker will work like a dog. The same holds when Fred finishes one year of college. A lazy rebel will toil and conform for two semesters if the wage is right. To signal you’re the real deal, a hardworking team player must outlast the posers and wannabes. As my colleague Tyler Cowen, ordinarily a signaling skeptic, once admitted: It does not suffice to give everyone a test and hire people with the highest scores. . . . Doing well on a test is no guarantee of perseverance. The signal must be costly and grueling, otherwise it fails to sort out the best job candidates.32 Contrary to critics, then, the sheer duration of education doesn’t refute signaling.

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You want relevant contacts.105 Friends in your narrowly defined occupation are quite lucrative.106 So are older male relatives (father, uncle, grandfather) who know the boss or vouch for you.107 When researchers estimate the average benefit of “contacts” or “social networks,” though, some find a positive effect on employment and wages, some no effect, and others a negative effect.108 If this seems implausible, bear in mind: even if your cousin or college roommate plainly “got you your job,” you might have swiftly found as good or better a job on your own. Who does meet useful contacts in school? If you want a job in education, school is the ideal place to network. Once I resolved to become an economics professor, I strove to meet other economics professors. One, Tyler Cowen, got me my job. (I also met many philosophy, history, and law professors. Career payoff so far: zero.) If you’re earning a professional degree in law or medicine, or majoring in more vocational subjects like engineering, you and your classmates will plausibly trade career favors down the line. Stanford’s computer science program could be your passport to Silicon Valley.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Relocating is a significant life change—moving away from friends and family requires significant courage, adaptability, and optimism. Imagine living somewhere where your best people always leave, where the purpose of excelling seems to be to head off to greener pastures. Over time it would be easy to develop a negative outlook. You might double down on pride and insularity. The economist Tyler Cowen observed that since 1970 the difference between the most and least educated U.S. cities has doubled in terms of average level of education—that is, more and more educated people are congregating in the same cities and leaving others. Business dynamism is now vastly unevenly distributed. Fifty-nine percent of American counties saw more businesses close than open between 2010 and 2014.

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The Annual Time Use survey in 2014 indicated high levels of time spent “attending gambling establishments,” “tobacco and drug use,” “listening to the radio,” and “arts and crafts as a hobby,” with over 8 hours per day spent on “socializing, relaxing and leisure.” The same surveys showed lower likelihood of volunteering or attending religious services than for men in the workforce, despite having considerably more time. “Every society has a ‘bad men’ problem,” says Tyler Cowen, the economist and author of Average Is Over. He projects a future where a relative handful of high-productivity individuals create most of the value, while low-skilled people become preoccupied with cheap digital entertainment to stay happy and organize their lives. Games have come a long way since I was a kid, and they’re about to take yet another leap forward.

…

…“a major metropolitan area run by armed teenagers with no access to jobs or healthy food”…: Matt Taibbi, “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town,” Rolling Stone, December 11, 2013. … since 1970 the difference between the most and least educated U.S. cities has doubled…: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), pp. 172–173. Fifty-nine percent of American counties saw more businesses close than open…: “Dynamism in Retreat: Consequences for Regions, Markets and Workers,” Economic Innovation Group, February 2017.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

IN THE PAST, EACH GENERATION of Americans believed it would live better than the one that came before it. That’s what we meant by “progress.” But though we continue to advance in technological ways, we’re no longer progressing in intergenerational betterment. That part of the American dream has died. Perhaps it can’t be saved, and we should just accept that fact. That’s what economist Tyler Cowen argues in his 2013 book, Average Is Over. Twenty-first-century America will be “much more unfair and much less equal,” he says. About ten percent of Americans will be wealthy while the rest grow increasingly poor. Aid from government will be inadequate, and millions will live in shantytowns like those in Mexico and Brazil.

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Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos, and David Hulme, Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South (Sterling, VA: Kumerian Press, 2010). 21. Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 22. Nicholas Lemann, “When the earth moved: What happened to the environmental movement?” New Yorker, April 15, 2013. 23. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 229—30 (Kindle Edition). Appendix: The Dividend Potential of Co-owned Wealth 1. Assumes 95 percent of US residents are eligible for Social Security and a 2013 population of 316 million; http://www.census.gov/population/foreign/data/acs2003.html. 2.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Table of Contents Cover Title Page Contents Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

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Strauss How Democracies Perish by Stephen Holmes “It Can’t Happen Here”: The Lessons of History by Geoffrey R. Stone Acknowledgments Contributor Biographies Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Contents Cover Title Page Introduction The Dictator’s Handbook, US Edition by Eric A. Posner Constitutional Rot by Jack M. Balkin Could Fascism Come to America? by Tyler Cowen Lessons from the American Founding by Cass R. Sunstein Beyond Elections: Foreign Interference with American Democracy by Samantha Power Paradoxes of the Deep State by Jack Goldsmith How We Lost Constitutional Democracy by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq On “It Can’t Happen Here” by Noah Feldman Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, But an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies by Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt States of Emergency by Bruce Ackerman Another Road to Serfdom: Cascading Intolerance by Timur Kuran The Resistible Rise of Louis Bonaparte by Jon Elster Could Mass Detentions Without Process Happen Here?

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But we have to pay attention to the real sources of constitutional dysfunction, halt the rot that threatens our constitutional system, and preserve our republic. The history of the American Constitution is a series of struggles for greater democracy, equality, and inclusiveness in the face of well-entrenched opposition. Trump’s presidency signals the beginning of yet another contest. Could Fascism Come to America? Tyler Cowen Could it ever happen here? Fascism, that is. That question is a standard refrain from American history, dating back at least to the 1930s and also related to the classic Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was asked with increasing frequency after the ascent and election of Donald Trump, both on the left and by “Never Trump” commentators on the right.

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

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

From quantum biology, nanotechnology and exoplanet astronomy to nudge unit governance, blockchain and virtual worlds, surely this is a uniquely fecund moment when the frontier is expanding at a record and still accelerating pace. Mounting evidence suggests the opposite. A lively debate is calling into question these dominant assumptions about our place in history and the default nature of progress. As much as anyone, the economist Tyler Cowen rang the alarm when he called the present, particularly in the West, the Great Stagnation. So let's call it the Great Stagnation Debate. Nicholas Negroponte believes we exist amid a ‘Big Idea Famine’. Others see not so much an innovation machine as an ‘Innovation Illusion’. The economist Robert Gordon talks about the ‘fall of growth’, while the physicist Lee Smolin talks about a science no longer capable of revolutionary thought.

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Productivity growth has been much slower over the 3IR than before. Since 1970, Total Factor Productivity (TFP), the key measure of how technology boosts growth, has grown at only a third of the pace achieved between 1920 and 1970, leaving us fully 73 per cent behind the postwar trend.17 In the words of Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood: ‘TFP growth probably is the best contender for how to measure scientific progress. And overall TFP measures do show declines in the rate of innovativeness, expressed as a percentage of GDP.’ 18 In short, it appears that recent ideas have failed to have the same impact as those of the earlier generation.

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But it provides stark evidence that a fraught environment now exists for big thinking. And Jones and his colleagues aren't alone among economists. Evidence is mounting from across the field. * Economists are increasingly sceptical about claims that we live in an age of radical innovation. High-profile names like Lawrence Summers, Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen elaborate the idea of ‘secular stagnation’, citing that strange slowing of Western economies despite a surface-level technological abundance. Cowen's ‘Great Stagnation’ is exactly what you'd expect if research productivity were to decline at 5.1 per cent a year.51 Prior to the 1970s, living standards doubled every couple of decades.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals By Tyler Cowen In my new essay, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, I ask questions about social philosophy for the future of our world. Why do we prefer one choice over another? To what extent do we have good reasons for such preferences? Exactly which choices should we make? Short reads are available for Medium readers, or read the whole thing, or find a full download of the essay at this pdf or pdf without images for Kindle. — Tyler Cowen, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 3434 Washington Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201, tcowen@gmu.edu.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

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

The hardening of class lines, and the growing concentration of disposable income, sends signals through everything from the political economy to consumer culture. Many theorists, both on the right and the left, suggest the time has come to accept a more stratified, less permeable social order. Conservatives and libertarians, such as economist Tyler Cowen, argue that “average” intelligence and skills are no longer sufficient for social advance. Some 15 percent of the population may do very well, he argues, but the vast majority will have to accept limited prospects for themselves and their offspring. The prospect he lays out essentially recalls the hierarchies of the Middle Ages, or at best the Victorian era.

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Blue-collar workers were described in major media as “bitter” and “psychologically scarred,” and even as an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession,” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.”26 This perspective extends across ideological lines. Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen suggests that an “average” skilled worker can expect to subsist on little but rice and beans in the future U.S. economy. If they choose to live on the East or West Coast, they may never be able to buy a house and will remain marginal renters for life.27 Left-leaning Slate in 2012 declared that manufacturing and construction jobs, sectors that powered the Yeomanry’s upward mobility in the past, “aren’t coming back.”28 Rather than a republic of Yeoman, we could end up instead, as one left-wing writer put it, living at the sufferance of our “robot overlords,” as well as those who program and manufacture them, likely using other robots to do so.29 Contempt for the middle orders is often barely concealed among those most comfortably ensconced in the emerging class order.

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Ronald Brownstein, “Eclipsed,” National Journal, May 28, 2011, http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/political-connections/white-working-class-americans-see-future-as-gloomy-20110526; Ronald Brownstein, “Meet the New Middle Class: Who They Are, What They Want, and What They Fear,” Atlantic, April 25, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/meet-the-new-middle-class-who-they-are-what-they-want-and-what-they-fear/275307; Phil Izzo, “Bleak News for Americans’ Income,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2011. 48. Rich Morin and Seth Motel, “A Third of Americans Now Say They Are in the Lower Classes,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, September 10, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/09/10/a-third-of-americans-now-say-they-are-in-the-lower-classes. 49. Brownstein, “Eclipsed.” 50. Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 23–24. 51. Ibid., p. 36; D. Robert Worley, “In Defense of Conservative Thought,” Huffington Post, September 18, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/d-robert-worley/conservatives-progressives_b_1879200.html. 52.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Morgan never had access to sulfa drugs or iPhones or fresh vegetables in wintertime. And the gap between Morgan’s quality of life and that of the typical American during his lifetime was in many important ways larger than the gap today between Bill Gates’s quality of life and that of the typical American. In Morgan’s day, as the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen puts it, “the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture.” But people do not experience life as an interesting moment in the evolution of human living standards.

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Currently forty states provide funding to expand preschool education, though most limit enrollment to low-income families. Nationally, 27 percent of all four-year-olds are enrolled in pre-K programs. That’s roughly equivalent to the number of fourteen-to seventeen-year-olds that were enrolled in high school during the late teens of the previous century. This might be the pool of “smart, uneducated kids” that Tyler Cowen is looking for—“low-hanging fruit” from whom we can derive future productivity gains merely by putting them in school. Research on early education suggests the benefits could be considerable. A 2011 study by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and five others (including Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) found that a one-percentile increase in scores on tests administered to Tennessee kindergarteners at the end of the school year was associated with a $94 increase in annual wages at age twenty-seven—and that’s after the numbers were adjusted to take into account variations in family background.

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Frank and Cook argue that corporate boards’ desire to hire known-quantity chief executives from outside the company, described earlier in this chapter, has made the market for CEOs winner-take-all as well. 10: Why It Matters General Sources Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Government Will Shape America’s Future (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Matthew Continetti, “About Inequality,” Weekly Standard, Nov. 14, 2011, at http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/about-inequality_607779.html?page=1. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). ———“The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (Jan.–Feb. 2011), at http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=907.

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

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

Techno-optimists, such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen,22 lampoon the worriers as luddites and point to rising employment around the world as proof that their fears are overblown, while many left-leaning thinkers continue to blame globalization and the erosion of worker bargaining power, rather than robots, for stagnant pay and rising inequality in rich countries. Some writers, like Brynjolfsson and McAfee, and also Tyler Cowen, whose 2013 book, Average is Over,23 speculates about America’s economic future, anticipate a future in which broad economic and social change occurs incrementally, and in which sensible policy reforms (to education, for example) can make a technologically induced decline in the need for labour easier for households to manage.

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In 1965 Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, reckoned his industry could double the number of transistors in an integrated circuit roughly once every two years, and that this doubling would likely continue.7 This astonishing pace of progress has been maintained for most of the last half-century, changing computing from something done at great expense by house-sized machines to something done all the time in tiny devices which now rest in the pockets of about 30 per cent of the world’s population. This slice of history played out during a period that economist Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, has labelled the ‘Great Stagnation’.8 A half-century of extraordinary gains in computing power somehow did not return humanity to the days of dizzying economic and social change of the nineteenth century. In 1987 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow mused, in a piece pooh-poohing the prospect of a looming technological transformation, that the evidence for the revolutionary power of computers simply wasn’t there.

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Most importantly, I am indebted to Zanny Minton Beddoes, without whose confidence and trust I would not have found myself in this position, and whose brilliance has made me a better thinker and writer. The ideas in the book were also shaped by years of debate and discussion with fellow economics writers and bloggers. I am especially grateful to Tyler Cowen, Matthew Yglesias, Karl Smith, Steve Randy Waldman and Brad DeLong, whose blogs have been a trusted sound-board off which I could bounce ideas. The book itself has been moulded by many hands. The text was immeasurably improved thanks to comments on early drafts from David Schleicher and Soumaya Keynes, and it was a great pleasure to work with Anna Hervé, who helped shape and polish the text.

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This recognition has led to a return of Locke’s basic wager that a system that provided material comfort, no matter the vastness of inequality and absent likely prospects of growth and mobility between classes, would nevertheless satisfy most members of society. The most recent muse of Lockean liberalism is the economist Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over echoes the basic contours of Locke’s argument. While noting that liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see the creation of two separate nations.

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Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Harper’s, May 2008, 37–38. CHAPTER 6. THE NEW ARISTOCRACY 1. Murray, Coming Apart. 2. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23, 26. 3. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 96. 4. Ibid., 95–96. 5. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Past the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 258. 6. Ibid. 7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Gray, On Liberty and Other Essays, 12–13. 8. Ibid., 65. 9. Ibid., 67. 10. Ibid., 68. 11. Ibid., 72. 12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Unlike the previous machine age of the first Industrial Revolution, the next one will not threaten manual blue-collar jobs, but those of highly paid, expert, white-collar workers. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, managers, designers, architects, are forecasted to become victims of computer automation. According to American economist Tyler Cowen, in the near future only an elite 10–15 per cent of the working population will have the intellectual capacity to master tomorrow’s AI technology, and that will make them very rich indeed.16 The rest of us will have to make do with low incomes and rather unfulfilling lives, or – at best – work as service providers to the rich.

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This latter category of intelligent machines may in fact prove to be the majority, if not the rule. They will exhibit reclusive types of behaviour similar to some of those we presently associate with autism.24 These behaviours could be the result of social selection. In his book Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen argues that success in the twenty-first century is already becoming synonymous with the ability to work with computers. My personal experience within the IT industry and Internet start-ups has been that the most brilliant programmers are often very shy of other people and social interaction. Science and technology have become so competitive nowadays that success in these professions most often comes to those exhibiting high IQs and maximum dedication to the lab or the computer terminal.

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Indeed, there may come a time when intelligent computers will be seen as the solution to all of humanity’s problems, including how to better govern ourselves. The end of liberty Most of the ideas, or warnings, offered today about the future effects of Artificial Intelligence point to the labour market. Several economists, such as Tyler Cowen, have argued that AI will cost many white-collar jobs. However, their analysis assumes that all other things will remain more or less equal, for instance our political system of parliamentary representation, or our free economies of prices mostly regulated by markets. But this is not necessarily so.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Here is a thoughtful and sweeping take on what we don’t know about why countries grow and what we do know about how ideas and technology and yes aid are improving lives everywhere.” —Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development “Charles Kenny is one of the best and deepest writers on economic growth and its relationship to quality of life in the modern world. This book represents the pinnacle of his thought.” —Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics, George Mason University “This nuanced and brilliant book is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand the complexity of development. Kenny doesn’t traffic in trite or facile diagnoses or solutions; instead, he compellingly lays out both the obstacles to success and the good reasons to be hopeful.

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For comments on parts or all of the draft, thanks to Michael Benedikt, Paul Currion, John Daly, Richard Easterlin, Joshua Gallo, Indur Goklany, Carol Graham, Cornlio Hopmann, Anthony Kenny, Nancy Kenny, Pamela Kenny, Andy McLennan, Stephen Mc-Groarty, Todd Moss, Al Rio, Gaute Solheim, Michael Warlters, and “The Disagreeables” book club. In addition, I put a draft of the book online for comments. Many thanks to Felix Salmon for an initial link and some generous comments. Thanks also to Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and Brad DeLong for blogging the draft. Beyond attracting interest from publishers (not least Basic Books), the process elicited some very valuable suggestions and corrections. Errors are mine, as are the views expressed. NOTES CHAPTER 1, ABANDONING HOPE 1 Kaplan, 1996, p. 27; Collier, 2007, p. 3; Ferguson, 2005. 2 Moyo, 2009; Clark, 2008, p. 3. 3 Figures are from Penn World tables: http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu/. 4 Pritchett, 1997, p. 1. 5 A search of Google Scholar conducted on August 8, 2007, entering the phrase “East Asian Miracle” returned 6,530 hits.

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

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

Sooner or later, a relatively minor reversal of fortune will suffice to spell catastrophe because almost all margin for error has been eliminated. The system as currently constituted is especially vulnerable to insidious, slow-fuse risks lurking in the tails of probability distributions. The economist Tyler Cowen has characterized the problem as a strategy of “going short on volatility”—in other words, “betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.”23 This strategy can appear to work well for many years, as by definition the contingencies being bet against are rare events. During these good times investors earn above-average returns, amped up by leverage.

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The Costs and Consequences of the 2007–09 Financial Crisis,” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Staff Paper no. 20, July 2013, https://dallasfed.org/assets/documents/research/staff/staff1301.pdf. 3.See Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality,” unpublished working paper, April 2012, https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeim JobsIncomeGrowthTopEarners.pdf. 4.See Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” American Interest 6, no. 3 (January 1, 2011), http://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-inequality-that-matters/. 5.http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/must-read-steve-teles-the-scourge-of-upward-redistribution-2/. 6.William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014), https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity. 7.See Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 3–28. 8.Justin Lahart, “Number of the Week: Finance’s Share of Economy Continues to Grow,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/. 9.General Accounting Office, “Financial Audit: Resolution Trust Corporation’s 1995 and 1994 Financial Statements,” July 1996, http://www.gao.gov/archive/1996/ai96123.pdf. 10.See David Min, “For the Last Time, Fannie and Freddie Didn’t Cause the Housing Crisis,” The Atlantic, December 16, 201l, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/for-the-last-time-fannie-and-freddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/. 11.Charles W.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Akerlof, “Writing the ‘The Market for “Lemons”’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” Nobelprize.org, November 14, 2003, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html. 207 “if this paper were correct”: Ibid. 207 50 million rides per month: Eric Newcomer, “Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth,” Bloomberg, last modified April 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/lyft-is-gaining-on-uber-as-it-spends-big-for-growth. 208 In 2013, California passed regulations: Tomio Geron, “California Becomes First State to Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX,” Forbes, September 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/19/california-becomes-first-state-to-regulate-ridesharing-services-lyft-sidecar-uberx/#6b22c10967fe. 208 by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them: BlaBlaCar, “Frequently Asked Questions: Is It Safe for Me to Enter My Govt. ID?” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.blablacar.in/faq/question/is-it-safe-for-me-to-enter-my-id. 209 “Many of the exchanges”: Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, “The End of Asymmetric Information,” Cato Institute, April 6, 2015, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2015/04/06/alex-tabarrok-tyler-cowen/end-asymmetric-information. 209 Airbnb CEO and cofounder Joe Gebbia: Joe Gebbia, “How Airbnb Designs for Trust,” TED Talk, February 2016, 15:51, https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_gebbia_how_airbnb_designs_for_trust?language=en. 209 “High reputation beats high similarity”: Ibid. 209 “can actually help us overcome”: Ibid. 211 SoulCycle: SoulCycle, “All Studios,” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.soul-cycle.com/studios/all. 217 But if it’s costly to switch: See, for instance, Paul Klemperer, “Markets with Consumer Switching Costs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 102, no. 2 (1987): 375–94; and Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, “Installed Base and Compatibility: Innovation, Product Preannouncements, and Predation,” American Economic Review (1986): 940–55. 219 more than $15 billion in loans: Douglas MacMillan, “Uber Raises $1.15 Billion from First Leveraged Loan,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-first-leveraged-loan-1467934151. 221 The lodging-industry benchmarking company STR: Bill McBride, “Hotels: Occupancy Rate on Track to Be 2nd Best Year,” Calculated Risk (blog), October 17, 2016, http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/10/hotels-occupancy-rate-on-track-to-be_17.html. 221 In Los Angeles the daily hotel rate: Hugo Martin, “Airbnb Takes a Toll on the U.S.

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And the TNCs continue to experiment and innovate. Uber, for example, was by early 2017 conducting spot checks by asking drivers to periodically take “selfie” photos. The company compared them to the pictures on file to make sure that the approved person was, in fact, driving the car. The economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok highlight online user reviews of platforms and other products as examples of a broad reduction in information asymmetries. This reduction has come about because of the diffusion of powerful technologies like smartphones, sensors, and networks, and because of ever-growing amounts of data.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The market would thus be the ultimate and efficient regulator, because the market would not forgive failure. Bankruptcy would be the remedy for failure, not a blank check from the Federal Reserve. Yet the banks fought this obvious reform with fury, and succeeded. As Lowenstein describes it, “Wall Street institutions emerged from the crisis more protected than ever.”46 “For better or worse,” as Tyler Cowen wrote after the reform bill was passed, “we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk.”47 Hacker and Pierson quote “two New York Times reporters describing Wall Street executives as ‘privately relieved that the bill [did] not do more to fundamentally change how the industry does business.’ ”48 Sebastian Mallaby “put [it most] simply”: “government actions have decreased the cost of risk for too-big-to-fail players; the result will be more risk taking.

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., 19. 102. Ibid., 21. 103. Rajan and Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, 92. 104. Ibid. 105. Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” 778, 792. 106. Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011, 2, available at link #127. 107. Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters,” The American Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2011), 4–5, available at link #128. 108. Huffington, Third World America, 17–18. 109. Sarah Anderson et al., “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay,” 15th Annual CEO Compensation Survey, Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (Aug. 25, 2008), 1, available at link #129. 110.

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The problem the past ten years has revealed is not innovation. It is innovation deployed in a context in which the risks are not borne by the gamblers. Hedge funds are not that. 45. Johnson and Kwak, 13 Bankers, 214–15. 46. Roger Lowenstein, The End of Wall Street (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 291. 47. Tyler Cowen, “Th c Cote> The American Interest (Jan.–Feb. 2011), 6, available at link #150. 48. Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, 282. 49. Mallaby, More Money Than God, 378. 50. MapLight, H.R. 4173: Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, available at link #151; MapLight, S. 3217: Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, available at link #152; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Commercial Banks, available at link #153; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Finance/Credit Companies, available at link #154; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Securities and Investment Companies, available at link #155; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Savings and Loan Institutions, available at link #156; Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, Credit Unions, available at link #157. 51.

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

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

the typical homeowner had about thirty times the net worth of the typical renter: Matthew Desmond, “How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality,” New York Times Magazine, May 9, 2017. The Case-Shiller Index of home values shows: See the “S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Prices Indices” maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indexes at http://us.spindices.com/index-family/real-estate/sp-corelogic-case-shiller. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, notes: Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). According to the Census Bureau, fifty years ago, some 20 percent: “Americans Moving at Historically Low Rates” (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2016). Chapter 11 In 2014, the Pew Research Center found: Kim Parker et al., “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014).

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Americans like to think their ancestors traversed the waters seeking political and religious liberty. Many did; many were seeking economic opportunity, leaving the stagnation and social failings of the bust places where they were born for a new land with unlimited boom potential. So why don’t more Americans pull up stakes today within their own still-very-large, still-booming nation? Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, notes that although conventional wisdom says Americans move constantly, the reality is otherwise. “Americans traditionally have thought of themselves as the great movers, and that was true in the nineteenth century and through most of the twentieth,” Cowen has written.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Koch Charitable Foundation gave GMU $3 million to hire the neoliberal Nobel economist and MPS member Vernon Smith; although that did not work out as planned, Koch gave another $2.5 million to Mercatus in 2009. Public sources suggest Mercatus has benefited to the tune of $30 million from Koch over the last two decades. Its general director is Tyler Cowen, another neoliberal we have already encountered. Reuters has reported that this foresight proved prescient in helping deflect the interpretation of the “consensus” pronouncements of economists in testimony to Congress: The House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee heard from academic economists linked to the Mercatus Center about a dozen times during the financial regulatory reform debate.

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The AEI then threw its weight behind the Freddie/Fannie story, with Wallison as point man, and the trusty echo chamber was revved up. Professional economists were recruited to bolster the narrative. The public-choice crowd was quick to chip in. Mark Calabria from Cato was brought in to fluff up the numbers. Dependable fellow travelers such as David Brooks, George Will, and Tyler Cowen chimed in in the columns and blogs. Douglas Holtz-Eakin signed on, in a way to soon become important in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Edward Pinto at AEI was brought on board to crunch some numbers. Raghuram Rajan promoted a more fuzzy-tinged and humanized version of the story in his Fault Lines.

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Kalle Lasn Associates has also published an anti-textbook entitled Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics which contains contributions by George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. At least the graphics were radical. Similar ideas were promoted in the curiously titled Occupy Handbook, which included chapters by Raghuram Rajan, Tyler Cowen, Martin Wolf, David Graeber, Jeffrey Sachs, and Robert Shiller.6 Besotted by the millenarian idea of starting anew, and lacking any sense of the history of protest and political organization, both neoliberals and neoclassical economists rapidly addled whatever political curiosity and radical inclinations that the well-intentioned protestors might have had.

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

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

Though an increasing number of people will lose in this new economy as their skill becomes automatable or easily outsourced, there are others who will not only survive, but thrive—becoming more valued (and therefore more rewarded) than before. Brynjolfsson and McAfee aren’t alone in proposing this bimodal trajectory for the economy. In 2013, for example, the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen published Average Is Over, a book that echoes this thesis of a digital division. But what makes Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s analysis particularly useful is that they proceed to identify three specific groups that will fall on the lucrative side of this divide and reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits of the Intelligent Machine Age.

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Advances such as robotics and voice recognition are automating many low-skilled positions, but as these economists emphasize, “other technologies like data visualization, analytics, high speed communications, and rapid prototyping have augmented the contributions of more abstract and data-driven reasoning, increasing the values of these jobs.” In other words, those with the oracular ability to work with and tease valuable results out of increasingly complex machines will thrive. Tyler Cowen summarizes this reality more bluntly: “The key question will be: are you good at working with intelligent machines or not?” Nate Silver, of course, with his comfort in feeding data into large databases, then siphoning it out into his mysterious Monte Carlo simulations, is the epitome of the high-skilled worker.

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

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

[The Half-Life of Facts] does what popular science should do—both engages and entertains.” —Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating and necessary look at the pace of human knowledge.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings “What does it mean to live in a world drowning in facts? Consider The Half-Life of Facts the new go-to book on the evolution of science and technology.” —Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, author of An Economist Gets Lunch “The Half-Life of Facts is fun and fascinating, filled with wide-ranging stories and subtle insights about how facts are born, dance their dance, and die. In today’s world where knowledge often changes faster than we do, Sam Arbesman’s new book is essential reading.”

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For example, the sizes of asteroids discovered annually get 2.5 percent smaller each year. In the first few years, the ease of discovery drops off quickly; after early researchers pick the low-hanging fruit, it continues to “decay” for a long time, becoming slightly harder without ever quite becoming impossible. There is even a similarity in one view of medicine. As Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has noted, if you tally the number of major advances, or definitive moments, in modern medicine (as chronicled by James Le Fanu) in each decade of the middle of the twentieth century, you get an eventual decline: “In the 1940s there are six such moments, seven moments in the 1950s, six moments in the 1960s, a moment in 1970 and 1971 each, and from 1973 [to] 1998, a twenty-five-year period, there are only seven moments in total.”

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Many have argued that our society’s growing economic divide is not born out of outsourcing, immigration, or even wage gaps. While all those things play a role, the real culprit is the divide in human capital and education. “The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century,” the economics professor and blogger Tyler Cowen writes. Starting around 1950, the relative returns to education began to rise. Since 1980 they have skyrocketed. Furthermore, “evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.”14 Where we live affects how we grow up, how we spend our free time, the educational opportunities available to us, and the people we meet.

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Bloomsbury USA, 2004. 11 Patrick McGeehan, “New York Area Is a Magnet for Graduates,” New York Times, August 16, 2006. 12 The Segmentation Company, a division of Yankelovich, “Attracting the Young College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities, May 11, 2006, www.ceosforcities.org/rethink/research/files/CEOsforCitiesAttractingYou ngEducatedPres2006.pdf. 13 Bill Bishop, The Big Sort, Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 14 Tyler Cowen, “Incomes and Inequality: What the Numbers Don’t Tell Us,” New York Times, Economic Scene, January 25, 2007. Chapter 13 1 The Segmentation Company, a division of Yankelovich, “Attracting the Young College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities, May 11, 2006, www.ceosforcities.org/rethink/research/files/CEOsforCitiesAttracting YoungEducatedPres2006.pdf. 2 Sam Roberts, “In Surge in Manhattan Toddlers, Rich White Families Lead Way,” New York Times, March 23, 2007. 3 Bill Gates, “Prepared Comments for the National Education Summit on High Schools,” February 26, 2005, www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/CoChairSpeeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechNGA -050226.htm. 4 According to the study, 1,700 high schools, 2 percent of all U.S. high schools, are places where no more than 60 percent of entering freshman make it to their senior year.

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

Meek, Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (London: Verso, 2015), p. 192. 1 Richard Seymour, ‘A Short History of Privatisation in the UK: 1979–2012’, Guardian, 29 March 2012. 2 C. Edwards, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Privatization Legacy’, Cato Journal 37 (2017), pp. 89–101, at p. 94. 3 Tyler Cowen, ‘Tyler Cowen’s Three Laws’, 15 April 2015, at marginalrevolution. com. 1 There are a few exceptions, typically small states. The Marshall Islands are one such. 2 See, respectively, H. Whiteside, ‘The State’s Estate: Devaluing and Revaluing ‘Surplus’ Public Land in Canada’, Environment and Planning A, 2 August 2017; F.

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No land.1 Chris Edwards’s 2017 tabulation of ‘major British privatizations’ in the libertarian Cato Journal? No land.2 Indeed, the neglect of land privatization in Britain runs considerably deeper. There is, to all intents and purposes, no scholarly literature on the subject; it is the one exception I know of to the second of US economist Tyler Cowen’s ‘three laws’: viz., ‘There is a literature on everything.’3 And as well as not having been studied, British land privatization has, for the most part, also not been substantively contested or protested. Why this lack of engagement, recognition and attention? One of the aims of this book is to try to account for it, but the question is essentially parked until the Conclusion.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In truth, Thiel said, “there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.” Thiel was fond of this particular trick—proclaiming himself fully rehabilitated, while often winking that maybe in his heart of hearts, he wasn’t quite falling in line to the degree he seemed to be. During an April 2015 Q&A with Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist who runs a fellowship, Emergent Ventures, which was started with $1 million in seed funding from Thiel, he was asked about the Cato essay in which he’d seemed to come out against women’s suffrage and democracy. “Writing is always such a dangerous thing,” Thiel said, coyly, and then pivoted to a riff about how the U.S. government wasn’t really a democracy anyway because it was run by “these very unelected, technocratic agencies.”

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This was, in other words, another kind of hedge, and New Zealand—remote, English-speaking, and with a right-leaning government then led by a wealthy former foreign exchange trader, John Key—was an attractive destination for a conservative billionaire with a paranoid streak. Thiel was looking for more than a bunker; he wanted a backup country. He said nothing about this publicly—and at the time of the Q&A with Tyler Cowen in which New Zealand came up, made no mention of his Kiwi citizenship. He was becoming an important supplier of software to the U.S. military and a patron of far-right politicians who railed against globetrotting elites—which to non-contrarians might have seemed inconsistent. On the other hand, the notion of abandoning the United States had been floating around the Thielverse for years.

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According to Bannon, Thiel’s job was to appoint people who could “break it up.” As a libertarian, Thiel seemed to relish the role. He’d spent his career attacking the government’s regulatory power—going all the way back to PayPal and the dream of Swiss bank accounts, to his 2009 essay in which he’d attacked democracy, to the 2015 interview with Tyler Cowen when he’d complained about “these agencies [which] have become deeply sclerotic, deeply nonfunctioning.” The Trump administration would adopt this rhetoric, complaining about an administrative apparatus so powerful that even the words “deep state” undersold it, according to Bannon. “It’s not deep, it’s in your fucking grill,” he told me, crediting this as “Peter Thiel’s theory of government.”

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, feminist movement, food miles, George Akerlof, global pandemic, information asymmetry, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, Netflix Prize, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Pareto efficiency, peak oil, pre–internet, price anchoring, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, Sam Peltzman, security theater, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549

The conversation was so interesting that I thought we’d pose a street charity question to a few other folks. Their answers are presented below (and, FWIW, at the very end you can see what Roland and I thought). The participants are: Arthur Brooks, who teaches business and government at Syracuse and is the author of Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism; Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason who writes books and maintains the Marginal Revolution blog; Mark Cuban, the multifaceted entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner; Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the low-rent classic Nickel and Dimed and many other works; and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the noted flâneur and author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

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This is the easiest case of all. I buy myself a hot dog and ignore the wino. Put some kraut on that and give me a Diet Pepsi, too. Which is my choice? I usually take number two, unless I’m feeling really lazy or I’m with somebody who knows I write books about charity—in which case I sometimes choose number one. TYLER COWEN I’m not keen on giving the money to the beggar. In the long run, this only encourages more begging. If you imagine a beggar earning, say, $5,000 a year, over time would-be beggars would invest about $5,000 worth of time and energy into being beggars. The net gain is small, if indeed there is one.

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

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

We look ahead at the prospect of ferocious competition, remorseless downward pressure on pay, the constant prospect of outsourcing, and the incessant press of technological change threatening to disintermediate and—to use the cant term beloved of Silicon Valley—“disrupt” traditional forms of employment. Flat living standards, flat median income, the disappearance of secure employment. We are told, in the title of a lively recent book by Tyler Cowen, that “average is over.” But most of us in our hearts know that in most important aspects, we are average. That’s the whole basis of prosperity in our societies: it provides good livelihoods and life prospects to the ordinary citizen. The notion of its coming to an end is terrifying. It’s no wonder people can’t get all that excited about the fact that out-of-sight poor people in the developing world are having a slightly less horrible time than they used to.

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A considered argument from the other side of the debate is Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, and the annual letter from the Gates Foundation is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question. The internet offers many superb resources on economics, as well as lively debates that respond to news and data in real time. There is no better place to begin than Twitter: I would start by following Tim Harford, Tyler Cowen, Aditya Chakrabortty, and Paul Kedrosky. Finally, I would urge anyone who’s interested in the subject but hasn’t read The Wealth of Nations to give Adam Smith’s masterwork a go. Smith was a great writer as well as a great thinker, and his book is still fresh and still readable, as well as being a serious candidate for the most influential work of the humanities ever written.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

The tale of the average Palaeolithic woman comes from Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism (New York: William Heinemann, 2009). For the rise of “clock-time” and what the Industrial Revolution did to our working week, read Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt’s works mentioned above. For more on threshold earners, see Tyler Cowen, “The Inequality That Matters”, The American Interest, January/February 2011. For an excellent deconstruction of that article, read political columnist Reihan Salam, “Threshold Earners and Gentleman Hackers”, National Review, 28 December 2010. “There is no sign of the ‘social snowball’ or ‘tipping point’ that would suggest that the medium chill is set to make the leap along the adoption curve.”

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For the definitive text on consuming fewer materials, read Chris Goodall, “Peak Stuff”, Carbon Commentary, 2011. And read Chris Goodall, Sustainability (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012). Keep up with the latest news via Goodall’s excellent blog www.carboncommentary.com. This chapter was also informed by Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2011), and Robert J Gordon, “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”, Centre for Economic Policy Research, September 2012. “In 2007, the average American bought almost twice as many items of clothing each year compared to 1991.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Even the news that companies like GE and Apple are bringing some manufacturing work back to the United States is bittersweet. One of the reasons the work is returning is that most of it can be done without human beings. “Factory floors these days are nearly empty of people because software-driven machines are doing most of the work,” reports economics professor Tyler Cowen.32 A company doesn’t have to worry about labor costs if it’s not employing laborers. The industrial economy—the economy of machines—is a recent phenomenon. It has been around for just two and a half centuries, a tick of history’s second hand. Drawing definitive conclusions about the link between technology and employment from such limited experience was probably rash.

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Edsall, “The Hollowing Out,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, July 8, 2012, campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/. 31.See Lawrence V. Kenton, ed., Manufacturing Output, Productivity and Employment Implications (New York: Nova Science, 2005); and Judith Banister and George Cook, “China’s Employment and Compensation Costs in Manufacturing through 2008,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2011. 32.Tyler Cowen, “What Export-Oriented America Means,” American Interest, May/June 2012. 33.Robert Skidelsky, “The Rise of the Robots,” Project Syndicate, February 19, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-future-of-work-in-a-world-of-automation-by-robert-skidelsky. 34.Ibid. 35.Chrystia Freeland, “China, Technology and the U.S.

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

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

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

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For all the many transatlantic differences, our basic economic experience is the same: persistent stagnation, chronic disappointment, and a growing conflict between the promise of progress and a reality where everything seems—surprisingly, depressingly—to stay the same. The Limits of Neoliberalism There is no shortage of theories to explain this “great stagnation” (to borrow a phrase from one of the theorizers, the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen), and there is also no need to simply choose between them. Like most broad trends, the economic decadence of the developed world is overdetermined, and almost every serious attempt at explanation will contain some element of truth. The most politically appealing theories—the ones animating our populist and socialist insurgencies—tend to blame neoliberalism itself, claiming that the medicine for 1970s stagflation has proven to be poison in large doses.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Large, monolithic companies, run by all-powerful leaders, stand like totems towering over Lilliputian start-ups. Whether a Caltech research scientist or a hacker high-school dropout, the people seem to lack cognitive diversity; the social equivalent of Norwegian board directors. Patrick Collison, the founder of the fintech firm Stripe, and Tyler Cowen, an economist, have called for a new discipline of “progress studies,” to understand in greater detail why some innovative ecosystems do better than others—and how to sustain success. Perhaps the geeks resemble clones of one another because they have all gone through Joel Podolny’s classes at Apple University only to strive to “think different” in the same way.

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See also: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997). A readable romp is: John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (New York: Penguin, 2015). On Collison’s “progress studies”: Interview with Patrick Collison by Kenneth Cukier, January 2020. Also see Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress,” Atlantic, July 30, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946. For a critical assessment, see: Cukier, “Innovation Around Innovation—Studying the Science of Progress,” The Economist, Babbage podcast, September 4, 2019, https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/09/04/innovation-around-innovation-studying-the-science-of-progress.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

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

Low-cost airlines continue to sell airline tickets with attractive flight times, which they then systematically change to an unearthly hour on Monday morning (didn’t you read the small print?). Unscrupulous loan sharks obscure their default interest rate and use the bailiff as if it were a branch of business. And the customer service of some companies is so chronically understaffed that you can never ask for your money back. Not every businessman is a hero. However, economist Tyler Cowen poses an interesting question to assess the reliability of entrepreneurship. Sure, he notes, companies lie but the question is: do they lie as much as normal people do? That is not a given, because we are not always in line with the truth. On average, we lie about twice in a ten-minute conversation, usually to our loved ones.

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Laissez Faire Books, 1966, pp.269f. 10. Hal R. Varian, ‘Recent trends in concentration, competition, and entry’, Antitrust Law Journal, vol.82, no.3, 2019. 11. Mary Amiti & Sebastian Heise, ‘US market concentration and import competition’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 5 April 2021. 12. Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, St Martin’s Press, 2019, chap.2. 13. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, HarperCollins, 2017. So remember to never compare your inner self with other people’s social media. 14.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The fact that all the remarkable progress in computing and the internet does not, by itself, measure up to the expectation that the kind of broad-based progress seen in earlier decades would continue unabated is captured in Peter Thiel’s famous quip that “we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” The argument that we have been living in an age of relative stagnation—even as information technology has continued to accelerate—has been articulated at length by the economists Tyler Cowen, who published his book The Great Stagnation in 2011,64 and Robert Gordon, who sketches out a very pessimistic future for the United States in his 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.65 A key argument in both books is that the low-hanging fruit of technological innovation had been largely harvested by roughly the 1970s.

…

Darrell Etherington, “Waymo has now driven 10 billion autonomous miles in simulation,” TechCrunch, July 10, 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/waymo-has-now-driven-10-billion-autonomous-miles-in-simulation/. 62. Waymo website, accessed May 20, 2020, waymo.com/. 63. Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil Library Blog, March 7, 2001, www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns. 64. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Dutton, 2011. 65. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 2016. 66. Nicholas Bloom, Charles I.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Commodities that aim at secularizing culture can instead be sacralized by those who receive them—as happens famously with so-called cargo cults9 and as happened with the Coke bottle that dropped from the sky in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Even marketing slogans can be turned against themselves. When Pepsi translated its “universal” slogan “Come alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” into Taiwanese, it became “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead,” not exactly what Pepsi was looking for. As Tyler Cowen has observed in his lively account of cultural consumption, culture itself is a moving target and apparent homogenization can conceal what in fact is mere mutability. To Cowen, all culture is fusion culture and no culture is pristinely indigenous, which certainly applies to consumer culture. Cowen thus shows that the “indigenous” music of Zaire, which is putatively under assault from a totalizing global music marketplace, is in reality itself a product (among other things) of the electric guitar, saxophone, trumpet, clarinet, and flute, “none of which are indigenous to Africa,” but instead arrived in earlier decades along with Cuban and other foreign influences.10 Likewise, Trinidad’s steel bands, among its greatest “indigenous” tourist attractions but vulnerable according to native defenders to the global marketing inroads of MTV, actually were themselves a twentieth-century by-product of the colonial petroleum market that led in the late 1930s to the replacement of truly indigenous bamboo instruments by steel drums—newly “traditional”—cut from oil barrels.

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., Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7. 9. Constance Classen and David Howes, “Epilogue: The Dynamics and Ethics of Cross-Cultural Consumption,” in Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption, p. 182. Also see Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 10. Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 22. Cowen’s title is drawn from classical economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the dialectic in which capitalism “creatively” destroys the stages it traverses as it evolves.

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Hence, in his view, “after 1900 the sheer amount of flesh on display decreased; the grotesque body of Carnival virtually disappeared” (p. 117). 55. These quotes are all from the preface in Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You:How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). Johnson’s focus is on video games and their impact on intelligence, but his claims are far more expansive. Tyler Cowen offers a similarly straightforward celebration of consumerism, especially in its putative capacity to sustain serious culture, in the book that preceded his Creative Destruction discussed earlier, a book appropriately titled In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 56.

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

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

While it will result in new housing being built and in increased density, the high costs of urban land combined with the high cost of high-rise construction, mean it is likely to mainly add more expensive luxury towers and that it will do little to provide the kinds of affordable housing our cities really need. Even the free-market economist Tyler Cowen has a certain skepticism toward this approach: “More stuff will be built, urban output will expand, land still will be the scarce factor, and by the end of the process rents still will be high,” he wrote. “If we deregulate building, landowners will capture a big chunk of the benefits.”8 As a result, very little of the benefit will end up trickling down to those who need it most.

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The study, which tracked 1,700 pieces of legislation from 1881 to 2000 that dealt with cities or counties in thirteen state legislatures, found that bills dealing with cities of 100,000 or more were far less likely to pass than those aimed at smaller places; bills that were introduced by legislators from smaller places were twice as likely to pass as ones that originated in big cities. 7. Richard Florida, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?,” New York Times, January 3, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/is-life-better-in-americas-red-states.html. 8. Tyler Cowen, “Market Urbanism and Tax Incidence,” Marginal Revolution, April 19, 2016, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/market-urbanism-and-tax-incidence.html. 9. As quoted in Stephen Wickens, “Jane Jacobs: Honoured in the Breach,” Globe and Mail, May 6, 2011, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/jane-jacobs-honoured-in-the-breach/article597904. 10.

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

This coincidence of very cheap borrowing and the apparent unwillingness of businesses to invest was what Larry Summers was talking about when he popularized the term “secular stagnation” in a 2013 lecture to the IMF.1 One immediate explanation for this weird mix of cheap money and low investment is simply that the demand for investment has fallen. In his 2011 bestseller The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen suggested that developed countries might have exhausted easy sources of good investments, such as settling new land or getting children to spend more years in education. Most memorably, he argued that technological progress might have slowed down, or, more specifically, that the economic benefit of new discoveries was less than had been the case in the past.

…

Paying for citizens to go to school for longer was, for much of twentieth century, an important way that governments increased productivity; the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz documented the vital role of education in the economic growth of the United States, pointing out, for example, that while 62 percent of the 1930 US birth cohort graduated from high school, 85 percent of the 1975 cohort did (Goldin and Katz 2008). Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have argued that there are diminishing returns here—children and young people can only spend so long in school or college—and that this will prove to be a major brake on US economic growth in the future (Gordon 2016; Cowen 2011). Working out how to defy these diminishing returns has proved challenging.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

E-International Relations, 24 January 2014, at e-ir.info; Robert Gordon, Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2012, at nber.org; Lawrence Summers, ‘US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound’, Business Economics 49: 2 (2014); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures (London: CEPR, 2014). 134.Cowen, Great Stagnation, pp. 47–8. 135.Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey, Industrial Renewal in the 21st Century: Evidence from US Cities?

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Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (London: Penguin, 2009). 10.Tony Smith, ‘Red Innovation’, Jacobin 17 (2015), p. 75. 11.Mariana Mazzucato, Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael Osborne, ‘Robot Panel’, presented at the FT Camp Alphaville, London, 15 July 2014, available at youtube.com. 12.Michael Hanlon, ‘The Golden Quarter’, Aeon Magazine, 3 December 2014, at aeon.co; Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011), p. 13. 13.This is one of the primary conclusions of Mariana Mazzucato’s important book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem, 2013). 14.For a lengthy analysis of how Apple cynically deployed state-developed technologies to build the iPhone, see ibid., Chapter 5. 15.The fact that so many megaprojects continue to go ahead despite their history of cost overruns and lack of profitability is deemed a paradox by one study: Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–5. 16.André Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, transl.

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

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

We see the consequences in the premature deindustrialization of the developing world today. In a world of premature deindustrialization, achieving economy-wide productivity growth becomes that much harder for low-income countries. As we saw in an earlier chapter, it is not clear whether there are effective substitutes for industrialization. The economist Tyler Cowen has suggested that developing countries may benefit from the trickle down of innovation from the advanced economies: they can consume a stream of new products at cheap prices.16 This is a model of what Cowen calls “cellphones instead of automobile factories.” But the question remains: What will these countries produce and export—besides primary products—to be able to afford the imported cellphones?

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Lopez-Calva, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, “Deconstructing the Decline in Inequality in Latin America,” Tulane Economics Working Paper Series, Working Paper 1314, April 2013. 14. James Manyika, et al., Digital America: A Tale of the Haves and Have-Mores, McKinsey Global Institute Report, December 2015. 15. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2016. 16. Tyler Cowen, “Economic Development in an ‘Average is Over’ World,” Working Paper, April 8, 2016. 17. Margaret McMillan, Dani Rodrik, and Íñigo Verduzco-Gallo, “Globalization, Structural Change, and Productivity Growth, with an Update on Africa,” World Development, vol. 63, 2014: 11–32. 18. Dietrich Vollrath, “More on Decomposing US Productivity Growth,” Blog, May 11, 2016, https://growthecon.com/blog/More-Decomp/. 19.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

Soon even higher education, the last redoubt of debtors’ prison, will be free, not because the politicians will restore Pell Grants and fund state universities, but because MOOCs and YouTube will give everyone online access to the most influential academics on the planet—from Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum to David Harvey. Rifkin and I agree that as the market registers fewer transactions—as we produce and distribute more goods without the mediation of money—our assessments of future economic growth, GDP and so forth, must begin to look bleak. Leading economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have, accordingly, predicted the decline of innovation and the end of growth. After all, the Commerce Department can’t measure what’s off the books. But that’s the thing about this new stage of economic development—it can’t be measured by the old quantitative criteria, even though we’re unquestionably producing more of what we need and want.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

“Nice” was the behaviour of champions. And yet suddenly, straight out of the sci-fi movies of your youth here are the robots and computers remorselessly operating on behalf of super-rich corporate titans. And they play by the rules of “Nice” better than you or I ever could or ever will. As the economist Tyler Cowen explained: “Average is over”. When all the world’s knowledge and opinions can be mined by giant social networks, then the average will be served up in real time with greater accuracy than you offer by a mere line of code. In the Nice Age, average ruled. Now it’s done. Anything other than summoning forth your own original ideas is playing to your weakness.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

Whatever side of politics you’re on, this smart little book will make you a better wonk, with a clearer sense about the facts that underpin the biggest policy debates of our time.” —JUSTIN WOLFERS, professor of economics and public policy, University of Michigan “Just how good or bad are things in America right now? Michael Strain’s The American Dream Is Not Dead is the most balanced and informative take on this question you are likely to see.” —TYLER COWEN, professor of economics, George Mason University and coauthor of the Marginal Revolution blog “The American Dream is alive and well—not based on wishful thinking, but on an abundance of evidence. Michael Strain’s balanced and expert presentation, acknowledging problems but identifying the strengths in America’s economy, is exactly what the policy debate has needed: a data-driven look at good news that has been ignored by politicians of left and right alike.”

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

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

My Department of Economics at UIC was amiable toward my mixing of the humanities with the mathematical social sciences. And the two other departments from which I also recently retired at UIC, of English and of Communication, let me gladly learn and gladly teach the human sciences. Joel Mokyr, as I said, and Robert Wuetherick gave me astoundingly detailed and useful comments on this volume. Tyler Cowen and Jack Goldstone made helpful suggestions at a late stage. Jonathan Feinstein and Gregory Clark participated in an illuminating electronic discussion of Bourgeois Dignity at Cato Unbound, a blog of the Cato Institute, as did Matt Ridley, who has been cordially encouraging in other ways as well.

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Yet if on account of Adam Smith’s hoped-for “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” all have access to excellent education—which is a proper subject for social policy—and if the poor are so rich (because the Great Enrichment) that they too have fewer children, which is the case, then the tendency to rising variance will be attenuated.12 The economist Tyler Cowen reminds me, further, that “low” birth rates also include zero children, which would make lines die out—as indeed they often did, even in royal families, well nourished. Nonexistent children, such as those of Grand Duke of Florence Gian Gastone de’ Medici in 1737, can’t inherit either financial or human capital.

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Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all.13 8 Or from the Right and Middle And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued recently that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.1 Maybe. The economists would acknowledge that in the past couple of centuries numerous other learned commentators have predicted similar slowdowns—such as the Keynesian economists in the late 1930s and the 1940s, confident in their theory of “stagnationism”—only to find their predictions once again falsified by the continuing Great Enrichment.2 The classical economists of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, Marx included, expected landlords, or in Marx’s case capitalists, to engorge the national product.

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

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

It’s an understatement to say that my business partner, Mitt Romney, winning the Republican nomination for president generated interest in my first book. That interest gave me a second career. The American Enterprise Institute’s stamp of approval and the endorsements of many top economists—Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen, Nouriel Roubini, Andrei Shliefer, and others—persuaded some skeptical readers and journalists to take a more thoughtful look at my work. My research assistant, Steve Bogden, ensured that I considered every relevant economic study. I doubt there is a person who has surveyed as much of the economic landscape as Steve.

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Edward Lazear, “How Not to Prevent the Next Financial Meltdown,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-not-to-pre vent-the-next-financial-meltdown-1443827426. 30. Conard, Unintended Consequences. 31. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 32. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 33. Paul Krugman, “The Conscience of a Liberal: Stimulus Arithmetic (Wonkish but Important),” New York Times, January 6, 2009, http://krugman.blogs.ny times.com/2009/01/06/stimulus-arithmetic-wonkish-but-important. 34.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Learning from Freestyle Chess Several writers who touch on what we are calling mutual augmentation do so with reference to chess. It’s definitely a realm in which some humility on the part of humans is called for. In one-on-one matches, we know the best chess players are computers these days. Yet the trouncing isn’t so complete as you might have been led to believe. The economist Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t play chess much (we like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs.

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John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 358–73. 10. David H. Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium on “Reevaluating Labor Market Dynamics,” September 3, 2014, http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835. 11. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013). 12. CareerSearch, “Career Advice on How to Become an Insurance Underwriter,” http://www.careersearch.com/careers/real-estate-and-insurance/insurance-underwriter/. 13. Mike Batty and Alice Kroll, “Automated Life Underwriting: A Survey of Life Insurance Utilization of Automated Underwriting Systems,” prepared for the Society of Actuaries, 2009, file:///C:/Users/jkirby/Downloads/research-life-auto-underwriting.pdf. 14.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

More recently, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s influential 2014 book The Second Machine Age argued that the American economy inevitably will be characterized by a “bounty” of fabulous economic gains for workers and entrepreneurs with the right skills, but also a widening “spread” between those winners and the growing army of losers whose jobs will disappear under a tidal wave of technological change.32 That book won approving reviews or front-cover blurbs from public figures many Millennials have grown up respecting, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and someone whose job title is “chief maverick” at Wired magazine. Millennials to the Right end of the political spectrum who distrust those figures could instead turn to books like Average Is Over by free-market blogger and professor Tyler Cowen, who in 2013 presented a similar argument about the future of work, with a somewhat more dystopian twist: “I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care.

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Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz, “The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4, no. 1 (2012). 31. Richard Florida, “Preface to the Original Edition,” in The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 32. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 33. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Plume, 2013). 34. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18901, March 2013. 35.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

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

That’s a pace lower than at any time since the 1970s and half what was seen during the postwar boom years. This leads some to argue that the anecdotal accounts of great breakthroughs in robotics and computation are misleading, because they aren’t actually being translated into economic results. The economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon are most closely associated with this view.15 Doug Henwood, of the Left Business Observer, makes a similar case from the Left.16 For more conservative economists like Cowen and Gordon, the problem is largely technical. The new technologies aren’t really all that great, at least from an economic perspective, compared to breakthroughs like electricity or the internal combustion engine.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

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

For a general survey of methods, see: Jose David Fernández and Francisco Vico, ‘AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey’, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 48 (2013), 513–82. 12 Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015); Simon Parkin, ‘The Artificially Intelligent Doctor Will Hear You Now’, MIT Technology Review 9 March 2016; James Gallagher, ‘Artificial intelligence “as good as cancer doctors”’, BBC, 26 January 2017. 13 Kate Brannen, ‘Air Force’s lack of drone pilots reaching “crisis” levels’, Foreign Policy, 15 January 2015. 14 Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013); Brad Bush, ‘How combined human and computer intelligence will redefine jobs’, TechCrunch, 1 November 2016. 15 Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 286; Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 197; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, ‘The Decline of the Urban Horse in American Cities’, Journal of Transport History 24:2 (2003), 177–98. 16 Lawrence F.

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., ‘Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm’, arXiv (2017), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf; see also Sarah Knapton, ‘Entire Human Chess Knowledge Learned and Surpassed by DeepMind’s AlphaZero in Four Hours’, Telegraph, 6 December 2017. 19 Cowen, Average is Over, op. cit.; Tyler Cowen, ‘What are humans still good for? The turning point in freestyle chess may be approaching’, Marginal Revolution, 5 November 2013. 20 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016. 21 Alex Williams, ‘Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax’, New York Times, 10 June 2017. 22 Simon Rippon, ‘Imposing Options on People in Poverty: The Harm of a Live Donor Organ Market’, Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (2014), 145–50; I.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, the dollar’s depreciation over the past decade has made U.S. exports more competitive. The dollar has strengthened slightly in the last year, but it remains 25 percent below its 2002 peak, a situation that continues to feed a U.S. export recovery. The U.S. share of global exports is up a full point from its all-time low of 7.5 percent, hit in July 2008. Economist Tyler Cowen recently predicted that America’s export success will not only revive the United States as a dominant global economic power but “largely cure its trade imbalance with China” and wipe away the view of America as “the borrowing supplicant in the US-China economic relationship.” The Manufacturing Revival The most dramatic signs of a U.S. revival are in manufacturing.

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For example, as 3D manufacturing advances, it is expected to give manufacturers the capacity to custom build goods for individual consumers more cheaply than the goods can be mass-produced in manned factories in Asia. And as developed nations like China grow richer, their consumers will demand the kind of advanced and custom-designed products that will be made mainly in America. As Tyler Cowen points out, the United States is a leading exporter of products that lie in the “sweet spot” for future demand from the emerging world, including civilian aircraft, semiconductors, cars, pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment, automobile accessories, and entertainment. Technology, Inequality, and the Debt Threat There is an undeniable and scary connection between technology and persistent or rising income inequality, an issue that has remarkable resonance everywhere I travel, from Chile to South Korea.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

EACH NEW RUN-UP in the price had drawn new and more sophisticated scrutiny of the principles underlying Bitcoin, and the December rise and fall were no different. This time, the people training their sights on Bitcoin were some of the highest-profile economists in the United States—including Paul Krugman, the progressive Nobel Prize winner; and Tyler Cowen, the prolific libertarian-leaning blogger. Few of them had much good to say. Krugman focused largely on Bitcoin’s claim to be a currency, given the difficulty it seemed to have fulfilling one of the basic roles of money: serving as a reliable store of value. Why would people store their wealth in Bitcoin if they knew the value was going to fluctuate so violently?

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Silk Road Redux,” All Things Vice, November 7, 2013, http://allthingsvice.com/2013/11/07/remember-remember-silk-road-redux/. 270The number of Blockchain.info wallets: Data on wallets available at https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users. 271But the relatively apathetic public response: David Lauter, “Public Largely Tunes Out NSA Surveillance Debate, Poll Finds,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2014. 271“We see the intrinsic value of Bitcoin”: Gil Luria, “Bitcoin: Intrinsic Value as Conduit for Disruptive Payment Network Technology,” Wed-bush Equity Research, December 1, 2013. 272“emerge as a serious competitor”: David Woo, “Bitcoin: A First Assessment,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch FX and Rates Research, December 5, 2013. 274The good news was that the agencies: The Chinese government statement is available at http://www.pbc.gov.cn/publish/goutongjiaoliu/524/2013/20131205153156832222251/20131 205153156832222251_.html. CHAPTER 27 286Krugman focused largely on Bitcoin’s claim: Paul Krugman, “Bitcoin Is Evil,” New York Times, December 28, 2013, http://krugman.blogs .nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/. 286Cowen, meanwhile, argued: Tyler Cowen, “How and Why Bitcoin Will Plummet in Price,” Marginal Revolution, December 30, 2013, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how-and-why-bitcoin-will-plummet-in-price.html. 287“to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy”: Charles Stross, “Why I Want Bitcoin to Die in a Fire,” Charlie’s Diary, December 18, 2013, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html. 289“It represents a remarkable conceptual”: Francois Velde, “Bitcoin: A Primer,” Chicago Fed Letter, December 2013. 289Overstock announced that it would begin: The announcement is available at http://blog.coinbase.com/post/72787431702/coinbase-and-overstock-com-announce-largest. 290Overstock processed more than $100,000 in orders: Sales data available at http://www.prweb.com/releases/bitcoin2014Keynote/PatrickByrne/prweb 11699797.htm.

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

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

As astrophysicist Mario Livio writes, “More than 20 percent of Einstein’s original papers contain mistakes of some sort.”71 Sara Blakely, the founder and CEO of Spanx, highlights her own oops moments at company-wide meetings.72 Catmull, the former president of Pixar, talks about the mistakes he has made at new-employee orientations: “We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right,” he explains.73 Economist Tyler Cowen wrote a detailed analysis of how, in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, he “badly underestimated the chance that something systemic had gone wrong in the American economy.” Cowen admitted his remorse: “I regret that I was wrong, and I regret that I was overconfident in my belief that I was right.”74 If these individuals now appear more endearing to you, you’re experiencing what researchers call the “beautiful mess effect.”75 Exposing your vulnerability can make you more desirable in the eyes of others.

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Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 266. 72. Hal Gregersen, “Bursting the CEO Bubble,” Harvard Business Review, April 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/03/bursting-the-ceo-bubble. 73. Catmull and Wallace, Creativity, Inc. 74. Tyler Cowen, “My Biggest Regret,” Econ Journal Watch, May 2017, https://pingpdf.com/pdf-econ-journal-watch-142-may-2017.html. 75. Anna Bruk, Sabine G. Scholl, and Herbert Bless, “Beautiful Mess Effect: Self–Other Differences in Evaluation of Showing Vulnerability,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 115, no. 2 (2018): 192–205, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-34832-002. 76.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Three decades or more since we first began to talk of living in a computer age, the total number of workers employed in the development and production of computer hardware, software and applications, is still only 4 per cent of the total workforce in the US, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts just 135,000 new jobs in software development over 2014 to 2024, versus 458,000 additional personal care aides, and 348,000 home health aides. Total employment in the giant mobile phone, software and Internet companies which dominate global equity values is a minute drop in the global labour market. Facebook, with a market capitalization of $500 billion, employs just 25,000 people.45 Turner takes issue with Tyler Cowen’s book Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation in which he argues that rising income inequality is inevitable but will not lead to social revolt, because low earners will still enjoy adequate living standards as long as housing costs are kept low. Cowen imagines a future in which “say 10 to 15 per cent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives” while “much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and cheap education” because of the free or near free services that the Internet makes available.46 The average citizen will not be able to afford to live well in the successful big cities… but will migrate to those parts of the United States, such as Texas, where plentiful land and easy zoning rules make housing affordable.

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., Skills Shift: Automation and the Future of the Workforce, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) Discussion Paper, May 2018. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 “EY Transforms Its Recruitment Selection Process for Graduates, Undergraduates and School Leavers,” press release from Ernst and Young, August 3, 2015. 43 “EY: How to Excel in a Strengths-Based Graduate Interview,” Target Jobs, https://targetjobs.co.uk/employers/ey/ey-how-to-excel-in-a-strengths-based-graduate-interview-323859. 44 See UK High Pay Centre. 45 Adair Turner, Capitalism in the Age of Robots: Work, Income and Wealth in the 21st Century, Lecture given at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, April 10, 2018, 29. 46 Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013). Chapter Ten: Cognitive Diversity and the Future of Everything 1 David Brooks, Intelligence Squared lecture, October 20, 2015. 2 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 3 Jonathan Rowson and Iain McGilchrist, Divided Brain, Divided World: Why the Best Part of Us Struggles to be Heard, RSA, February 2013, 4–5, https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/blogs/rsa-divided-brain-divided-world.pdf. 4 Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier?

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

The effect of a minimum wage increase on the overall price level is likely to be small … small enough that they are far outweighed by fluctuations in prices for products such as gasoline and apparel.”69 CHAPTER 20 OFFSHORING AND THE APPLE PROBLEM “Manufacturing in America is in serious decline, with 40,000 factory closures and more than 4 million jobs lost over the last decade.”1 Manufacturing: A Better Future for America, Alliance for American Manufacturing, 2009 “We stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty or connection to the United States than a GPS device.”2 ROBERT REICH, Aftershock “The problem with that strategy is that for the past two decades we have allowed our industrial and technological base to deteriorate as talent and capital were grossly misallocated toward other sectors of the economy….”3 STEVEN PEARLSTEIN, Washington Post, September 2010 “American companies often save on costs by finding lower wages abroad, not by enhancing the abilities of American workers.”4 TYLER COWEN, George Mason University, August 2011 “These are the jobs that have created the Midwestern middle class for generations. Manufacturing jobs paid for college educations, including mine. They have been cut in half over the past two decades.”5 JEFFREY IMMELT, CEO, General Electric, December 2009 Lord Uxbridge was Wellington’s deputy commander as the combined forces arrayed against Napoleon fought desperately in Belgium against the fearsome French cuirassiers and cannoneers who had conquered Europe.

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Jensen, “Capitalism Isn’t Broken,” Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1996, A-10. 29 Norbert Häring, “Man As a Yardstick,” Handelsblatt, Aug. 19, 2010. 30 Charles Lane, “Obama’s Leaky Bucket,” Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2011. 31 Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry, “Equality and Efficiency: Is There a Trade-off Between the Two or Do They Go Hand in Hand,” Finance and Development, International Monetary Fund, Washington, September 2011. 32 David Brooks, “The Biggest Issue,” New York Times, July 29, 2008. See also Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: A Penguin Group e-Special from Dutton, 2011). 33 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 34 This includes: Alan Blinder, Edward N. Wolff, Deborah Reed, Daniel Cohen, Gordon Lafer, Frank Levy, and Peter Temin.

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Wascher, Minimum Wages, 97. 69 Ibid., 248, 252. CHAPTER 20 1 “Manufacturing: A Better Future for America,” ed. Richard McCormack, Alliance for American Manufacturing, 2009. 2 Robert Reich, Aftershock, 56. 3 Steven Pearlstein, “The Bleak Truth About Unemployment,” Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2010. 4 Tyler Cowen, “The Sad Statistic That Trumps the Others,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 2011. 5 Jeffrey Immelt, “Renewing American Leadership,” General Electric, Dec. 9, 2009. 6 Max Hastings “The West’s Crisis of Honest Leaders,” Financial Times, Aug. 15, 2011. 7 “Public Says American Work Life Is Worsening, But Most Workers Remain Satisfied with Their Jobs,” Social Trends Project, Pew Research Center, September 2006. 8 “The Story so Far,” Economist, Jan. 19, 2013, 5. 9 Justin R.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Even elite jobs in the civil service have lost their cachet. The situation is so dismal that students who study public service would prefer to work in the voluntary sector. There are some first-rate people in the public sector—brilliant economists, smart diplomats, wily spies. But the bench is far weaker than the private sector. The American economist Tyler Cowen called one of his books Average Is Over. It certainly isn’t over in the halls of Leviathan. Do an average job and you will still be able to coast to retirement (and, according to one study in America, get paid more than a private sector worker, once you take perks and hours into account).19 By contrast, do an exemplary job for the Western state and you will never get the rewards you get at Google—or indeed in Asian government.

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

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

Much of the recent literature on corporate governance, business development, and strategy that we have read has felt like a copy of the original thought derived from the works of Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Henry Minzberg, Philip Kotler, and Igor Ansoff. There are several thinkers today that can be put in the same category. If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf. Their works have contributed to our thinking for this book. Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us.

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Between 1995 and 2009, Europe’s labor productivity grew by just 1 percent annually.13 Figure 2.3 G7 labour productivity growth Like the United States, the other G7 countries seem to have exhausted the usual sources of productivity growth, especially the growth from the first (1760–1840) and second (1870–1970) industrial revolutions. That tallies with economist Tyler Cowen’s catchy summary of declining strength in the American economy, that it has “eaten all the low-hanging fruits of modern history and got sick.”14 Translated into economic prose, this means that new technologies do not create much economic growth, or at least are not making as large a contribution as in the past.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

This included information and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and television, but it also included advances in many other industries, such as transportation, energy, housing, and medicine. Since 1970, there’s been substantial progress in information and communication technologies, but in all those other industries, progress has been comparatively incremental. Since 1970, the pace of progress seems to have slowed. The economist Tyler Cowen has argued that a growth slowdown is extremely bad from a longterm perspective.14 Decreases to the rate of economic growth, he argues, would be hugely harmful to future generations. For example, suppose that the long-run growth rate slows from 2 percent per year to 1.5 percent per year. The difference this makes for people in a hundred years’ time will be massive: they will be nearly 40 percent poorer at a 1.5 percent growth rate than they would have been at a 2 percent growth rate.

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Paul Burke (climate change), Prof. Bryan Caplan (population ethics), Dr Lucius Caviola (psychology of wellbeing), Dr Paulo Ceppi (climate science), Prof. David Christian (history), Prof. Antonio Ciccone (climate change), Prof. Matthew S. Clancy (economic stagnation), Dr Paul Collins (Sumerian Empire), Prof. Tyler Cowen (economic stagnation), Dr Colin Cunliff (public policy), Dr Allan Dafoe (great-power war), Prof. Lewis Dartnell (civilisational collapse and recovery), Prof. Hadi Dowlatabadi (climate change), Dr David Edmonds (population ethics), Prof. Kevin Esvelt (biosecurity), Grethe Helene Evjen (civilisational collapse), Prof.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

To subject their lives to such uncertainty is anathema to people who’ve expected a salaried job to last a lifetime and to provide security and permanence. People will have to figure out how to apply their particular skills to this Brave New World and, if they can’t apply them, how to rapidly acquire the right skills. As Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over, “The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?” Cowen’s thesis, which drew in part from the “work is over” theory, wasn’t a rosy one for Middle America.

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Visa, MasterCard, and Western Union: Employee tallies taken from 2013 annual reports for Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Western Union Holding Inc. Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist: Chris Dixon, phone interview with Michael J. Casey, June 25, 2014. Asked to describe the job market: Daniel Larimer, interviewed by Michael J. Casey, April 8, 2014. As Tyler Cowen noted in his book: Tyler Cowan, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (Dutton, 2013). Yale’s Robert Shiller: Joe Weisenthal, “Robert Shiller: Bitcoin Is an Amazing Example of a Bubble,” Business Insider, January 24, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-bitcoin-2014-1#ixzz3Cmp0YFyx.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

Except for the top 1 percent of the income distribution, Gordon predicts the vast majority of the U.S. population will experience growth of only 0.5 percent per year, less than one-quarter the long-term average. Others have echoed Professor Gordon’s pessimism and complain that discoveries today have not changed people’s lives as fundamentally as they did a century ago. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and author of The Great Stagnation, has voiced his belief that the developed world is on a technological plateau and that all the low-hanging fruit has already been discovered.13 Indeed, look at Table 4-1. It shows the most important life-changing inventions of the past 100 years.

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Productivity growth was slightly higher immediately following World War II, but since 1960, productivity growth in the United States has shown no significant downward trend. 12. Robert Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts Six Headwinds,” NBER #18315, August 2012. For a rejoinder, see the response by John Cochrane of the University of Chicago in his blog at http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/08/gordon-on-growth.html. 13. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, New York: Dutton Adult, 2011. 14. These are not the dates when these items were discovered but when they became operational or widespread in the general population in the United States and most other advanced economies. 15.

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks