falling living standards

73 results back to index


pages: 205 words: 55,435

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is not quite so dramatic in the UK, but the number is still high. Here is the problem. Across the world, many who live this way have experienced a drop in real wages in recent years, so even if the overall employment situation is quite robust, as there are no savings to fall back on, many have suffered a fall in living standards. The decline in real wage growth started all the way back in the 1970s and has coincided with an increase in corporate profits. More recently the trend has gained momentum, though, to the extent that real wages are now falling in some countries, which has had the effect of suppressing aggregate consumer demand even further.

See ‘The problem in a nutshell (second take)’ below for more on this topic. 89 Source RP Siegel (2012). 90 The greenhouse gas problem could also be addressed by accelerating the implementation of renewable energy forms, but that wouldn’t address our desperate need for cheaper energy, as renewables are still comparatively expensive. 91 In this context, the painful subject of falling real wages (i.e. falling living standards – at least in nominal terms) in certain countries is being conveniently ignored. 92 Hedonic regression is a method of valuing a product by breaking it into its constituent parts and then estimating the contribution of each part. 93 Although Feldstein’s comments are US specific, most other countries use the same approach when calculating inflation. 11.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

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

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

Siddarth sums up the general mentality: ‘I think the City is a convenient whipping boy, because everybody loves having a scapegoat,’ he says. ‘Everybody was more than happy to get a zero per cent interest rate on their credit card, everybody’s happy to spend, consume, and spend money that ultimately they don’t have.’ In truth, workers who had been experiencing real-term falls in their living standards long before the crash had been forced to top up their increasingly meagre income with cheap credit. In the City, you risked ridicule for even mentioning the impact of austerity on people’s lives. ‘If I started talking to people about cuts, I would be a figure of fun,’ says former City trader Darren.

Modern capitalism has become completely ‘financialized’, as Professor Costas Lapavitsas puts it. Modern businesses themselves indulge independently in financial speculation with their retained earnings, or the money that is not distributed to shareholders. Households are ever more dependent, too, as the growth of home ownership and the dependence on credit to top up falling living standards lands them in debt. The modern Establishment has been financialized to an unprecedented degree. Above all, the financial sector is a threat to British democracy. Governments have surrendered their economic powers, whether it be through the abandonment of exchange controls or the promotion of deregulation.

We should levy restrictions on foreign ownership of residential property, deflating potentially economically crippling housing bubbles that price Britons out of the market.6 Above all, this would shift economic sovereignty from corporate interests to elected governments, representing a sizeable blow to the Establishment’s position. A democratic revolution would have redistribution of wealth at its very heart. The bank accounts of the wealthy continue to boom, even as the recession causes a fall in living standards. This is not just manifestly unjust; it also represents a huge pile of cash that is not being invested and could be put to productive use. Money is being hoarded when it could be invested and put to social use. And while the poorest 10 per cent pay 43 per cent of their income in taxes, the richest 10 per cent pay just 35 per cent – surely an indefensible state of affairs from any rational perspective.7 More prosperous European countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands and Belgium, have significantly higher top rates.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

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

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

The Tories’ Economic Adviser on the Thatcher Years”, New Statesman, 8 March. https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/03/thatcher-economic-budd-dispatches 21 Shabani et al (2014) 22 This account draws on: Stockhammer (2010); Keynes (1936); Lapavitsas (2013); Hein (2012); Lysandrou, P (2011) ‘Global inequality, wealth concentration and the subprime crisis’, Development and Change, vol. 42. 23 The Institute of Employment Rights (2014) “Real Wages Have Been Falling Since the 1970s and Living Standards Are Not About to Recover”, 31 January. http://www.ier.org.uk/news/real-wages-have-been-falling-1970s-and-living-standards-are-not-about-recover 24 TUC (2016) 25 Shabani et al (2014) 26 Ibid. 27 Lawrence (2017) 28 World Bank (2019) “Gross Fixed Capital Formation (% GDP)”, World Bank dataset NE.GDI.FTOT.ZS, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.FTOT.ZS?

Nationalists use dog-whistle racism to link voters’ experience of hardship and deteriorating living standards with an ill-defined “other” that can shoulder the blame. The only movements that have managed to absorb the discontent that would ordinarily fuel the far right are those that locate the blame for falling living standards where it belongs — with elites. Few traditional social democratic parties have lived up to the task, clinging instead to old narratives about a “third way” for workers between freedom and exploitation. As a result, they have been Pasokified — consigned to electoral insignificance just like the Greek social democratic party Pasok — leaving space for the far-right to take up the mantle of economic agitation.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

And so Miliband used his first party conference speech to declare: ‘You wanted your concerns about the impact of immigration on communities to be heard, and I understand your frustration that we didn’t seem to be on your side.’68 We got it wrong on immigration, he would repeatedly say as leader, implying New Labour let ‘too many’ people in. As Labour was pandering to anti-immigration sentiment, the Tories were charging ahead with their own agenda. Implementing austerity, cutting public services and overseeing a fall in living standards, the Conservatives also zeroed in on immigration. Under Theresa May and David Cameron, the government pledged to get immigration down to the tens of thousands. With this target in mind, May, as home secretary, oversaw the chilling 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, which aimed to create a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants.

‘I’m hoping after the general election I can do a toast in that mug as we get on and change Britain for the better.’76 That celebration would never happen; with a net loss of twenty-six, Labour lost forty-eight seats in the election, Balls’s among them. As Patrick Gordon Walker is said to have done in Smethwick decades earlier, Miliband inadvertently reinforced the very rhetoric the far right thrived off. UKIP told the public that immigration was to blame for their falling living standards and the country’s creaky public services; Labour and the Conservatives said they were right. Unsurprisingly, people who were significantly motivated by immigration chose the genuine article over the unenthusiastic imitation; UKIP or the Tories rather than Labour. When I ask Harvey Redgrave, ex-Downing Street staffer and Ed Miliband’s former adviser on migration, why Labour didn’t robustly challenge anti-immigration messages at the 2015 General Election, he claims that had already been done.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Since the end of the Great Recession, between January 2010 and January 2019 nearly sixteen million new jobs were created, but fewer than three million were for those without a four-year degree. Only fifty-five thousand were for those with only a high school degree.12 The prolonged decline in wages is one of the fundamental forces working against less educated Americans. But a simple link to despair from falling material living standards cannot by itself account for what has happened. For a start, the wage decline has come with job decline—from better jobs to worse jobs—with many leaving the labor force altogether because the worse jobs are unattractive, because there are few jobs at all, or because they cannot easily move, or some combination of these reasons.

Some people invent new tools, drugs, or gadgets, or new ways of doing things, and benefit many, not just themselves. They profit from improving and extending other people’s lives. It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it. The people who are being left behind care about their own falling living standards and loss of community, not about Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) or Tim Cook (of Apple) being rich. Yet when they think the inequality comes from cheating or from special favors, the situation becomes intolerable. The financial crisis has much to answer for. Before it, many believed that the bankers knew what they were doing and that their salaries were being earned in the public interest.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

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

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

The New Economics Foundation found in 2013 that Britain had recently seen the biggest drop in living standards since the Victorian era, most severely affecting public sector workers and women.29 The bald facts of this austerity craze were enough to indicate that something was horribly wrong with modern politics. British prime minister David Cameron felt the need, in 2013, after years of austerity and falling living standards, to teach schoolchildren about the glories of capitalism—which seemed like a defensive impulse. It was vital, he said, to celebrate a culture “that values that typically British, entrepreneurial, buccaneering spirit.”30 Multinational corporations spent the twentieth century gradually reducing their obligations in the various jurisdictions in which they operated.

So dreams can unfurl.” 25Andrew Hill and Gill Plimmer, “G4S: The Inside Story,” Financial Times, November 14, 2013. 26“The Shadow State: A Report about Outsourcing of Public Services,” Social Enterprise UK, December 2012, at socialenterprise.org.uk. 27Larry Elliott, “Britain’s Five Richest Families Worth More than Poorest 20%,” Guardian, March 17, 2014. 28Paul Krugman, “The Austerity Agenda,” New York Times, May 31, 2012. 29Nigel Morris, “The Poorest Pay the Price of Austerity: Workers Face Biggest Fall in Living Standards since Victorian Era,” Independent, December 9, 2013. 30Tom McTague, “David Cameron Calls for Capitalism Lessons in Schools to Celebrate Profits in the Classroom,” Mirror, November 11, 2013. 31Rajeev Syal and Alan Travis, “Britain’s Immigration System in Chaos, MPs’ Report Reveals,” Guardian, October 29, 2014. 32Randeep Ramesh, “Hundreds of Contracts Signed in ‘Biggest Ever Act of NHS Privatisation,’” Guardian, October 3, 2012. 33Charlie Cooper, “NHS Funding Crisis: Boss Warns of 75 Pounds a Night Charge for Hospital Bed,” Independent, October 7, 2014. 34Benedict Cooper, “The NHS Privatisation Experiment Is Unravelling Before Our Eyes,” New Statesman, January 9, 2015. 35“‘People Will Die’—The End of the NHS.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

During this period, Labour cravenly failed to combat this migrant scapegoating, making repeated interventions which only helped stoke the issue, and, during Ed Miliband’s 2015 general election campaign, even selling election mugs emblazoned with the slogan ‘Controls on immigration’. By the time of the referendum, immigration frequently topped polls as voters’ main concern. With very few in public life willing to make a pro-migrant case – and with government policies fuelling social crises, ranging from falling living standards to a lack of affordable housing to crumbling public services, for which migrants were now being blamed – the backdrop for the referendum could hardly have been less favourable for Remain. In the first months of Corbyn’s leadership, Labour was split on how to approach the referendum: whether to follow Hilary Benn’s wholehearted embracing of the EU; or Corbyn’s own strategy of ‘Remain and Reform’ – a phrase coined by Seumas Milne – acknowledging that there were things wrong with the EU and reforms were needed, but that it was right to stay in.

While they are often flawed, it’s striking that in 1945, at the end of the war, the incumbent government led by a Conservative prime minister was swept aside in a landslide victory for a reforming Labour government, a Labour government which shredded the old status quo in favour of a new settlement, of a welfare state, National Health Service, public ownership and state intervention. Now the war had been won, Labour argued, it was time to win the peace. If Corbynism showed anything, then it is that ours is an age in which people are demanding radical solutions to a fall in living standards unprecedented for generations. The Covid-19 pandemic may well prove only the warm-up act for a far greater emergency that threatens human existence itself: a climate crisis, which demands a fundamental transformation of our social and economic system. Far from being answered, the injustices that led to the rise of Corbynism have only intensified.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

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

In his book Ages of Discord, the scholar Peter Turchin proposes a structural-demographic theory of political instability based on societies throughout history. He suggests that there are three main preconditions to revolution: (1) elite oversupply and disunity, (2) popular misery based on falling living standards, and (3) a state in fiscal crisis. He uses a host of variables to measure these conditions, including real wages, marital trends, proportion of children in two-parent households, minimum wage, wealth distribution, college tuition, average height, oversupply of lawyers, political polarization, income tax on the wealthy, visits to national monuments, trust in government, and other factors.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

Although the reforms were modest, they were remarkably successful: output grew more rapidly than at any time during the oil boom. But these few percentage points of growth in non-oil output were completely swamped by the fall in the value of oil and the switch from borrowing to repayment, with the consequent contraction in expenditure. The reform-induced growth only helped slightly to offset the misery of falling living standards. That is what happened, but it is not what Nigerians think happened. Unsurprisingly, Nigerians think that the terrible increase in poverty they experienced was caused by the economic reforms that were so loudly trumpeted. Until reform, life was getting better; then along came reform, and poverty soared.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Men are bombarded with macho cultural icons: the athletes, the swaggering Wall Street speculators, and the gunslingers of interactive electronic games. Men have to earn a living, so most will work at whatever they have to, but by and large they will not like it. The surrounding culture will relentlessly push back the shame and ache of falling living standards back on the individual. The pronouncements from TVs, classrooms, and pulpits will continue to hammer home the message that people are responsible for their own fate. Self-help books, videos, and guest lecturers will promise that you can beat the odds if only you submit to the Seven Principles, the Five Steps, or the Ten Tenets of Success.


pages: 212 words: 80,393

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

This has risen significantly since the austerity measures started to have an impact on communities after the 2010 General Election. In 2013 the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) published a report revealing that in the first full year of the coalition government, 300,000 more children faced a real fall in living standards that had pushed them into dire levels of poverty (Cribb et al, 2013). The entire increase is from homes where parents are working – there are now 2.4 million children in working households living in severe poverty. And on top of the 300,000 extra young people living below the breadline, half-a-million working-age adults have fallen into the extreme poverty bracket, along with an additional 100,000 pensioners (Cribb et al, 2013).

By 2014 – in the aftermath of the weakest economic recovery since the Victorian era – the Conservative-led coalition government was lauding the return of economic growth as vindication of its assault on public spending. But while it certainly was boom time for the rich – the Sunday Times Rich List recorded a doubling of the wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons between 2009 and 2014 – working people suffered the longest fall in living standards in well over a century. Disabled people faced the slashing of benefits, and the indignity and stress of appealing to win back their desperately needed support; workers enduring plummeting pay packets had their in-work benefits cut in real-terms; while no private pensions, no paid leave or no set hours became the reality for workers driven into zero-hour contracts or bogus self-employment.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

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

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

This chuckling aside, the themes of The Great Reckoning proved less ludicrous than the guardians of orthodoxy pretended. • We extended our forecast of the death of the Soviet Union, exploring why Russia and the other former Soviet republics faced a future of growing civil disorder4 hyperinflation, and falling living standards. • We explained why the 1 990s would be a decade of downsizing, including for the first time a worldwide downsizing of governments as well as business entities. 16 • We also forecast that there would be a major redefinition of terms of income redistribution, with sharp cutbacks in the level of benefits.

Therefore, eliminating or sharply reducing the taxes that are negatively compounding against their net worths may not appear to make them much better off-the price of lower taxation is a diminished stream of transfer payments. They will lose income because they will no longer be able to depend upon political compulsion to pick the pockets of persons more productive than themselves. Those without savings who rely upon government to pay their retirement benefits and medical care will in all probability suffer a fall in living standards. This loss of income translates into a depreciation of what financial writer Scott Burns has dubbed "transcendental" or political capital. 88 This "transcendental" or imaginary capital is based not upon the economic ownership of assets but upon the de facto claim to the income stream established by political rules and regulations.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

Nemeth was under no illusions about the depth of Hungary’s crisis, nor why he had been tapped as prime minister. He was being set up. He was to be the communists’ fall guy, the man whom the people would blame when the economy completely crumbled. Grosz and other party leaders feared they could not arrest Hungary’s economic slide—30 percent inflation, the highest per capita foreign debt in Europe, falling living standards and wages. Few Hungarian families could make ends meet without working two or even three jobs. Resentment was growing. So that May, at a fractious party conference, they looked around for a potential scapegoat to become prime minister. Nemeth, then head of the party economics department, was their choice.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Inequality has been static in several countries with growing populist movements and has fallen sharply in Poland which actually has a populist government.10 Nevertheless, a delayed reaction to the 2008 crisis and disillusionment with the broader economic and social order—including inequality, falling living standards after the crisis, and fewer good jobs for school leavers not destined for university—is clearly one of the recruiting sergeants for populist disaffection (see more detail in chapter six). The more important factor can be encapsulated in the notion that ‘Britain increasingly feels like a foreign country’—immigration, speed of demographic change and so on.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

After all, the vast majority of people who were out of work or poor did not riot. But there are growing numbers of young people in Britain with no secure future to risk. Youth unemployment is running at over 20 per cent. There is a crisis of affordable housing, the biggest cuts since the 1920s, and falling living standards; university tuition fees have trebled and the Educational Maintenance Allowance for students from poor backgrounds has been scrapped. Many young people have been left with very little to hope for. For the first time since the World War II,the next generation will be worse off than the generation before it. of course, we all have agency: we don't all respond to the same situation in the same way.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

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

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

Europeans know that, even if their industries shut down due to foreign competition, they will be able to protect their living standards (through unemployment benefits) and get re-trained for another job (with government subsidies), whereas Americans know that losing their current jobs may mean a huge fall in their living standards and may even be the end of their productive lives. This is why the European countries with the biggest welfare states, such as Sweden, Norway and Finland, were able to grow faster than, or at least as fast as, the US, even during the post-1990 ‘American Renaissance’. The oldest profession in the world?


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

But in all cases net outflows strip developing countries of an important source of revenue and finance that could be used for development. The GFI report finds that increasingly large net outflows (since 2009 they have been growing at a rate of 20 per cent per year) have caused economic growth rates in developing countries to decline, and are directly responsible for falling living standards. * What this means is that poor countries are net creditors to rich countries – exactly the opposite of what we would usually assume. But when we consider the aid budget in its broader context, we should look not only at outward flows but also at the losses and costs that developing countries have suffered as a result of policies devised by rich countries.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

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

Does this portend a global capitalism managed under the dictatorship of the world’s central bankers whose foremost charge is to protect the power of the banks and the plutocrats? If so, then that seems to offer very little prospect for a solution to current problems of stagnant economies and falling living standards for the mass of the world’s population. There is also much chatter about the prospects for a technological fix to the current economic malaise. While the bundling of new technologies and organisational forms has always played an important role in facilitating an exit from crises, it has never played a determinate one.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

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

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

London, January 2017 INDEX Abbasids (i), (ii) Abu Bakr (i) Acemoglu, Daron (i) advertising (i) Afghanistan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Africa (i) China and (i) high levels of ethnic diversity (i) oil, commodities and (i) population percentages (i) ‘scramble for’ (i), (ii) sub-Saharan nations (i), (ii), (iii) trade flows and slavery (i) ageing population (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Agincourt, Battle of (i) Al Qaeda (i), (ii)n2 Alaska (i) Ali (cousin/son-in-law to Prophet Mohammad) (i) Alibaba (i) Allies (Second World War) (i) Almaty (i) Almohads (i) Almoravids (i) Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (i) Amazon (i) America see United States American Civil War (i), (ii) American dollar (i), (ii) as good as gold (i) global foreign exchange market and (i) peso and (i) premier reserve currency (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) American Dream (i) American Samoa (i) Amin, Idi (i) Amsterdam Treaty (1997) (i), (ii) Anatolia (i) Andalucía (i) Andes (i) Angell, Norman (i), (ii), (iii) Angola (i) ‘animal spirits’ (i) Annecy (i) Apple (i), (ii) Arab nations (i), (ii) Arab Spring (i) Arabic language (i), (ii) Arabs (i), (ii), (iii) Aramaic (i) Arc of Prosperity (i) Argentina (i), (ii), (iii) Armenia (i) ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) (i) Asia see also China and other individual countries 1997/8 crisis (i), (ii), (iii) ageing population (i) balance of payments deficits (i) Central Asia (i), (ii), (iii) Columbus’s belief (i) East Asia (i) emerging market labour (i) events impinging on the West (i) immigrants in America (i) mathematical ability (i) Obama and (i), (ii), (iii) rail connections (i) Russia and (i) Trump and a vacuum (i) Asian Development Bank (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Asiatic Barred Zone Act (i) al-Assad, Bashar (i), (ii) asylum seekers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n17 see also immigration; refugees Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (i) Atlantic (i), (ii) Austen, Jane (i) austerity (i), (ii), (iii) Australia ASEAN and (i) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and (i) average incomes (i) foreign-born share of population (i) Second Gulf War (i) tobacco policy (i) Austria (i), (ii) Austro-Hungarian Empire (i), (ii) Axis (Second World War) (i) Azerbaijan (i) Bagehot, Walter (i) Baghdad (i) Baker, James (III) (i) balance of payments (i) Asian Crisis (i) Latin America (i) Plaza Accord and (i) UK and Suez (i) US (i), (ii) Varoufakis on (i) Balkans (i) Baltic Sea (i), (ii) bancor (i), (ii), (iii) Bangladesh (i) Bank of Credit and Commerce International (i) Bank of England (i), (ii) Bank of Japan (i) bankers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also central banks Barings (i), (ii)n1 Basel I (i) Basel II (i) Basra (i) Battle of Bretton Woods, The (Ben Steil) (i)n4 BBC Two (i) Bedford (i) Beijing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belarus (i), (ii) Belgium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Belt and Road strategy (i), (ii) Benn, Tony (i) Bentham, Jeremy (i) Berbers (i) Bergère, 14 rue (i) Berghof sanatorium (i) Berlin Wall (fall of) asylum seekers after (i) changing times after (i), (ii) Poland goes from strength to strength (i) relative living standards after fall (i) Soviet living standards (i) US military spending and (i) Bernanke, Ben (i) Big Brother (i) Bilderberg Club (i) bin Laden, Osama (i) Bitcoin (i) Black and White Minstrel Show, The (i) Black Death (i) Black Sea (i), (ii), (iii) Blair, Tony (i), (ii), (iii) Blanchard, Olivier (i) Blockchain (i) Blue Feed (i) BMW (i) BNP Paribas (i) Boers (i) Boko Haram (i) Bolsheviks (i) see also communism borders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) see also cross-border capital flow capital flows see cross-border capital flow EU and (i) globalization and (i) historical accident (i) Mediterranean (i) movement of labour (i), (ii) post-global financial crisis (i), (ii) railways and (i) slowly dissolving (i), (ii) technology and (i), (ii) Triffin Dilemma (i) Boston (i), (ii) Boughton, James M.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

May was accused of being a liar, of regretting calling the election, and of not getting into a debate. Corbyn was asked about his record on Northern Ireland and his position on the use of nuclear weapons. What was the reality of him ever exercising their use? Would he allow Iran or North Korea to bomb us first? The key soundbite was Theresa May under attack about falling living standards, from a nurse of twenty-six years’ experience, living on the same salary as 2009. May produced the line ‘there isn’t a magic money tree’ which both patronised the nurse and infantilised the answer. This was the latest in a series of appearances where Corbyn had surpassed expectations and May had under-performed.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

In April 1950 the Bureau of the Budget announced: “Foreign economic policies should not be formulated in terms primarily of economic objectives; they must be subordinated to our politico-security objectives and the priorities which the latter involve.”27 Three years later, the National Security Council urged the entry of Japanese goods to the United States to halt “economic deterioration and falling living standards” in Japan that “create fertile ground for communist subversion.”28 The State Department judged that “Japan’s resistance to Soviet-Sino pressures will depend in large measure on whether the free world [is] willing [to] make reasonable place for Japan’s trade.”29 Many believed that American industry was so strong that it would not suffer from unilateral trade measures that drew in imports from Europe and Japan.


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

He had finally allowed the imbalance of military power in Europe, which had stood provocatively and overwhelmingly to Soviet advantage since 1945, to be broken unopposed. Behind all this lay a basic truth: Moscow had effectively already given up the ideological struggle. The Russia reborn in 1992 had to confront the unexpected need to substitute at short notice raw patriotism for a long-outmoded belief in a global ideal, all in the face of falling living standards and full consciousness—not least via MTV, now beamed freely into city apartments—of what the West could offer in return for betrayal. The negative impact on intelligence assets and their recruitment was severe, given how heavily Moscow depended upon human resources once attracted by and tied to the Soviet model.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The domestic population was always big enough to sustain a division of labour, and – even if contact with the rest of the world was limited to invasions, government barter, kidnappings and espionage – they did know the world was there and they preyed on the innovations taking place elsewhere. And yet, in every case it resulted in something similar to the Late Bronze-Age Collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire: stagnation and falling living standards. Often the protectionist backlash was a response to increased imports that helped consumers but hurt producers and workers in affected industries. The Great Depression is the classic example. Just as free trade started to make the West rich, the forces opposing it gathered momentum. Open trade combined with cheaper transportation and the invention of refrigeration made it possible for cheap American grain and meat to reach hungry Europeans, and for cheaper European manufacturing goods to enter American homes.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

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

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

In an echo of Ronald Reagan’s war on air traffic controllers in the 1980s, this was an attempt to dismantle what was left of union power, one which led to sustained protests across the country. A similar divide has been emerging in the UK. After falling in every year from 2005-2010, real take-home pay is now predicted to continue to fall for the next year or two at least. This is the first time since the 1920s there have been six successive years of falling real living standards, a process that started well before the crash. In both the US and the UK, the likelihood is that wages will continue to lag productivity postrecovery, living standards will continue to stagnate while the wealth and income gap will remain at historic highs. Indeed, the new independent economic overseer set up by the Coalition, the Office for Budget Responsibility, has forecast that the United Kingdom’s wage share will continue to fall until 2016.416 The risk now is that the fundamental economic factor that has driven rising instability and created the conditions for the crash—the two-decade long growing wage-productivity gap in both the UK and the US—is set to continue.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

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

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

Here’s why’, The Guardian, 22 November, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/british-empire-museum-colonial-crimes-memorial 6 Buchan, L. (2017) ‘Britain’s debt will not fall to 2008 levels until 2060s, IFS says in startling warning’, The Independent, 23 November, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-debt-uk-deficit-not-fall-below-2008-levels-2060-financial-crash-economy-warning-a8071696.html 7 Watts, J. (2017) ‘UK facing longest fall in living standards for over 60 years, finds think tank’, The Independent, 23 November, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-living-standards-fall-longest-60-years-records-began-economy-household-incomes-costs-energy-a8071146.html 8 Wearmouth, R. (2017) ‘Budget 2017: Chancellor Blasted For Finding More Additional Money For Brexit Than The NHS’, Huffington Post, 22 November, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-nhs-budget_uk_5a158a00e4b09650540e914c 9 Alexander, A. (2017) ‘Britain without a judge on the International Court of Justice for first time since 1946’, Daily Telegraph, 20 November, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/20/britain-without-judge-international-court-justice-first-time/.

In 2018, it was reported by the statistics portal Statista that most recently China had 34 per cent of the world market, South Korea 22 per cent and Japan 21 per cent. The EU, which included Britain, and to which was added Norway, took only 11 per cent of the market, leaving just 12 per cent for the rest of the world, including what little shipbuilding is still undertaken in the USA. Today, Brexiteers ignore the impact of the falling pound on inflation and living standards, preferring to suggest that the fall will be ‘good for trade’. When doing this, they are also ignoring the investment problem. We know that without investment, cheaper exports have a limited impact for a limited time. As the then Prime Minister Edward Heath told the Institute of Directors in 1973: The curse of British industry is that it had never anticipated demand.


pages: 669 words: 150,886

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

These were all prominent GDR artists—Biermann had been deported in 1976, while Krug and Mueller-Stahl were allowed to leave the following year. ¹⁰⁴ Cited in Madarász, Conflict, 143. ¹⁰⁵ Jena citizens to Volkskammer, 12 July 1983, exhibit in Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, 2001. ¹⁰⁶ Lehmann to Eichler, 3 Jan. 1975, BAB, DA-5/9013. 212 Behind the Berlin Wall mould growing on their furniture.¹⁰⁷ Others attacked falling living standards. In such cases the authorities usually tried to remedy the immediate cause of the aggravation, in the interests of achieving a retraction. Such applications could, it has to be said, range from the sublime to the ridiculous and petitions officers must occasionally have wondered if pranks were being played.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

Facing a fall in their wages, the police and army began setting up extra road blocks to shake money from motorists. Cocoa drivers went on strike. Gradually people began taking to the streets, mainly students and teachers at first, but even former loyalists soon joined them. It wouldn’t have escaped the president’s notice that the favourite chant was ‘Corrupt Houphouet’. Resentment over falling living standards turned into demands to move away from a single-party state and introduce multi-party elections. Leading the protests was the young history professor he had chastized in his study all those years before. Laurent Gbagbo could smell blood; the president had never experienced such public dissent.


pages: 665 words: 146,542

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

When investment opportunities weakened in Britain, British savings were invested in the areas being colonised. The capital flows to these regions increased the supply of raw materials from mining and, especially, agricultural production. At the same time, stagnation in Britain reduced demand. The prices of the imported food products began to fall. Living standards in British agriculture were reduced and the population was thus pushed to move to the cities. The concomitant low cost of subsistence goods and the excess labour force increased capital profitability. An investment boom took off in Britain. It lasted until the increase in employment levels and the rise in the cost of subsistence goods pushed up wages to the point that profitability again began to decline.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The Luddite Riots of 1811–1816, where workers fought against the introduction of new technologies they believed would reduce their wages, were followed by riots explicitly demanding political rights, the Spa Fields Riots of 1816 in London and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in Manchester. In the Swing Riots of 1830, agricultural workers protested against falling living standards as well as the introduction of new technology. Meanwhile, in Paris, the July Revolution of 1830 exploded. A consensus among elites was starting to form that the discontent was reaching the boiling point, and the only way to defuse social unrest, and turn back a revolution, was by meeting the demands of the masses and undertaking parliamentary reform.


The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder

anti-communist, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, deglobalization, European colonialism, falling living standards, false flag, foreign exchange controls, global pandemic, guns versus butter model, Monroe Doctrine, power law, reserve currency, rising living standards, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

The prospect of material damage rather than moral stigma would induce publics to restrain their governments’ aggressive behavior. Identifying public opinion with the primacy of commercial motives was no doubt appealing to the bourgeois officials on the IBC. Still, their conviction that a population’s fear of falling living standards could preserve peace was striking. Would the doux commerce of economic exchange always trump the amour-propre that encouraged nationalism and aggression? In light of the deep distrust and division left behind by the war, many commentators were skeptical. Even Norman Angell, the most famous early twentieth-century proponent of the softening commerce argument, concluded that same year, “What we have seen in recent history is not a deliberate choice of ends with a consciousness of moral and material cost.


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The second category consists of those borrowers who had secured their debts against an asset which has fallen in value. In such circumstances, both the borrower and the creditor lose out. The borrower’s wealth is less than it was and so is the creditor’s. They have discovered, like the clients of Bernie Madoff, that part of their wealth was illusory. The result could be a substantial fall in living standards, rather than just sluggish growth. THE LONG VIEW As this book has explained, the world has seen cycle after cycle in which money and debts have expanded. These cycles are initially self-reinforcing as the extra money begets confidence, as in John Law’s experiment in the early eighteenth century.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

But why had the Soviet Union faced no significant problem before then from the Czechs and Slovaks? In fact, there had been a serious wave of strikes in Czechoslovakia in May 1953, triggered by the announcement of a swingeing currency devaluation to be introduced the next month (widely dubbed ‘the Great Swindle’) and following months of sharply rising prices and falling living standards. Strikers from the Škoda factory in Plzeň had even thrown busts of Lenin, Stalin and Klement Gottwald (the Czech communist leader, who had died within days of Stalin’s death) out of the window of the town hall, which they had occupied. But the disturbances were savagely put down by the police and never developed into the outright challenge to the regime similar to that which was shortly to explode in the German Democratic Republic.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Or, as the blogger Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism put it, “The US needs to wean itself of unsustainable overconsumption, and since consumption has come to depend on growth in indebtedness, a reversal, however painful, is necessary. Our excesses have been so great that there is no way out of this that does not lead to a general fall in living standards.”9 At a deeper level, the financial meltdown also signaled the rise of a new economic system broadly. The Long Depression was the crisis of the First Industrial Revolution. The massive growth and productivity of the textile, steel, and railroad industries could not be contained by the larger, mainly rural society of the period.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

Who cares if she had a facelift? It’s like people talking about whether Hitler dyed his moustache. She’s an anti-abortion feminist, placing her on the list of great feminists somewhere between Peter Sutcliffe and Henry VIII. The Tories have done a brilliant job while in power. The UK has suffered the worst fall in living standards since the Second World War. I’d add an ‘apparently’ to that as I’m not convinced downgrading from Sainsbury’s to Asda quite compares with picking dead relatives out of the rubble. Cameron says it’s time for Britain to show the world what it’s made of. Though I’m not sure exactly what you can knock together out of debt and diabetes.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

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

Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” OECD Multilingual Summaries, 2008, p. 2; Andrew Grice, “New Law to Enforce Social Mobility,” Independent, January 14, 2009; Mia Shanley, “Swedish Equality Fades Away as Rich Get Richer,” Reuters, Mar 21, 2012; Joel Kotkin, “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City,” Legatum Institute, May 2010, http://www.newgeography.com/files/The-Broken-Ladder-Joel-Kotkin.pdf. 18. Gary Duncan, “Brown’s Legacy Is a Nation More Divided than Ever,” Times (UK), June 8, 2009; Ilona Billington and Nicholas Winning, “U.K. Politicians Vie to Address Fall in Living Standards,” Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2013. 19. Katya Vasileva, “6.5% of the EU Population Are Foreigners and 9.4% Are Born Abroad,” Eurostat, July 7, 2011, http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-11-034/EN/KS-SF-11-034-EN.PDF; World Population Review, “Sweden Population 2014,” http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/sweden-population; U.S.


pages: 464 words: 139,088

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

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

One day German voters may rebel against the losses imposed on them by the need to support their weaker brethren, and undoubtedly the easiest way to divide the euro area would be for Germany itself to exit. But the more likely cause of a break-up of the euro area is that voters in the south will tire of the grinding and relentless burden of mass unemployment and the emigration of talented young people. The counter-argument – that exit from the euro area would lead to chaos, falls in living standards and continuing uncertainty about the survival of the currency union – has real weight. But if the alternative is crushing austerity, continuing mass unemployment, and no end in sight to the burden of debt, then leaving the euro area may be the only way to plot a route back to economic growth and full employment.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

In fact, one study found that 70 per cent of people aged 70 or under felt there was a minimal chance of selling their house to pay for retirement.7 Another study found that when people retire they are equally as likely to move into a larger house as a smaller one.8 It is generally only traumatic events, such as death of a partner or illness, that tends to trigger house sales as people age. Given that owning a house provides imputed rent, and selling a house involves a fall in living standards, it is no surprise that equity release schemes have been growing in popularity with older home owners. Equity release helps provide financing without the loss of imputed rent. This clearly has a role to play in providing financing for old age, but while these schemes make a contribution, they cannot be relied upon to solve the problem.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

Initial discussion topics included the peasants’ revolt of 1514 (a pretext for a debate on agricultural policy) and an analysis of Hungarian historiography (a pretext for a debate about the falsification of history in communist textbooks).55 The choice of name quickly proved “double-edged,” as one Hungarian writer put it: Petőfi had been a revolutionary fighting for Hungarian independence and the group bearing his name soon felt empowered to become revolutionary too.56 Changes had been taking place in other regime institutions at the same time. At Szabad Nép, the communist party’s hitherto reliable newspaper, reporters had become restless. In October 1954, a group of them, sent to cover life in the country’s factories, returned wanting to write about faked production statistics, falling living standards, and workers who had been blackmailed into buying “peace bonds.” In a published article, they declared that “though the life of the workers has changed and improved a great deal in the last ten years, many of them still have serious problems. Many are still living in overcrowded and shabby apartments.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Even if we discount the 1980s as a decade of adjustment and take it out of the equation, per capita income in the region during the 1990s grew at basically half the rate of the ‘bad old days’ (3.1% vs 1.7%). Between 2000 and 2005, the region has done even worse; it virtually stood still, with per capita income growing at only 0.6% per year.21 As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and the 1970s (1–2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neo-liberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century. The poor growth record of neo-liberal globalization since the 1980s is particularly embarrassing.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Even if we discount the 1980s as a decade of adjustment and take it out of the equation, per capita income in the region during the 1990s grew at basically half the rate of the ‘bad old days’ (3.1% vs 1.7%). Between 2000 and 2005, the region has done even worse; it virtually stood still, with per capita income growing at only 0.6% per year.21 As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and the 1970s (1–2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neo-liberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century. The poor growth record of neo-liberal globalization since the 1980s is particularly embarrassing.


pages: 58 words: 18,747

pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The growth acceleration was so dramatic that the half-century following 1820 is typically referred to as the Industrial Revolution.6 In those fifty years, per capita income in Western Europe grew at 1 per cent, a poor growth rate these days (Japan grew at that rate during the so-called ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s), but compared to the 0.14 per cent growth rate between 1500 and 1820, it was a turbo-charged drive. Expect to live for seventeen years and work eighty hours a week: misery increases for some This acceleration of growth in per capita income, however, was initially accompanied by a fall in living standards for many. Some with old skills – such as textile artisans – lost their jobs, having been replaced by machines operated by cheaper, unskilled workers, including many children. Some machines were even designed with the small sizes of children in mind. Those who were hired to work in factories, or in the small workshops that supplied inputs for them, worked long hours – seventy to eighty hours per week was the norm, and some worked more than 100 hours a week with usually only half of Sunday free.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

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

People enter the market with different housing assets (some inherit a house) and some prices rise much faster than others, so there can be relative winners and losers from rising average house prices. But these complications do not undermine the main argument. 48 The price of some positional goods (such as desirable houses) will fall; in other cases, where prices reflect international demand (sports cars), the price may not fall but living standards are unlikely to be much affected from having to scale back from, say, a Ferrari Berlinetta to a Porsche 911 Turbo at half the price. See below. 49 Frank, 91. 50 For the UK, see Atkinson, Inequality, 237–9. For the US, see Stiglitz, 336–55. 51 Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail, 6 July 2002. 52 For more discussion and references see Mcquaig and Brooks, 121–3. 10.


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

‘Benefit fraud could lead to 10-year jail terms, says DPP’, BBC News, 16 September 2013, at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk–24104743 By way of comparison, the official figures for average punishments for some other crimes are reported on by Alan Travis, ‘Rape sentences now average eight years, Ministry of Justice figures show’, Guardian, 27 May 2011, at: www.theguardian.com/society/2011/may/26/rape-sentence-average-eight-years-justice-figures 22. Curtice, ‘Thermostat or weather vane?’. 23. British polling by YouGov from spring 2013 suggests that a majority (52%) of poorer families (gross income below £20,000) anticipate a continuing fall in living standards, compared to less than one-third (31%) of households where income exceeds £70,000. Details reported in: Resolution Foundation, 2015: The living standards election, 2013, at: www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/media/downloads/2015_-_The_living_standards_election.pdf 24. Tom Clark, ‘Britons favour state responsibilities over individualism, finds survey’, Guardian, 15 April 2013, at: www.theguardian.com/society/2013/apr/14/britons-sympathetic-unemployed-france-germany 25.


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pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Although most people had read in their newspapers about Britain’s competitive decline, and were certainly aware that the country had lost power and prestige since the Second World War, their own lives, by and large, had been marked by greater affluence and opportunity. They had not yet realized the penalties – in higher prices, falling living standards, pay freezes and strikes – they would have to pay for Britain’s economic problems, and there was little sense that they wanted radical change. What was more, Heath’s bloodless brand of time-and-motion modernization was not always very attractive, a classic example being Walker’s reform of local government.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

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

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

All of the member countries bar Portugal traded more with EEC countries than with each other. Britain’s trade with the EEC grew faster in the first half of the 1960s than with other EFTA members.18 So in 1962, the British government applied to join the EEC, only to be rebuffed by the French president, Charles de Gaulle.19 Britain continued to worry that it was falling behind European living standards and, in 1967, it applied again, and faced a second veto by De Gaulle. The UK only managed to join the EU in 1973 (along with Denmark and Ireland) after De Gaulle left office. The move was designed to stop the rot in Britain’s economic performance: in 1950, the UK’s per capita GDP was almost a third larger than the average of the six original EEC members, but by 1973, it was 10% below it.20 In the immediate post-war period, Britain made an enormous effort to repair its position, restricting domestic consumption through rationing and focusing on overseas trade; by 1950, the country produced 22% of global manufacturing exports.21 Yet it was dogged by balance of payments issues and sterling crises, and by its poor industrial relations record.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Grant imposed legal tender laws on Americans via the subversion of the Supreme Court set a pattern of duplicity by the Executive Branch that remains strongly embedded in American jurisprudence today. By giving the federal government control over the issuance of “money,” which was now defined as a piece of paper, an expedient war leader doomed future generations of Americans to live with inflation and falling real living standards, the bitter legacy of all legal tender laws going back centuries before the founding of the United States. When émigrés from Europe came to the United States seeking freedom, it was not just religious liberty or freedom from physical bondage, but also freedom from the tendency of monarchs to compel their subjects to use the king’s money, which was frequently light in terms of metal content.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

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

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


pages: 346 words: 90,371

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

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

This of course disguises large regional variations – in more desirable areas such as London and the South East the ratio is up to twenty times (ONS, 2015c). Recent research shows that when housing costs (including mortgage debt and rents) are included in an assessment of changing living standards since 2002, over half of UK households across the working age population have seen falling or flat living standards (Clarke et al., 2016). Figure 5.2 House prices and mortgage debt compared to income in the UK (source: ONS, Nationwide and Bank of England; data de‹ated using 2010 prices) The impact of rising housing costs is not distributed equally across populations of course. In 2013, 1.17 million households had mortgage debts amounting to more than 4.5 times their disposable income – representing nearly one in seven (13.2%) households with mortgages (ONS, 2015a, p. 1).


pages: 295 words: 90,821

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

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

It would probably be wise to avoid the latter, but nevertheless let me offer some tentative predictions about what to expect with respect to growth over the next few decades. You may not be surprised that I believe the growth rate will continue to be low relative to the twentieth century and may fall further as living standards continue to improve. I see no obvious reason that the growth rate would accelerate in the near future. Take human capital first. At some point the demographic changes that have been pulling down the growth rate will subside, as the baby boom generation will not live forever. But that is still several decades into the future, so for the time being this drag on the growth rate will persist.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

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

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

It is an instance of the Lauderdale Paradox, in which commodification is an act of privatisation that contrives scarcity of space or time. These forms of labour intensify the pressure to commodify all aspects of life. Intensifying self-exploitation is a sad way for the precariat to respond to adversity. It is how those experiencing falling wages and living standards cover up the decline, for a while. In addition, governments will have fiscal problems due to the changing character of labour and work. The shift to taskers will reduce tax revenue through lower employee and employer contributions and will push more people below tax thresholds, for example by expanding part-time labour.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

pages: 473 words: 132,344

pages: 352 words: 107,280

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

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

The further benefit cuts announced since the 2015 election, alongside further increases in income tax allowances, will extend the regressiveness of the Coalition’s reforms. In the long run, the quiet and often hidden processes of how we adjust the level of benefits and tax allowances from year to year can have just as great an effect. Left on autopilot, if and when the economy returns to growth, each year benefits and tax credits tend to fall behind general living standards (although pensions are now insulated from this), and fiscal drag brings a bigger share of income into tax, and into tax at higher rates. Letting this run on helps public finances, but does so in a way that increases inequality and poverty. Recent short-term fiscal adjustments have been regressive, but so – unless conscious decisions are made to offset it – are the long-term effects of how we adjust the tax and benefit systems to allow for growth and inflation.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Insolvency beckoned and with it the specter of national bankruptcy. Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey defended the loan and warned Britons that failure to act would result in an “economic policy so savage that I think it would produce riots in the streets. It would mean an immediate and very heavy fall in living standards and unemployment, maybe 3 million.” Healey also knew that Britain was obliged to somehow meet the first payment on a separate $5.93 billion international standby credit due to fall on December 9. There was wild talk of the overthrow of the government. “Nobody wants to talk about it, but the possibility of a breakdown in law and order, or an extremist revolt in Great Britain, gives the United States and other NATO governments the chills,” reported The Washington Post.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck


pages: 264 words: 76,643

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

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

Certainly, Japan had problems and it was true that its economic miracle, which had so astonished the world in the 1980s, had run out of steam. But Japan’s supposed misery—as measured by nominal GDP—really didn’t feel like misery at all.12 Unemployment was extremely low, prices stable or falling, and most people’s living standards rising. Communities were intact, certainly in comparison to those in America, Britain, and France. Crime was low, drug use almost nonexistent, the quality of food and consumer goods world class, and health and life expectancy among the highest in the world.13 And yet, viewed through the prism of economics, Japan was an abject failure.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

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

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


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce


pages: 323 words: 95,492

pages: 339 words: 88,732

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


pages: 323 words: 90,868

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

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


pages: 480 words: 119,407

pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Equally important to his image as a Thatcherite, however, was a simple cultural perception of his humble origins. His father was a trapeze artist in the music halls, who had moved with some success into the garden ornaments business, before the bottom dropped out of the gnome market on the outbreak of the Second World War. By the time John Major was born in 1943, the family had suffered a severe fall in living standards, and he grew up in straitened circumstances in South London, leaving school with just three O-levels. The fact that he subsequently rose so high was entirely due to his involvement in the Conservative Party, and was seen as a fine illustration of a new meritocracy. ‘What does the Conservative Party offer a working class kid from Brixton?’


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Instead of inspiring his audience around a vision of global interdependence—where economic prosperity, ecological restoration, and crosscultural understanding are woven together—Blair offered a dry, textbook description of global warming science and a defensive insistence that Kyoto wouldn’t harm the economy. “However,” Blair said, “behind the dispute over science is another concern. Political leaders worry they are being asked to take unacceptable falls in economic growth and living standards to tackle climate change.” It is tempting to chalk up the speech’s shortcomings to un-creative speechwriting. But Blair’s oratorical skills are fine—witness his powerful speeches on terrorism in the wake of September 11. Blair lacked neither the proper emotional commitment nor good speechwriters.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

Although Ireland’s national debt may not have been large by contemporary European standards, control of credit was curtailed by the link with sterling, and despite the establishment of a Central Bank in 1943, Irish bank lending was still heavily concentrated in the City of London.42 If any more proof was needed that economic self-sufficiency was an irrational and unachievable quest, it was provided with the Emergency, though the war also focused Irish economic planners on change and adaptation. Industrial output fell by one fifth during the Emergency, rationing was introduced (in 1943 Ireland had only 28 per cent of its normal requirements for its beloved tea) and a wide-scale turf development plan was implemented. But it is fair to assert that stagnation, inflation and a fall in living standards were not the only developments which contained lessons for Irish economic planners. The concept of long-term planning was also given a boost by a recognition that the economy could be directed and guided, particularly in the context of general European post-war reconstruction and recovery plans.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game


pages: 387 words: 119,244

pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Spiraling prices for staple foods and collapsing growth conspired to unseat the left-wing government in Argentina and the left-wing legislature in Venezuela. As the price of onions rule warns, rapidly rising prices for basics like onions doom economic prospects and often unseat leaders, particularly when high inflation is accompanied by falling growth and dwindling living standards. One simple rule of thumb is to watch out for countries where inflation is well above the emerging-world average, which has fallen recently to around 4 percent. In Argentina the combination of 25 percent inflation and zero growth toppled President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her populist party, which had been in power for twelve years.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game


pages: 554 words: 168,114

pages: 626 words: 167,836

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

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


pages: 872 words: 259,208

pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

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

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