informal economy

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

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

It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and marketbased production, than they ever have in modern democracies. 16 The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic economic observations. Its overarching claim is that we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action--specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies--plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy.

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Index Attribution Acknowledgments Chapter 1 - Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge The Emergence of the Networked Information Economy Networked Information Economy and Liberal, Democratic Societies Enhanced Autonomy Democracy: The Networked Public Sphere Justice and Human Development A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations Four Methodological Comments The Role of Technology in Human Affairs The Role of Economic Analysis and Methodological Individualism Economic Structure in Liberal Political Theory Whither the State? The Stakes of It All: the Battle over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment Part One - The Networked Information Economy Introduction Chapter 2 - Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation The Diversity of Strategies in Our Current Information Production System The Effects of Exclusive Rights When Information Production Meets the Computer Network Strong Exclusive Rights in the Digital Environment Chapter 3 - Peer Production and Sharing Free/Open-Source Software Peer Production of Information, Knowledge, and Culture Generally Uttering Content Relevance/Accreditation Value-Added Distribution Sharing of Processing, Storage, and Communications Platforms Chapter 4 - The Economics of Social Production Motivation Social Production: Feasibility Conditions and Organizational Form Transaction Costs and Efficiency The Emergence of Social Production in the Digitally Networked Environment The Interface of Social Production and Market-Based Businesses Part Two - The Political Economy of Property and Commons Introduction Chapter 5 - Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law Freedom to Do More for Oneself, by Oneself, and With Others Autonomy, Property, and Commons Autonomy and the Information Environment Autonomy, Mass Media, and Nonmarket Information Producers Chapter 6 - Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media Design Characteristics of a Communications Platform for a Liberal Public Platform or a Liberal Public Sphere The Emergence of the Commercial Mass-Media Platform for the Public Sphere Basic Critiques of Mass Media Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness Chapter 7 - Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere Basic Tools of Networked Communication Networked Information Economy Meets the Public Sphere Critiques of the Claims That the Internet Has Democratizing Effects Is the Internet Too Chaotic, Too Concentrated, or Neither?

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These characteristics save the networked environment from the Babel objection without reintroducing excessive power in any single party or small cluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the role of money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly. 35 Justice and Human Development 36 Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of justice and human development. Because the outputs of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides free access to a set of the basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and the basic outputs of the information economy. From a liberal perspective concerned with justice, at a minimum, these outputs become more readily available as "finished goods" to those who are least well off.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

From the standpoint of the YWCA, these policies seemed unmoored from reality. It was Silicon Valley all over again: the information economy was going to lift some boats, but it was a comfortable ride only if you could ignore the screams of the people drowning all around you. In this chapter, I use an intersectional approach to explore claims made by high-tech economic development boosters that the information economy is a force for equity. Intersectional feminist analysis of the information economy demands that we ask more difficult questions than “How do we fill the pipeline?” It should question taken-for-granted assumptions, center itself in explorations of power, oppression, and domination, and uncover features of social life that have been made invisible by dominant economic models (Barker and Feiner 2004, 9).

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The ability of workers and other citizens to profit from the increased volatility of the information economy is, thus, closely tied to their social location. Topographies of Inequality in Troy The volatility of the information economy is not idiosyncratic because the ruptures and shocks of increasingly rapid change arrive in actual places. These places have history, contexts, legacies of past systems of domination, and institutions shaped by continuing oppression and inequity. In Troy, the volatility of the information economy arrived on a landscape already deeply inscribed by racial discrimination and economic stratification.

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However, the most rapid job growth in the 66 Chapter 4 Table 4.5 Change in Capital Region industrial composition and wages, 2001–2008 NAICS industry classification No. of jobs gained or lost between 2001 and 2008 Employment growth between 2001 and 2008 Average weekly wage, 2008 (in 2000 dollars) Wage growth between 2001 and 2008 Goods-Producing Information Economy Occupations Manufacturing −4899 −18.0% $955 +5.4% Construction +123 +0.7% $813 +7.1% Top-Tier Information Economy Occupations Information −2271 −19.7% $937 +8.7% Financial activities +1370 +5.4% $880 +6.8% Professional and business services +4288 +8.6% $864 +8.3% Bottom-Tier Information Economy (Service) Occupations Education and health services +7168 +10.9% $604 +6.9% Other services +874 +5.8% $462 +2.4% Leisure and hospitality +4282 +14.7% $262 +5.4% Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for the Albany-Schenectady-Troy MSA (U.S.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

How could we help nudge the economy in the direction that would be most beneficial to people and the planet? The Information Economy changed organizations and the labor market as well as demanding a new, enabling environment. Could we expect the same types of changes in the emerging Purpose Economy? The impact of the Information Economy cannot be overstated. Its rise led to radical changes in government, policy, education, community dynamics, non-market human interactions, and the role and design of nonprofit organizations. Within organizations, the Information Economy not only created technology departments, it also catalyzed the widespread introduction of strategic planning, marketing, and human resources.

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The expertise developed in building increasingly sophisticated machines was key to the rise of the Information Economy. And though the computer was conceived by a mathematician, Alan Turing, it was built and commercialized by engineers. Engineers also pioneered the series of new technologies that formed the infrastructure of the Information Economy, culminating with the introduction of the Internet. Of course, information, as well as the need to disperse and manage it, wasn’t new either: the Information Economy has been around since the first teacher. What was remarkable in 1977, when my uncle wrote his thesis, was the magnitude of its growth and the speed at which it was gaining dominance in the overall economy.

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The portion of the economy connected to purpose will continue to grow as companies dedicate more of their business to creating purpose, and as more innovative organizations, such as hybrid non- and for-profit companies, are created. That was true also for the Information Economy. Leaders of that economy, like HP and IBM, started with a foot still in manufacturing, creating hardware to store and manage information. Today, we see the early Purpose Economy stars anchored in Information Economy platforms; Facebook, which enables self-expression and community on a massive scale, is a great example. Kickstarter, which now provides more funding for the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts, is another. With the rise of the Information Economy, most companies eventually adopted information-driven systems and tools into their operations and products, such as GPS in cars and robotics in manufacturing.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Beyond that, just because someone is on the bum side of the information economy doesn’t mean that person will be poor. There ought to be plenty of people who do very well in physicality. Deeply physical professions like child care, lutherie, or massage might become better paid than ever in an advanced information economy. The more advanced our electronic gadgets become, the more expensive “artisan” organic produce seems to become. Virtuality reveals physicality to be ever more precious in comparison. At the same time, creative practitioners of inherently human physical trades ought to do well in the information economy, too, by starting trends and helping supply the most valuable example data to cloud algorithms.

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Meanwhile, trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes that the emerging information economy is benefiting the majority of those who provide the information that drives it. If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, “raw” information, or information that hasn’t yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn’t valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions.

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The reason is that the distribution of interest and connections gets “thicker” or “bushier” on a general graph than on a tree. More nodes become connected to a typical node. The biggest shift since the publication of my previous book has been the rise of the app economy, pioneered by Apple. This is generating some serious cash flow, and I take that as a sign that a better, more useful information economy is possible. However, the current information economy is simply not doing enough. If there were a universal app economy, it might be big enough to support a middle class. As it is, the app economy is confined to proprietary tree-shaped company stores. Even so, this sub-economy is getting bigger, but not big enough fast enough to save the middle class.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I'm not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables.

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Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode — the information economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't even have to actively participate in it. Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to information.

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But not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!). How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the "Information Economy." No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early 90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable strategic resource to puzzle out what an "information economy" was and to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the "new economy" — America sent in the futurists. We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't remember everything that happened to us, just selective details.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Lessons from the Industrial Revolution The Historical Sequence of the Information Technology Revolution Models, Actors, and Sites of the Information Technology Revolution The Information Technology Paradigm 2 The New Economy: Informationalism, Globalization, Networking Productivity, Competitiveness, and the Informational Economy The Global Economy: Structure, Dynamics, and Genesis The New Economy 3 The Network Enterprise: the Culture, Institutions, and Organizations of the Informational Economy Organizational Trajectories in the Restructuring of Capitalism and in the Transition from Industrialism to Informationalism Information Technology and the Network Enterprise Culture, Institutions, and Economic Organization: East Asian Business Networks Multinational Enterprises, Transnational Corporations, and International Networks The Spirit of Informationalism 4 The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-timers1 The Historical Evolution of Employment and Occupational Structure in Advanced Capitalist Countries: the G-7, 1920–2005 Is There a Global Labor Force?

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Therefore, to argue that productivity creates economic growth, and that productivity is a function of technological change, is tantamount to stating that the characteristics of society are the crucial factors underlying economic growth, by their impact on technological innovation. This Schumpeterian approach to economic growth12 raises an even more fundamental question concerning the structure and dynamics of the informational economy. Namely, what is historically new about our economy? What is its specificity vis-à-vis other economic systems, and particularly vis-à-vis the industrial economy? Is knowledge-based productivity specific to the informational economy? Economic historians have shown the fundamental role played by technology in economic growth, via productivity increase, throughout history and especially in the industrial era.13 The hypothesis of the critical role of technology as a source of productivity in advanced economies seems also able to comprehend much of the past experience of economic growth, cutting across different intellectual traditions in economic theory.

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In the process, they created, and shaped, a new, global economy. The historical specificity of informationalism A complex picture emerges regarding the process of historical development of the new informational economy. This complexity explains why highly aggregated statistical data cannot reflect directly the extent and pace of economic transformation under the impact of technological change. The informational economy is a distinctive socio-economic system in relationship to the industrial economy, but not because they differ in the sources of their productivity growth. In both cases, knowledge and information processing are critical elements in economic growth, as can be illustrated by the history of the science-based chemical industry51 or by the managerial revolution that created Fordism.52 What is distinctive is the eventual realization of the productivity potential contained in the mature industrial economy because of the shift toward a technological paradigm based on information technologies.

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Perhaps the only people who had the good sense to ignore the term “informal” were the very ones whose lives it purported to describe. Few of the merchants who operate on the roadsides or in the chaotic marketplaces of the developing world have any idea what the informal economy is. I found this out the hard way. My first foray into the world of unlicensed trade was a trip to Lagos, Nigeria. I spent my first few days in the African megacity walking up to merchants in the city’s street markets, introducing myself, and telling them I was writing a book on the informal economy. Without exception, they gawked at me and refused to talk. My words seemed to fill them with terror. Na so trouble plenty. Fortunately, I was working with two locals who were helping me navigate the chaotic and cramped markets of the city.

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“It says what people are not doing—not wearing conventional dress, not being regulated by the state—but it does not point to any active principles they may have for doing it. It is a passive and conservative concept that acknowledges a world outside the bureaucracy, but endows it with no positive identity.” That’s why I propose to jettison the phrase “informal economy” and to adopt, instead, the moniker “System D.” Of course, changing the name is cosmetic surgery. But language does encapsulate some of the deeper values inherent in a society. Rebranding the informal economy as System D provides an opportunity to strip away layers of preconceptions and judgments, to reduce the association with criminality, and to give this economic arena a chance to prove the naysayers wrong.

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For these merchants, the answer lies not in groveling at the altar of formalization but in creating a middle ground in which the flea market is a fine model for productive economic activity. “We need to come up with models that allow the street trader to coexist along with retail shops and along with large malls,” Chen told me. “The informal economy is not the problem. It’s part of the solution. Street traders, waste pickers, market women: these people really do contribute to the economy and to their cities. How can we manage our cities in a way that has space for them? What we need to do with the informal economy is to figure out how to help it become more productive, more efficient, and more effective.” Freedom to Trade Political œconomy … proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

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

“A wave of euphoria swept over Italians after economists recalibrated their statistics, taking into account for the first time the country’s formidable underground economy of tax evaders and illegal workers,” reported the New York Times.24 The observation and labeling of the informal economy originated with the work of the anthropologist Keith Hart, based on his fieldwork in Ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Subsequently, the extensiveness of informal economic activity has been widely recognized. It means business carried out without paying taxes or acquiring permits or observing all government regulations such as health and safety or employment laws. There are pluses and minuses. The informal economy is highly entrepreneurial and creates lots of jobs. In some countries it occurs either because government regulations are onerous—such as high import duties on manufactured goods shipped into developing countries, or finicky rules about the placement of shelves or sinks in developed countries—or because people are so poor they need to earn money however they can.

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In developing countries, the proportion of GDP accounted for by economic activity that stays outside the official net for taxes and scrutiny is high: the “informal” economy will be large in a poor country where many people work as self-employed entrepreneurs, farmers, or day laborers. In developed countries, the proportion is variable, ranging from around 7 percent of GDP in the United States and 8 percent of GDP in Switzerland to 20 percent in Italy and 25 percent in Greece (all 2012 estimates). The average is about 15 percent of GDP. In the formerly communist “transition” economies, the typical share of the shadow economy is 21–30 percent, and in poorer developing economies 35–44 percent of GDP. The informal economy has been growing in size around the world.

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Abramowitz, Moses, 113 Africa, 31–33, 72, 93, 138 Anders, William, 68 art, 127–28, 132 assets, contributing to sustainability, 134–35, 137 austerity measures, 23 Australia, 73, 109, 118 automation, 128–29 Bangladesh, 53 base year, in GDP calculations, 31, 33–34 Baumol, William, 127 Benford’s Law, 3, 143n3 Berners-Lee, Tim, 81 Bhalla, Surjit, 53 Bhutan, 112 Bos, Frits, 47–48 Boskin Commission, 35, 88 Brazil, 94, 125 Bretton Woods system, 48 BRIC economies, 94, 96 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 128–30 Burundi, 73 business, purpose of, 95 Campaign for Happiness, 112 Canada, 73, 89, 109 capabilities, 72–73, 134 capital consumption, 131 capitalism: 1970s crisis of, 59–75; 2008 crisis of, 93–118; achievements of, 5–6; innovation as hallmark of, 91; investment and depreciation, 131–33 capital widening, 132 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 69 centrally planned economies, 46–47, 56, 60, 66–68 Central Statistical Office (United Kingdom), 18 Chad, 73 chain-weighted price indexes, 33–34 China: economic growth of, 94, 96–97; economic limitations of, 96–97; GDP of, 51–53, 96, 97; living standards in, 51, 57, 96; manufacturing and exporting in, 82, 97, 125; U.S. relations with, 97 Christophers, Brett, 104, 105 circular flow, 26–27, 27f, 57, 63 Clark, Colin, 12, 13, 17, 50, 84 Clean Water Act (1972), 69 Clegg, Nick, 110 Cobb, John, 116 Cold War, 46–47, 60, 66 communications technology, 81–82 communism, 46–47, 60, 66–68, 96 compound arithmetic, 64, 83, 130–31 comprehensive wealth, 133, 135 computers, 80–82, 87–88 conspicuous consumption, 112 consumerism, 45, 112 consumer spending (C), 27–28, 45 consumer surplus, 130 customization, of goods and services, 123–25 Cuyahoga River, 69 Daly, Herman, 116 Darling, Alastair, 102 dashboard approach, 118, 136 data collection, 33, 37, 51–53, 137–38 Data Resources, Incorporated (DRI), 21 Davenant, Charles, 8 David, Paul, 79 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 81 defense spending, 14–16 deferred stock options, 37 deflators, 31 Defoe, Daniel, 9 DeLong, Brad, 86, 117 Democratic Republic of Congo, 54, 73 Deng Xiao Ping, 96 depreciation, 25, 30, 131–33 developed/high-income countries: GDP of, 72, 93; informal economy in, 107 developing/low-income countries: economic growth/stagnation in, 61, 71–72; GDP of, 32–33, 51, 71–72; informal economy in, 107, 109; and PPP, 50–53 development aid, 72, 74 digital products and services, 129–31 disasters, GDP growth after, 43 Domar, Evsey, 55 double-entry bookkeeping, 8 Easterlin, Richard, 111 Eckstein, Otto, 21 econometric models, 20–21, 23 economic growth: critiques of, 60; in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 12; lack of, in developing countries, 61; meanings and measures of, 15; meanings of, 123; potential rate of, 82–83; problems arising from, 63–64; real, 30–31; significance of, 135–36; sustainable, 71, 116, 137; theories/models of, 55–57, 78–81; virtuous circle of, 57, 59, 64, 73, 79; well-being and welfare aided by, 135 economics, challenges to conventional, 59–61 economic welfare.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Source: World Resources Institute THE TRAGEDY OF THE JUNGLE THE PROBLEM WITH FREE EXCHANGE In their own ways the resilience of the communities in the first part of the book showed the best of economics. These are places where people start with nothing but build an informal economy in which they innovate, often inventing an unofficial currency, creating markets from scratch and trading to each other’s mutual benefit. This reaction to economic devastation whether due to disaster, war or incarceration seems innate, and it shows how an informal or underground marketplace can allocate scarce resources, help people define roles and identities, and give meaning to life. Places like Darien show that informal economies are not always benign. Absent of rules and regulations, markets can arise that destroy resources, reduce the value of a human settlement and undermine its long-term prospects.

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The difference is that the malign government has been so long-lasting that a kind of privatization of the state has occurred, with direct, micro-level deals done between citizens and state employees. In Kinshasa the organic and informal economy delves into areas of life, such as policing, that even the most market-orientated countries regard as public or state functions. In its span and depth, the informal economy is greater than we appreciate. But this city, like the Darien Gap, offers a warning about the limits of all this. The culture of débrouillez-vous – to look after yourself, trade informally, and avoid the corrupt and voracious tax collector – is completely rational when public officials like police and teachers demand payment directly.

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So many people were arriving that they were forced to rationalize their operation, focusing on just a few essentials: health and vaccinations, food and water, and security. They ceded control of much that is rigorously enforced in other camps: details such as how houses should be laid out, and the number of shops and traders that are permitted. Without close administration, Zaatari became a lawless place, with fights breaking out. At the same time an informal economy flowered as Syrians, determined to re-create a little of the economic life they had left behind, set up mini versions of the companies they had run at home. Source: UNHCR, see notes At first the shopkeepers operated from tents. Then, when the UNHCR provided wooden caravans for the refugees to live in, the entrepreneurs got hold of these, cut the sides out and created small kiosks.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

De Soto has observed wryly that if the formal Egyptian economy was really the only recourse for twenty million educated young men without jobs, the country would have been swallowed up in permanent revolutionary struggle decades prior to the Arab Spring or suffered mass starvation on a Malthusian scale. As things stand, the informal economy prevents the poor from falling into the abyss without necessarily lifting them out of poverty. Advocates of microfinance, of legalizing squatters’ rights, of giving title to property users who are not owners, and of other policies aimed at formalizing the informal economy and bringing practices outside the law within the circle of legitimacy, have placed a bet, however. It is the informal economy that minimally keeps the poor from expiring, and if elaborated, formalized, and made legitimate, it can help overcome radical inequality and foster mobility—in time, greater civic integration as well.

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Social observers and civic advocates like Hernando de Soto, the director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, have long recognized, however, that urban economics is as much about informal power as about city government, as much about the invisible economy as about public jobs or formal corporate institutions. As Katherine Boo poignantly shows, the reality in third-world megacities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia is an informal economy that offers employment to the technically “jobless,” lodging to the technically “homeless,” and hope, however wan and perverse, to the actually “hopeless.” The question is how to unlock the informal economy and liberate the “dead capital” trapped inside. De Soto has observed wryly that if the formal Egyptian economy was really the only recourse for twenty million educated young men without jobs, the country would have been swallowed up in permanent revolutionary struggle decades prior to the Arab Spring or suffered mass starvation on a Malthusian scale.

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The dramatic story related by Jesse Katz of trying to sanction and support street vending by establishing an “Art-Gricultural Open Air Market” on Little Street cannot be retold here, but the effort nearly destroyed the neighborhood’s traditional unlicensed but thriving vending economy, which, Katz writes, was a “hodgepodge that sustained an ecosystem, an entry-level marketplace in which anyone could afford to participate, as buyer or seller.”37 This is the very definition of the informal economy’s potential for creative entrepreneurship, which, if harnessed, can impact inequality significantly. But in Los Angeles, Katz shows, city efforts echoed other well-intended urban policies like those that lead to the construction of dysfunctional high-rise projects. Formalizing what had been working informally can then undercut the informal economy’s core spirit without facilitating its incorporation into conventional business practices. Trying to order and legalize what vendors on their own were doing, creating a system for “allocating space and resolving disputes” that duplicated the informal system was simply not a recipe for success.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

On the face of it, this suggests deep contradictions within capitalist and socialist systems that belie the claimed and apparent differences between the two blocs. But even those concerned with cybersecurity acknowledge that it can be difficult to identify the “other” in the network environment. What was the uncanny valley in this analytical zone? For those who think about the information economy, differences between the East and West are indiscernible. Cristiano Antonelli’s (1992) seminal insights into the nature of the information economy, in which cooperation and coordination are as important as—or more important than—competition for long-term economic success were inductively developed from detailed studies of the practices and activities of transnational corporations on both sides of the iron curtain (many funded by the unfortunately short-lived United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations).

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The reality of the latter half of Soviet economic history reveals that private life increasingly depended on the resilience and robustness of people’s connections to the informal economy. The command economy operated on hidden networks of tolkachy (literally “pushers”) or “go-to-guys” or “fixers” who got the job done outside of the formal economic plan. Without the support of tolkachy, thousands of official economic quotas over decades never would have been met.42 Recent economic studies based on previously unconsulted archival data have estimated that a stunning average of 24 percent of annual expenditures per household in the Soviet Union went to the informal economy between 1968 and 1990.43 The estimated percentage of GNP not accounted for by the informal economy over the same period ranges between 17 and 40 percent.44 Despite both official claims and its enemies’ fears otherwise, Soviet economic life drew its vitality not from the strictures of top-down command and control but from the fitful hustling and the scrambling that came about because of those commands.

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For a basic review of tolkachy and other informal mechanisms in the economy, see Mark Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors; and Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 43. Byung-Yeon Kim, “Informal Economy Activities of Soviet Households: Size and Dynamics,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (3) ( 2003): 532–551. 44. Kim, “Informal Economy Activities of Soviet Households,” 532–535; Simon Johnson, Daniel Kaufmann, and Andrei Shleifer, “The Unofficial Economy in Transition,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1997): 159–221. 45. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors, 12. 46.

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

A highway, after all, is an industrial version of a footpath, a network for the physical transit of people and goods. The information economy is not like a highway, a railroad, or a pipeline. It does not haul or transport information from point to point the way the Trans-Canada Highway carries heavy trucks from Alberta to New Brunswick. What the world calls the "Information Superhighway" is not merely a transit link. It is the destination. Cyberspace transcends locality It involves nothing less than the instantaneous sharing of data everywhere and nowhere at once. The emerging information economy is based in the interconnections linking and relinking millions of users of millions of computers.

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Those who live in jurisdictions that remained poor or underdeveloped during the industrial period have the most to gain by the liberation of economies from the confines of geography. This is contrary to what you will hear. The main controversy surrounding the advent of the information economy and the rise of the Sovereign Individual will focus on the allegedly adverse effects on "fairness" arising from the death of politics. It is certainly true that the advent of the global information economy will deal a mortal blow to large-scale income redistribution. The main beneficiaries of income redistribution in the Industrial Age have been inhabitants of wealthy jurisdictions whose level of consumption is twenty times higher than the world average.

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The tendency toward the devolution of large systems is already powerful because of the fall away of scale economies and the rising costs of holding fragmenting social groups together. The irony of information wars is that they could well impose more of a shock to the brittle systems left over from the Industrial Age than to the emerging information economy itself. As long as essential information technology continues to function, cybercommerce could proceed in tandem with the struggles of information war in a way that could never happen in a territorial war. You could not imagine millions of commercial transactions taking place at the front in one of the twentieth century's wars.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

It is clear from this that much of the necessary infrastructure is in place. What is lacking is the willingness to take risks. Black Market Buccaneers An interesting side note on the question of risk and innovation is the so-called ‘informal economy’. This is estimated to have a collective Buccaneers 89 value of $10 trillion.25 Robert Neuwirth’s Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy makes the bold claim that this motley collection of enterprises have a great deal to teach the rest of us.26 Neuwirth estimates that half of the workers in the world are part of this shadow economy. The black market operates at the purest level of entrepreneurialism, untouched by law, regulation or tax.

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It had little capacity to properly supply the needs of its people. With the informal economy we see the other side, a lawless place where demand can be instantly met by supply, in its rawest, most elemental form. For example, Neuwirth tells us that it was underground Chinese manufacturers that first offered a dual-sim-card mobile phone. It was sold through street vendors in countries where mobile phone provision works on a patchwork basis.27 This is something that can now be bought in a perfectly legal way, but it was the informal economy that got there first. The market abhors a vacuum, and it is the smaller, more nimble enterprises that can fill them, long before a multinational leviathan like, for example, Nokia, can even begin to contemplate developing a product.

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Economist Le Dang Doanh estimates that in Vietnam the private sector currently constitutes 40 per cent of GDP, on top of which exists a further 20 per cent which can be considered the ‘underground’ economy.28 Clearly, law and order, intellectual property rights and consumer law exist for a reason, and are on the whole beneficial. But as a sheer experiment in what the poorest entrepreneur can achieve, when nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed, the informal economy is pretty hard to beat. The tradeoff between risk and reward is more visible here than anywhere else. As Steve Jobs once famously said, ‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.’ 90 Britannia Unchained Frontier Spirit The conceit that Britain ought to play the wise cultured Athenian to the boorish new Romans of the US is an old one, and not without its charms for those still nostalgic for empire.

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

For a long time now, any policy that intentionally eliminates low-cost jobs has not thereby removed the need in the economy or among the population for work of that kind. Criminalization is thus tantamount to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It hastens the movement into irregular work in the informal economy, which it then brands as criminal. Cheaper services for groups with declining incomes Formal services (because of high taxes and charges, among other things) are becoming prohibitively expensive for sections of the population with declining incomes who still want to maintain their standard of living. The informal economy is thus seen as a boon by these groups. Informalization as a strategy of corporate rationalization The spread of casual labour, spurious self-employment and ‘permanently temporary’ work offers many advantages for a strategy of corporate rationalization.

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Otherwise they are ‘social cheats’, whose transgression is harmful to the public good. This vicious circle – contradictory regulations, paradoxical coalitions, high-cost services, income loss, informality as a rationalization strategy, surplus time and deep financial insecurity of the unemployed – encourages the further spread of grey work and the informal economy. Unless the informal economy is decriminalized, the problems of the labour market can hardly be successfully tackled. But then the dykes may possibly break. The Either-Or policy – either work and a wage or no work at all – means that the new risks of informality are heaped on to the shoulders of people in work.

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On the one hand, it points to the huge potential of the informal economy to integrate people willing to work and to offer them some chance of making a living. Truly these countries have a remarkable capacity to absorb people amid soaring population growth and flight from the land. On the other hand, the label ‘not unemployed’ can only be described as cynical in a region of the world where most of the excluded underclass does not show up in the ‘unemployment’ statistics. With regard to the Western view of unemployment as a scandal, this cynicism may even be turned to political use. For decriminalization and recognition of the informal economy might appear to some – at least as far as the statistical construction of reality is concerned – as precisely the royal road out of unemployment.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

From Airbnb (a rental website that has gone from 120,000 listings in early 2012 to over 300,000 at the time of this writing) to Zipcar (the car-sharing service that was sold to Avis for $500 million in January 2013), people the world over are moving away from the fixed, formal “own it” model to a more fluid “exchange it” approach. The importance of the informal economy is starting to become more apparent in other European countries. In the United Kingdom, a September 2012 study6 by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Community Links found that the informal economy was flourishing, and that its existence was, in fact, important to the health of entrepreneurship. A nod to the need for hustle, this study underscored that in order for entrepreneurs to formalize their activities (as in, legally become a taxpaying registered business), they often have to trade one skill for another—exchange a website design for a marketing strategy, for example, or pay a supplier off the books.

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., 71–72 Griffel, Mattan, 23 Groupon, 83 Guangdong, China, 81 guayusa, 182–83 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 113 Guerrilla Girls, 151 gun use, 133 Hacker Ethic, 37–38, 110, 125, 126 hacker movement, 110–14, 123 hackers, hacking, 19–20, 107–37, 149 access to information and, 110, 112–14 characteristics and mentality of, 122, 136–37 of culture, 205 of electronics, 108–9, 110–14 of establishments, 123–25 manipulation and, 108 mistrust of authority and, 110, 112 motivation for, 112 perception of violence and, 129–36 physical, 125–27 pirates as, 116–22 rules and principles of, 37–38 as small players, 123–24 as term, 111, 115 “white hat,” 108–9 see also specific people and organizations Hackers (Levy), 110 Hadid, Zaha, 81 Hafun, Somalia, 13 H&M, 85 Hargeisa Prison, 26 Harrelson, Woody, 190 Harvard Business Review, 124 Harvard Medical School, 187, 190 Harvard University, 199–200 Hasan, Abdi, 16, 26–27 health care industry, 23–24 see also pharmaceutical industry Hearts of Darkness, 32 Hemingway, Ernest, 211–13 Hendrix College, 140 HERO, 71 High Court of Admiralty, 117 HI-SEAS, 144 HIV/AIDS, 95, 129 Hofstra University, 63 Hoke, Catherine (“Cat”), 58–60, 62, 63–64, 207–9 Hong Kong, China, 82 Hostetler, Corlene, 3 Hostetler, Sam, 3–4, 6–7, 8, 10, 11 hotel industry, hacking of, 124 “How the Weak Win Wars” (Arreguín-Toft), 123 Hulu, 96, 97 Hulu Plus, 97 Humpback Dairies, 6–7 hustling, 51–75 community building and, 68–72 for ex-criminals, 55–56, 59–64 in informal economy, 65 while in prison, 51–54, 55, 57, 59 as term, 57–58 hypnotic regressions, 187, 189 IBM, 92 IKEA, 115 “In Cannes, Women Show Their Reels, Men, Their Films,” 152 incarceration, 51–54, 55, 57, 58–59, 173–74 entrepreneurship programs and, see Defy Ventures; Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP); Venturing Out hustling and, 51–54, 55, 57, 59 India, 15, 78, 94–95 indigenous tribes, 180–84, 200 Industrial Revolution, 38 informal economy, see misfits, misfit economy information, access to, 110, 112–14 Infor-Nation, 55, 56, 58 innovation, 18, 24–25, 35, 37, 85, 86, 92, 94, 96–98, 102 copying and, see copying in large corporations, 167 patents as threat to, 92 pivoting and, 169 “In Praise of Misfits,” 35 intellectual property, 92 laws for, 79 sharing of, 89 theft of, 77, 85, 93, 105 see also copying International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, 81 International Women’s Day, 151 Internet censorship, 113 Invisible Hook, The: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Leeson), 118 iPhone, 169 Iraq, 133 iTunes, 96 Jackson, Jesse, 176 Jamaica, N.Y., 49, 50 Jargon File, The, 111 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 148 Jobs, Steve, 30–31, 34, 169 Johns, Adrian, 93 Johnson, Charles, 118, 119 Johnson, Steven, 98 Jolly Roger: The Story of the Great Age of Piracy (Pringle), 120 Joyce, James, 213 Kenning, Tom, 156 khat drug trade, 15 Kickstarter, 102 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 115 King Blood (Latin King leader), 171, 173, 174, 175 Knockoff Economy, The (Raustiala and Sprigman), 85 Kunstmann, Lazar, 19–20, 126, 127 La Barbe, 151–53, 154, 155, 204, 214, 216 Lackman, Jon, 19–20, 126 Lady Gaga, 90 Last Broadcast, The, 32 Latin Kings, 170–79 Latinos, 170–71 Lawrence, T.

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They’re found in gangs and within hacker collectives. They’re in the crowded streets of Shenzhen, the prisons of Somalia, the flooded coastal towns of Thailand. Resourceful and creative, loyal and wily, they are slum dwellers, dissidents, and outlaws. Call it the gray market, the black market, the informal economy. Or shadow markets or the makeshift economy. We call it the Misfit Economy. Whatever the term, misfit innovators inhabit a different world—a world that, by conventional wisdom, should have nothing to do with traditional businesses and mainstream markets. However, far from being deviants who pose a threat to our social and economic stability, these entrepreneurial misfits are pioneering new ways of thinking and operating, establishing new best practices that we all can learn from and apply to formal markets.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

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

It is a belief in a world where work and thrift today are rewarded by prosperity and progress tomorrow, where savings promise comfort in retirement, and where our children enjoy glowing prospects on new frontiers of opportunity. The way monopoly money has savaged these hopes is a great untold story of our time. In an information economy, governed by wealth achieved through learning, money is a messenger from the future—a bearer of information and a signal of opportunity. If the money no longer conveys a reliable message—a way of thinking coherently about our priorities and our values—how can we harbor intelligible dreams? Today we fear the dream is failing—that something has corrupted the links between our history and our horizons, that some insidious force is stealing our future.

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Federal Express launched its overnight deliveries, Walmart its retailing revolution, Southwest Airlines its democratization of the air. Containerization vastly facilitated international shipping and trade. Annual productivity growth, as the advance of GDP over hours of labor, did not plummet from 3 percent to .5 percent because of any putative 1970s exhaustion of intrinsic technological gains. In an information economy, growth springs not from power but from knowledge. Crucial to the growth of knowledge is learning, conducted across an economy through the falsifiable testing of entrepreneurial ideas in companies that can fail. The economy is a test and measurement system, and it requires reliable learning guided by an accurate meter of monetary value.

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Inflation seems a remote threat in an epoch of near-zero interest rates and collapsing commodity prices. Nonetheless, Turner correctly warns that real estate by its very nature is scarce. If the private banking system were permitted to generate credit at will, it would flow toward urban land, the price of which would be bid up vertiginously in the overflow of wealth from the new information economy. He shares the skepticism of Austrian economists about fractional reserve banking, whereby financial institutions can multiply deposits into cataracts of money and debt. Thus he prefers high reserve requirements and restrictions on international capital flows. What insight does our new information theory of money give us into these prescriptions?

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

The growing belief that the United States is in the midst of a modern Gilded Age is about more than concern about wealth inequity.11 Figure 1.1 Existing and projected Amazon small sortable fulfillment centers in the United States. Given the perceived shift in recent decades (in the Western world, at least) from an industrial to a postindustrial society, the continued dependence of information-economy firms like Amazon on material infrastructure and the manipulation of physical objects is surprising, if not paradoxical. Despite repeated claims that the defining characteristic of the information society is “the displacement in our economy of materials by information,” as Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has described it—or, in the even more succinct and memorable words of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, the inevitable shift “from atoms to bits”—what has in fact occurred is a massive increase in our interaction with our physical environment.12 Information technologies allow humans to visualize, explore, and exploit our environment more efficiently.

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Of the many industrial-era corporations with which we might compare Amazon and other Silicon Valley tech firms, Sears stands out as the most relevant: not only did it share a business model with Amazon, but it survived long enough into the twenty-first century to be a competitor. Like electronic commerce today, the mail-order-catalog industry of a century ago reveals the essential continuities between the industrial and informational economies. Sears was not the first of the mail-order-catalog companies: that honor goes to Montgomery Ward, whose founder, Aaron Montgomery Ward, issued in 1872 a one-page catalog that listed some items for sale and provided information on how to order them. But the company that Richard Sears and his business partner, Alvah Roebuck, founded in 1891 quickly emerged as a leading competitor to Ward and was, by 1897, delivering a 500-page catalog to 300,000 American homes, offering up everything from bicycles to bonnets to bedroom furniture to two-bedroom homes.

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In the low-margin world of mass-market retail, it is hard to imagine either Sears or Amazon being able to construct and maintain these critical infrastructures ex nihilo.34 From advertising to finance to customer support to supplier relations, once you start unraveling the layers of material infrastructure that make supposedly “immaterial” information economy possible, it turns out to be turtles upon turtles, all the way down . . . In addition to solving the problem of trust, Sears also had to solve the problem of data management. Although they would not have referred to their solution to the data management problem as a “computer” (though the term was already widely used by the early twentieth century), they did call it “data processing.”

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

And yet they thrive economically, charging each other rent for space in buildings with no legal ownership, employing each other in unlicensed businesses, and selling each other all manner of services and goods—some of the goods pirated, some of the services criminal. This is what is called the “informal economy.” It is to economic theory what dark energy is to astro-physical theory. It’s not supposed to exist, but there it is, and it’s huge. While the informal economy specializes in being invisible to the formal world, of course it is highly visible to itself. This is where the social capital of a dense community pays off. Without formal property title, everyone knows who effectively owns a building and may charge rent for a room in it.

…

I find what needy people do with surplus time more interesting than what un-needy people do with surplus money. Ingenuity is the norm in the informal economy. For instance, there is a whole urban-farming subeconomy in the slums: Families save money and improve nutrition by growing their own food, and they can sell the produce a short distance from where it’s grown. In the Medellín slums in Colombia, “people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in cut-open bleach bottles they hang from their window sills,” according to blogger Ethan Zuckerman. At the entry level, the informal economy is organized around pittances. Robert Kaplan wrote in 2008 thatFor the many rural newcomers to Bangladesh’s cities, there is the rickshaw economy, as much an animating force in urban areas as the search for usable soil is in villages.

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This book was finished before the full effects of the world financial crisis of 2009 could be studied. Did the informal economy in the world’s slums offer a refuge from it, or did people there suffer more than anybody? (A 2009 report in the Wall Street Journal said that in the developing world, “people are landing in the informal sector, which has become a critical safety net as the economic crisis spreads.”) Were some people driven further into the crime economy? For that matter, how did global crime do? Did the rate of urbanization slow down or speed up? Here’s my prediction from March 2009: significant growth in the informal economy from more people retreating into it; significant growth in the crime economy, because it’s always ready to exploit chaos; no change in the rate of urbanization.

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Consumers receive access to cheap products and services provided by these low-wage, untaxed workers. But workers in the informal economy don’t fare so well. They don’t have access to any of the worker protections that come with formal employment, like minimum wage or health and safety regulations. Workers in the informal economy can’t get unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation and generally get no benefits from their employer (like health insurance or sick leave or vacation time). It’s hard to calculate exact numbers for the informal economy because, by definition, it’s unregulated. One recent study in Los Angeles estimated that immigrants made up 40 percent of the city’s population, and one-fourth of these were undocumented.

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Rather than focusing on immigrants as the problem, it proposed “increasing the minimum wage, adopting universal health care, and enacting labor law reform as the remedies for the widening income disparity in the nation.”18 MYTH 4 IMMIGRANTS DON’T PAY TAXES Immigrants, no matter what their status, pay the same taxes that citizens do—sales taxes, real estate taxes (if they rent or own a home), gasoline taxes. Some immigrants work in the informal economy and are paid under the table in cash, so they don’t have federal and state income taxes, or social security taxes, deducted from their paychecks. So do some citizens. In fact every time the kid next door babysits, or shovels the snow, he or she is working in the informal economy. Much of the service sector operates in the informal sphere. Nanny jobs and housecleaning jobs—which tend to be held primarily by women—generally use informal arrangements whether the workers are citizen or immigrant, documented or undocumented.

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One recent study in Los Angeles estimated that immigrants made up 40 percent of the city’s population, and one-fourth of these were undocumented. The informal economy accounted for some 15 percent of the city’s workforce, and undocumented workers were concentrated there: 60 percent of workers in the informal economy were undocumented.2 Many immigrants work in the formal economy, in which case they have all of the same tax deductions from their paychecks as citizens do. Undocumented immigrants who work in the formal economy generally do so by presenting false social security numbers. The Social Security Administration estimates that about three-fourth of undocumented workers do this.3 Public commentary about this practice is often quite angry.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Government may function as a check on abusive power, but government itself is a power that must be checked. What I propose is not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach to the information economy. By that I mean a regime whose goal is to constrain and divide all power that derives from the control of information. Specifically, what we need is something I would call a Separations Principle for the information economy. A Separations Principle would mean the creation of a salutary distance between each of the major functions or layers in the information economy. It would mean that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be kept apart from one another.

…

The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of those consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. “We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy,” prophesied Yochai Benkler. “It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn’t consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had—in fact, have—a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests.

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(The degree to which the long lines had been subsidizing loss-leading markets throughout the country was greater than even Bell itself knew!) It would be some years before these inconveniences were offset by the fruits of innovation. On the other hand, when the innovation pent up by the Bell system came out, it was not a trickle but a tidal wave, in computing, telephony, networking, and everything else that has defined the information economy of the last thirty years. It is always to be preferred that the Cycle proceed of its own accord. The examples of the Paramount decree and the Bell divestiture are both tales of much that is bad and ugly arising before the eventual good of an open industry. There is an undeniable efficiency that attends a monopoly’s doing what it has been perfected to do, whether that be to turn out a certain kind of film or provide a universal phone service.

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

So, while the modern world often appears increasingly impersonal, in those areas where knowledge really counts, people count more than ever. In this way, a true knowledge economy should distinguish itself not only from the industrial economy but also from an information economy. For though its champions like to present these two as distinct, the information economy, like the industrial economy, shows a marked indifference to people. The industrial economy, for example, treated them en masse as interchangeable partsthe factory "hands" of the nineteenth century. The information economy threatens to treat them as more or less interchangeable consumers and processors of information. Attending to knowledge, by contrast, returns attention to people, what they know, how they come to know it, and how they differ.

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Rather, it feels more as if, as the economist Paul Krugman puts it, "We've gone from an economy where most people worked in manufacturingin fairly large companies that were producing manufactured goods and engaged in things like transportationto an economy where most people work for fairly large companies producing services." 28 The resilience of the large organization is not all that surprising. Given that information technologies are particularly good at taking advantage of large networks, the information economy in certain circumstances actually favors the aggregated, massified firm.29 These are firms that can or have knit diverse networks together, as AOL hopes to do with its purchase of Netscape or as Microsoft hopes to do with the insertion of Windows into television set-top boxes. Consequently, the small, agile firm with big ideas and little money is less likely to be the viable start-up of legend.

…

The great classical economist Adam Smith used the image of the invisible hand to describe forces that reconcile the pursuit of private interests through markets with the public good and with what we have called the social fabric. If not actually producing good, at least the invisible hand prevents the pursuit of private interests from doing harm. "Assumptions which underlie the microeconomics of the Invisible Hand," de Long and Froomkin conclude, "fray badly when transported to the information economy."26 Better bots, then, will require a better understanding of human negotiation, the contribution of the social fabric, and the role of human restraint in the functioning of the invisible hand. Development will be ill served by people who merely redefine elaborate social processes in terms of the things that bots do well.

Off the Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", business climate, gentrification, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, new economy, refrigerator car, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban renewal, working poor, Y2K

The study of underground economic activity in American inner cities was not well established until the seventies, when Louis Ferman published a pathbreaking paper on "informal economies." (See L. Ferman and P. Ferman, "The Structural Underpinning of the Irregular Economy," Poverty and Human Resources Abstracts 8 [1978]: 3-17.) Until that time, studies of unreported income could be found in histories of early twentieth-century prohibition, biographies of mafia leaders, anthropological studies of vice and hustling, and sociological inquiries into family life and public behavior generally. 3. The variation in definitions of the underground may be found in L. Ferman, S. Henry, and M. Hoyman, "Issues and Prospects for the Study of Informal Economies: Concepts, Research Strategies, and Policy," Annals of the Academy of Political Science 493 (1987): 154-172. 4.

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Using such figures, Hoyman argues that women are driven into the underground economy by their need to attend to these household duties, which are themselves not paid and which often require labor arrangements (e.g., day care, barter) that are not integrated into mainstream institutions. See M. Hoyman, "Female Participation in the Informal Economy: A Neglected Issue," in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: The Informal Economy, ed. L. Ferman, S. Henry, and M. Hoyman (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1987), esp. 72. 8. The men in Liebow's study wove various myths, such as being "too manly" for marriage, which not only helped them cope with their inability to be a reliable husband but also provided them with an alternate source of meaning and identity—what Liebow would call a "value stretch."

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For essays on informalization and immigration, see Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 12. About half of startup businesses in general close after four years, so the short tenure rates are not specific to ghetto-based businesses. Also, closure does not necessarily mean failure: businesses may merge, proprietors may find new and better economic opportunities, and so on. See Portes, Castells, and Benton, The Informal Economy, Brian Head, Business Success: Factors Leading to Surviving and Closing Successfully, Working Paper #CES-WP-01-01 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic Studies, U.S.

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

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

They were paid to crank widgets—and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency—even if most haven’t yet recognized this reality. Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It’s instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren’t earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

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For someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98 percent of his day in his old job surfing the Web, Jason Benn’s transformation is nothing short of astonishing. Jason Benn’s story highlights a crucial lesson: Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s instead a skill that has great value today. There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that’s dependent on complex systems that change rapidly. Some of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn’t exist ten years ago and will likely be outdated ten years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they’d need to master digital analytics.

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No one would fault Ric Furrer for not using Facebook, but if a knowledge worker makes this same decision, then he’s labeled an eccentric (as I’ve learned from personal experience). Just because this connection between depth and meaning is less clear in knowledge work, however, doesn’t mean that it’s nonexistent. The goal of this chapter is to convince you that deep work can generate as much satisfaction in an information economy as it so clearly does in a craft economy. In the sections ahead, I’ll make three arguments to support this claim. These arguments roughly follow a trajectory from the conceptually narrow to broad: starting with a neurological perspective, moving to the psychological, and ending with the philosophical.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Whereas traditional formal industries such as textiles in India or oil in the Middle East tended to foster interethnic solidarity through unions and radical political parties, the rise of the unprotected informal sector has too frequently gone hand in hand with exacerbated ethnoregious differentiation and sectarian violence.40 38 Breman, The Labouring Poor, pp. 5, 201. 39 Philip Amis, "Making Sense of Urban Poverty," Environment and Urbanisation 7:1 (April 1995), p. 151. 40 I think Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, however, went too f a r i n a 1989 essay that suggests that the proletariat is "fading away" in the face of the "increasing heterogeneity of work situations and, thus, of social conditions." (Castells and Portes, "World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy," in Portes, Castells, and Lauren Benton (eds), The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced a id Less Developed Countiies, Baltimore 1989, p. 31.) Informal workers, in fact, tend to be massively crowded into a few major niches where effective organization and "class consciousness" might become possible if authentic labor rights and regulations existed.

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In their restructuring of Hong Kong's spatial economy, planners seldom paid attention to actual livelihood strategies of the urban poor, including their frequent use of their homes as workshops or their need to be located close to central markets or factories. The incompatibility of peripheral, highrise housing with the social structures and informal economies of poor communities is, of course, ancient history: it's an original sin repeated over decades by urban reformers and city czars everywhere. Indeed, back in the 1850s Baron Haussmann's Second Empire showcase of workers' housing, the Cite Napoleon in Paris, was rejected by its intended residents because of its uniformity and "barracks-like" quality.

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Some Brazilian sociologists call this process — analogous to the semi-proletarianization of landless peasants — passive proletarianisation, involving the "dissolving of traditional forms of (re)production, which for the great majority of direct producers does not translate into a salaried position in the formal labor market."3 This informal working class, without legal recognition or rights, has important historical antecedents. In modern European history, Naples, even more than Dublin or London's East End, was the exemplar of an urban informal economy. In this "most shocking city of the nineteenth century," as Frank Snowden calls it in his brilliant study, a "chronic super-abundance of labour" survived by miracles of economic improvisation and the constant subdivision of subsistence niches. A structural dearth of formal jobs — permanent unemployment was estimated at 40 percent —was transformed into an overwhelming spectacle of informal competition.

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

UNHCR might be most urgently needed in Lebanon given that it hosted over 1 million refugees against the backdrop of a total population of just over 4 million. But weak governance and Lebanon’s reluctance to open camps given its past experience of hosting Palestinians since 1948 and its complex relationship with Syria meant that, in practice, the overwhelming majority of Syrians were tolerated and de facto integrated, particularly in the informal economy and impoverished urban areas. Lebanon was therefore a poor fit for UNHCR’s standard emergency-driven approach of delivering humanitarian assistance in camps. To all intents and purposes, civil society provided the bulk of the response. In Turkey, UNHCR’s role has also been limited. Less than 10 per cent of the country’s Syrian refugees have been in several government-run camps, with UNHCR’s role being limited to the delivery of core relief items and support during the winter months.

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Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps. In Jordan around 85 per cent of refugees went to live in cities. Even in the cities, Syrian refugees were not officially permitted to work. But, like many developing countries, Jordan had a large informal economy. In practice, if people were sufficiently desperate, they could work illegally, either as an employee at a wage below the official minimum, or scratching a living in informal self-employment. The same pattern emerged in Turkey: some refugees went to the camps, but most entered the informal urban economy, which abounded with opportunities.

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Often, living standards could be cushioned for a while by depleting assets, but as the conflict persisted this gradually became unsustainable, and many refugees understandably faced mounting anxiety. In effect, in this phase by far the most useful mechanisms for meeting the needs of the refugee exodus from Syria were the informal economies of the neighbouring countries. They provided the income-earning opportunities which refugees, using their own initiative, grasped: the informal private economy was the lifeboat. In contrast, official policies were constraining. The haven governments prevented all but a handful of refugees from working legally, whereas UNHCR camps were located far away from possible job opportunities.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Instead of moving from thought to action once – as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century radicals did – repression forces radicalized young people to oscillate between the two: you can jail, torture and harass people but you cannot prevent their mental resistance. In the past, radicalism of the mind would have been pointless without power. How many generations of rebels wasted their lives in garrets writing angry poetry, cursing the injustice of the world and their own paralysis? But in an information economy, the relationship of thought to action changes. In hi-tech engineering, before a single piece of metal is shaped, objects are designed virtually, tested virtually and even ‘manufactured’ virtually – the whole process modelled from start to finish – on computers. The mistakes are discovered and rectified at the design stage, in a way that was impossible before 3D simulations came about.

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Sociologist Michel Foucault’s prediction of what it would make us – ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ – looks all the more visionary because it was made when the only thing resembling the internet was a green-screen network, owned by the French state, called Minitel.37 The promise was that new technology would produce an information economy and a knowledge society. These have emerged but not in the form envisaged. In the old dystopias – as with the rogue computer Hal, in 2001: A Space Odyssey – it is the technology that rebels. In reality, the network has allowed humans to rebel. It enabled them first of all to produce and consume knowledge independently of the channels formed in the era of industrial capitalism.

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On 15 September 2008, the Nokias and Motorolas pointed at Lehman Brothers HQ, and the free wifi signal in the Starbucks opposite, were in their own way just as significant as the bank that had collapsed. They were conveying the ultimate market signal from the future to the present: that an information economy may not be compatible with a market economy – or at least not one dominated and regulated by market forces primarily. That, I will argue, is the root cause of the collapse, fibrillation and zombie state of neoliberalism. All the money created, all the velocity and momentum of finance built up during the last twenty-five years have to be set against the possibility that capitalism – a system based on markets, property ownership and exchange – cannot capture the ‘value’ generated by the new technology.

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

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

We now have all sorts of indicators about the size of the information economy, and we often evaluate a country by how much technical innovation we find there. The World Bank now counts patents and Ph.D.s in its country-wealth indicators. We continually worry about the supply of engineers in the economy. Bytes of traffic are a good proxy for a country’s importance in the global-information infrastructure. The financial services sector expects government investment in the internet, and when countries invest in information infrastructure, many industries benefit. The perception of technical innovation, the size of the information economy, and the reach of high-tech industries are all important to the evaluation of modern economic wealth.

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Some of us commit to Google, others to Apple, still others to Microsoft, or sometimes our employers make that commitment for us. We commit to buying their products and services, and they commit to making new technologies available (within their information ecologies). These feudal lords try to keep our data safe. If we want to participate in the modern information economy, or we want employment in a modern workplace, or we want to use digital media to maintain social ties with families and friends, we have to pledge allegiance to at least one of these lords. As data serfs it is difficult to pick up and move between kingdoms. However, this perspective doesn’t work because social elites are hardly using the internet to usher in a new era of feudalism.

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Young people who had never known a political alternative to authoritarianism started exploring their options. People began using social media to turn political problems into opportunities. The internet and mobile phones provided a new structure for political life. Mubarak’s Choice In the late 1990s, the global information economy was booming. Egypt was also doing well, at least compared with some of her neighbors, but was coming under pressure to modernize. Since so much economic growth seemed to be tied to the internet, Egypt’s strongman, Hosni Mubarak, faced a dilemma. Giving the country’s major businesses access to fast telecommunications services seemed like a good economic strategy.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Dollar’s 25,000-member Atlanta congregation, parishioners pray for salvation so that they can get rich. But resolving the conflicts of midcentury America has exacted its own terrible price: the fragmentation of the self, not to mention alienation and anxiety among today’s professional classes—those Americans who earn lots of money but who need to work for it. The 24/7, dual-sex information economy in which they work—riddled with inequality between the rich and the very rich—has changed the way we do business, advance our careers, and navigate our personal lives. This socioeconomic restructuring has generated wide reverberations perhaps best illustrated by three discrete (if interrelated) phenomena: the economic red shift; the portable workshop; and the price culture.

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Seen as a shortcut to the top that flew in the face of meritocratic ideals back during the social ethic of the 1950s, networking through weisure is now a skill that Americans pay millions of dollars to book publishers and network trainers to cultivate. This is not false consciousness, either. Social capital is real capital in the information economy. Those who control social valves—connections between individuals—are the ones who are able to profit through information arbitrage. That’s why Mr. Elsewhere is constantly having “meetings” that are ambiguous in nature. Part of each workday is spent drinking lattes with folks who may be potential clients, or investors, or just interesting people from whom the newest hot idea for private equity may arise.

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Working Paper no. 11278, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. One Plus a Hundred Zeros Welcome to Your (N)Office If there is any “center” or “downtown” to our new economy (and to Elsewhere, U.S.A., for that matter) it is just off the 101 Freeway in Mountain View, California. The headquarters of the information economy, so to speak, is Google.com, whose mission, elegantly stated, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Started as a Ph.D. research project, and incorporated in a friend’s Silicon Valley garage, Google epitomizes the Elsewhere Ethic better than any other company.

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

They do not understand that it is the rules we have made that create and sustain them, that it is “intellectual property” monopolies that are allowing these extraordinary concentrations of power and wealth. We must go on spreading awareness and challenging mistaken conceptions of the workings of the digital information economy. We need a world where every policy-maker, every expert, every educated citizen understands that bits are different from bread – and what that implies. We need to spell out the dangers of a Closed world built on proprietary information. We need research bodies dedicated to understanding our information economy and society, as well as think-tanks to track progress and develop policies. We need mass membership organizations to campaign for an Open world, in the way that Green organizations campaign on behalf of the physical environment, because membership provides the resources to engage long term and a clear constituency supporting change.

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Intellectual property is one way to pay for this first instance. But, as we shall see, there are other ways to fund innovation, ways to replace patents and copyrights with remuneration rights, preserving the incentives to innovate but without creating monopolies. Old Rules in a New World And the result of running the information economy by the old rules of intellectual monopoly rights is spiralling inequality. In 2016, the eight richest people in the world had as much money as the bottom 50 per cent of humanity – that’s three-and-a-half billion people. And of those eight, six were tech billionaires. This is a political timebomb.

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Old property worked, but transplanted into this new world as intellectual property it does not. In this new world, intellectual property is intellectual monopoly. Monopolies that are unjustified and unjust, dangerous both to our economies and our societies. We need new rules suited to our new information economy; rules that provide ways to reward innovators and creators whilst preserving fairness and freedom, and which give everyone a stake in our digital future. Most simply, we need an Open world. A world where all digital information is open, free for everyone to use, build on and share; and where innovators and creators are recognized and rewarded.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable. Another, less celebrated, was his key role in establishing a trustworthy gold standard, which made economic valuations as calculable and reliable as the physical dimensions of items in trade. Since Claude Shannon in 1948 and Peter Drucker in the 1950s, we have all spoken of the information economy as if it were a new idea. But both Newton’s physics and his gold standard were information systems. More specifically, the Newtonian system is what we call today an information theory. Newton’s biographers typically underestimate his achievement in establishing the information theory of money on a firm foundation.

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Its new holding company, Alphabet, is worth nearly $800 billion, only about $100 billion less than Apple. How do you get rich by giving things away? Google does it through one of the most ingenious technical schemes in the history of commerce. Page’s and Brin’s crucial insight was that the existing advertising system, epitomized by Madison Avenue, was linked to the old information economy, led by television, which Google would overthrow. The overthrow of TV by computers was the theme of my book Life after Television. If Google could succeed in its plan to “organize the world’s information” and make it available, the existing advertising regime could be displaced. Brin and Page began with the idea of producing a search engine maintained by a nonprofit university, operated beyond the corruption of commerce.

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While most of us welcome “free” on the understanding that it means “no charge,” what we really want is to get what we ordered rather than what the authority chooses to provide. In practice, “free” means insecure, amorphous, unmoored, and changeable from the top. This communications-first principle served us well for many years. The Internet is a giant asynchronous replicator that communicates by copying. Regulating all property rights in the information economy are the copy-master kings, chiefly at Google. In this system, security is a function of the network, applied from the top, rather than a property of the device and its owner. So everything rises to the top, the Googleplex, which achieves its speed and efficiency by treating its users as if they were making random choices.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Third, the skyrocketing value of data has given rise to an information dragnet: institutions constantly trawling to collect data in whatever way possible. The dragnet foists on consumers a whole array of shadow tasks that involve both supplying personal information and managing the reams of data that the information economy pushes into their computers and smartphones. Fourth, constantly evolving social norms affect behavior. An emergent norm like parental overengagement in children’s lives can fertilize an entire meadow of shadow work with previously nonexistent tasks. IT IS QUIXOTIC to oppose the winds of change.

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Skilled jobs of this kind require education and technical training. Their salaries are a distinct upgrade over pump-jockey pay. But to cash in on the opportunities, we must renew our educational establishment, gearing it to the kinds of expertise the emerging workplace rewards. Traditional education has not yet caught up with the information economy; nor has it taken into account the incoming surge of shadow work. Online learning and teaching innovations can help connect students with windows that are being opened—sometimes by shadow work. SHADOW WORK SAGA: The Don Quixote of the Oil Industry In the late 1940s, a maverick filling station owner named Bill Henderson lived in Winnipeg, the capital and largest city of the Canadian province of Manitoba.

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These are people like Michael Jordan in basketball, Warren Buffett in investing, Meryl Streep in film acting. (Of course, every field has its own pyramid. Warren Buffett’s poetry? Don’t ask. Ask Michael Jordan to sing, and you’ll be sorry—he wasn’t even that good at baseball. And don’t even think about Meryl Streep at quarterback.) Yet the populism of the information economy is leveling this classic pyramid. The Internet has melted the pyramid of expertise down to horizontal form—it is now more like a lake. That lake spreads out much wider than the pyramid ever did, opening reservoirs of knowledge to the masses. Consider lawyers. Laypeople have long viewed attorneys as professionals with trained expertise—and of course there are specialties within law, like torts, taxes, intellectual property, criminal law, and so on.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

While many dwellers in informal settlements crowd into minivan taxis or walk along busy roads to get to their jobs in occupations such as cleaning or domestic service, many others lack regular employment and make ends meet in the informal economy, selling street food, collecting rubbish, repairing clothing and in other ways contributing to the bustling local economies. These irregular and unprotected jobs represent over 50 per cent of all urban employment in developing economies.43 In cities like Kolkata in India, it is more than 80 per cent.44 While the informal economy is a major source of livelihood for both men and women, the majority of these jobs are taken up by women. Life in the informal economy is too often precarious. Sadly, some individuals are forced into prostitution or crime out of desperation.

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For example, in 2016 the government of Egypt began a five-year programme that successfully relocated roughly 850,000 people into subsidized social housing, and it has since set a further ambition to end all informal settlements by 2030.47 , 48 The programme, which has involved vast amounts of demolition and redevelopment, also has created numerous challenges. While the new housing areas may be a step up in terms of living conditions and access to basic services such as health and education, many of those relocated have been cut off from the communities and support groups they lived with and the livelihoods they generated from the informal economy or nearby workplaces.49 If relocated residents fail to find gainful employment, the risk is that these newly developed projects rapidly deteriorate into ghettos of concentrated poverty. The wrenching personal implications of these slum clearances is movingly described in Rohinton Mistry’s book A Fine Balance.

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.), Atlas of Cities (Princeton University Press). 39 Ibid. 40 Marx, B., et al., 2013, ‘The economics of slums in the developing world’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 27, No. 4. 41 Glaeser, E., 2011, Triumph of the City (Penguin). 42 Ibid. 43 International Labour Organization, 2018, ‘Women and men in the informal economy: a statistical picture’ (ilo.org). 44 WIEGO Statistics Database (wiego.org). 45 Samora, P., 2016, ‘Is this the end of slum upgrading in Brazil?’, The Conversation (theconversation.com). 46 Marx, et al., ‘The economics of slums in the developing world’. 47 Farouk, M., 2020, ‘Cautious hopes for slum dwellers relocated in Egypt housing project’, Reuters. 48 Daily News Egypt, 2021, ‘Egypt to be free from informal housing areas by 2030: Cabinet’. 49 Farouk, ‘Cautious hopes for slum dwellers relocated in Egypt housing project’. 50 de Soto, H., 2000, The Mystery of Capital (Basic Books). 51 Marx, et al., ‘The economics of slums in the developing world’. 52 Martine, G., et al., 2013, ‘Urbanization and fertility decline: cashing in on structural change’, IIED Human Settlements working paper. 53 Chandna, H., 2018, ‘The Rise of the Tycoon’, Business World. 54 Mahurkar, U., 2011, ‘A look into profile of billionaire Gautam Adani’, India Today. 55 Roser, M., 2017, ‘Fertility rate’, Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org). 56 O’Neill, ‘Total fertility rate in India, from 1880 to 2020’. 57 Roser, M., ‘Fertility rate’. 58 Irwin, D., 2020, ‘The rise and fall of import substitution’, Peterson Institute of International Economics (piie.com). 59 Little, I., et al., 1970, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Countries (OECD and Oxford University Press). 60 Ritchie, H. and Roser, M., 2021, ‘Crop yields’, Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org). 61 Hoeffler, A., et al., 2011, ‘Post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding’, World Bank (worldbank.org). 62 Gollin, D., et al., 2016, ‘Urbanization with and without industrialization’, Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 21. 63 World Bank Data, 2022, ‘Research and development expenditure (% of GDP)’ (data.worldbank.org). 64 Rodrik, D., 2022, ‘Prospects for global economic convergence under new technologies’, in Autor, D., et al.

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

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

Everyone is born with some labor, but not everyone is born with capital.”61 In the gig economy, the workers who are most likely to succeed are those who have social and financial capital. This work also has implications for the informal economy, defined as “those actions of economic agents that fail to adhere to the established institutional rules or are denied their protection.”62 Most informal-economy research is focused on illegal markets or examines developing or emerging economies.63 The concept of the informal economy originates with Keith Hart’s study of urban markets in Africa.64 Other researchers have studied informal work among the middle class, but with a focus on removing activities from economic exchange—for instance, individuals choosing to repair their own machines or mow their own grass in an effort to “maximize the efficient allocation of time.”65 Just like participants in the underground economy, workers in the gig economy—especially when paid as 1099 workers—are engaged in “informal economic activities [that] bypass the existing laws and regulatory agencies of the state.”66 Workers must trust that they will be paid and won’t be harassed or get injured on the job.

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———. 2017. “I Coined the Term ‘Sexual Harassment.’ Corporations Stole It.” New York Times, October 18. Farrell, Diana, and Fiona Greig. 2016. The Online Platform Economy: Has Growth Peaked? New York: JP Morgan Chase Institute. Feige, Edgar L. 1990. “Defining and Estimating Underground and Informal Economies: The New Institutional Economics Approach.” World Development 18(7):989–1002. Fermino, Jennifer. 2015. “Airbnb Taking Up 1 out of 5 Vacant Apartments in Popular New York City Zip Codes: Study.” New York Daily News, July 15. Fiegerman, Seth. 2014. “Kitchensurfing Raises $15 Million to Bring Private Chefs to Your Home.”

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Brussels: Fernand Nathan. Geron, Tomio. 2013. “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy.” Forbes, January 23. Gershon, Ilana. 2017. Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kindle edition. Gershuny, Jonathan. 1979. “The Informal Economy.” Futures 11(1):3–15. ———. 1985. “Economic Development and Change in the Mode of Provision of Services.” In Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistence, ed. N. Redclif and E. Mingione. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ghoshal, Raj, and S. Michael Gaddis. 2015. “Finding a Roommate on Craigslist: Racial Discrimination and Residential Segregation.”

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

Instead, it’s a top-down system that is concentrating wealth instead of spreading it. Unfortunately, the supposed “new rules” for this new economy aren’t very new. Rather than producing more jobs or prosperity, the Internet is dominated by winner-take-all companies like Amazon and Google that are now monopolizing vast swaths of our information economy. But why has this happened? How has a network designed to have neither a heart, a hierarchy, nor a central dot created such a top-down, winner-take-all economy run by a plutocracy of new lords and masters? Monetization In The Everything Store, his definitive 2013 biography of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Brad Stone recounts a conversation he had with Bezos about the writing of his book.

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But in contrast with Perkins, Frank, and Cook—whose observations about this emerging plutocracy are supported by the later research of many distinguished economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, and Thomas Piketty—didn’t celebrate this one percent, trickle-down economy. Frank and Cook argued that the new information economy was central in the creation of the new inequality. “Perhaps the most profound changes in the underlying forces that give rise to winner-take-all effects have stemmed from technological developments in two areas—telecommunications and electronic computing,” they argued.30 Scale is critical in an instantly global market like the Internet.

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AdWords and AdSense together represented what Levy calls a “cash cow” to fund the next decade’s worth of Web projects, which included the acquisition of YouTube and the creation of the Android mobile operating system, Gmail, Google+, Blogger, the Chrome browser, Google self-driving cars, Google Glass, Waze, and its most recent roll-up of artificial intelligence companies including DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, and Nest Labs.70 More than just cracking the code on Internet profits, Google had discovered the holy grail of the information economy. In 2001, revenues were just $86 million. They rose to $347 million in 2002, then to just under a billion dollars in 2003 and to almost $2 billion in 2004, when the six-year-old company went public in a $1.67 billion offering that valued it at $23 billion. By 2014, Google had become the world’s second most valuable company, after Apple, with a market cap of over $400 billion, and Brin and Page were the two wealthiest young men in the world, with fortunes of around $30 billion apiece.

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

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

We don’t want terrorists to be able to evade detection because they know exactly what Homeland Security agents are looking out for.12 But when every move we make is subject to inspection by entities whose procedures and personnel are exempt from even remotely similar treatment, the promise of democracy and free markets rings hollow. Secrecy is approaching critical mass, and we are in the dark about crucial decisions. Greater openness is imperative. Reputation, Search, Finance At the core of the information economy are Internet and finance companies that accumulate vast amounts of digital data, and with it intimate details of their customers’— our—lives. They use it to make important decisions about us and to influence the decisions we make for ourselves. But what do we know about them? A bad credit score may cost a borrower hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he will never understand exactly how it was calculated.

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As its customer base expanded, it forced its suppliers to accept ever smaller margins. Consumers had little loyalty to the sources of their shampoo, socks, and dog food; they were pleased to accept Walmart as the place to find ultracheap everything.155 Firms like Google and Apple are the Walmarts of the information economy.156 They aggressively scheme to restrict their own workers’ wages.157 They squeeze content producers (for whom making it on a big platform may mean everything), and habituate users to value the finding ser vice itself over the sources of the things found. The content contributors—the writers, musicians, fi lmmakers, artists, 86 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY historians, scholars, photographers, programmers, journalists, activists, cooks, sailors, manufacturers, yoga teachers, knitting gurus, auto mechanics, dog trainers, fi nancial advisers, Lego architects, and muckrakers in quest of whose output people use major internet platforms—may receive no share at all of the revenues that that vast user base occasions.

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Who are these people and these companies that wield so much power in our lives? What do we owe them? Are they really the Gandalfs of the digital world, wizards selflessly guiding us through digital brambles? Or is it time to reconsider some conventional views about technology, labor, and value in the information economy?161 Silicon Valley’s top managers are well educated and technically skilled, but they are not great sages. They hide behind corporate THE HIDDEN LOGICS OF SEARCH 87 operations so covert that their actual contributions are hard to assess, and it’s hard not to wonder whether other firms or other individuals might make more constructive use of their data than they do.

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

The jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the postindustrial economy an informational economy. The claim that modernization is over and that the global economy is today undergoing a process ofpostmodernization to- ward an informational economy does not mean that industrial pro- duction will be done away with or even that it will cease to play an important role, even in the most dominant regions ofthe globe. Just as the processes ofindustrialization transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes.

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As the proletariat is becoming the universal figure of labor, the object of proletarian labor is becoming equally universal. Social labor produces life itself. We should emphasize the central role that informational accumulation plays in the processes of postmodern primitive accumulation and the ever greater socialization of production. As the new informational economy emerges, a certain accumulation of information is necessary before capitalist production can take place. Information carries through its networks both the wealth and the command of production, disrupting previous conceptions of inside and outside, but also reducing the temporal progression that had previously defined primitive accumulation.

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The Detroit auto factory of the 1930s stood at the pinnacle ofthe global economy in the dominant position and producing the highest value; the 1990s auto factory, whether in Sa˜o Paulo, Kentucky, or Vladivostok, occupies a subor- dinate position in the global economy—subordinated to the high- value production ofservices. Today all economic activity tends to come under the dominance ofthe informational economy and to 288 P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N be qualitatively transformed by it. The geographical differences in the global economy are not signs ofthe co-presence ofdifferent stages ofdevelopment but lines ofthe new global hierarchy ofpro- duction. It is becoming increasingly clear from the perspective of subor- dinated regions that modernization is no longer the key to economic advancement and competition.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Once upon a time, this country, like every country, had a much larger informal economy. As wealthy countries transitioned from an agricultural economy to an industrial one, they regulated away most of the informal economy, which is now much smaller and hidden. Governments see the informal economy as unsafe, unreliable, and just plain chaotic. Productivity gains and the ensuing rise in standard of living came with the purchase of capital assets—machines, tools, factories—that only companies could afford. It made sense to favor this kind of productivity. Poor countries that still have a large informal economy strive to do the same in their central business districts, ridding their cities and economy of this uncontrollable blight and pushing the informal economy to the edges and slums, where it remains an important part of the total economy.

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Poor countries that still have a large informal economy strive to do the same in their central business districts, ridding their cities and economy of this uncontrollable blight and pushing the informal economy to the edges and slums, where it remains an important part of the total economy. The Peers Inc structure transforms the economic logic and this once-sound societal-benefits argument. Remember, platforms give individuals the power of the corporation at very affordable prices (often for free). Productivity and quality-of-life gains are now not necessarily achieved only through government support of the big and wealthy. Peers now have access to the means of production themselves. We don’t have to stifle the informal economy, because platforms organize, improve quality, and even self-regulate.

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

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

If self-employment (referred to as own-account production for small farming or sex workers, for example) grows in importance, or if a way can be found to cost externalities, national income will jump when the statisticians decide to include it. The Black Economy Gets into the SNA Something similar happens with the black or - to use the official euphemism - ‘informal' economy when countries decide that it has grown so large that they must start to include estimates of it in national accounting. Consider Italy, a ‘developed' country. The Group of 7 (G7), the international club of the biggest economies, estimates that in 2015 the informal economy made up 12.6 per cent of Italy's GDP.35 That calculation excludes illegal activities, which Italian statisticians decided to leave out of their GDP measures.

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Minsky, ‘The capital development of the economy and the structure of financial institutions' (1992), Hyman P. Minsky Archive, paper 179. 62. A. Barba and G. de Vivo, ‘An “unproductive labour” view of finance', Cambridge Journal of Economics 36(6) (2012): http://doi.org/10.1093/cje/ber022; Duncan K. Foley, ‘Rethinking financial capitalism and the “information” economy', Review of Radical Political Economics, 45(3) (2013), pp. 257-68: http://doi.org/10.1177/0486613413487154 2. VALUE IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: THE RISE OF THE MARGINALISTS 1. J. B. Clark, The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. v. 2.

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Wolff, Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity: An Analysis of the Postwar U.S. Economy (Cambridge: University Press, 1987). 15. T. Veblen, ‘The Limitations of marginal utility', Journal of Political Economy, 17(9) (1909), pp. 620-36. 16. See Foley, ‘Rethinking financial capitalism and the “information” economy' for further examples. 17. ‘entrepreneur ne faisant ni benefice ni perte'; Walras quoted in J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 860. 3. MEASURING THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 1. C. Busco, M. L. Frigo, P. Quattrone and A. Riccaboni, ‘Redefining corporate accountability through integrated reporting: What happens when values and value creation meet?'

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science by Paul Krugman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, declining real wages, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, new economy, Nick Leeson, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, trade route, very high income, working poor, zero-sum game

Perhaps the best way to describe the flawed vision of fin-de-siècle futurists is to say that, with few exceptions, they expected the coming of an “immaculate” economy—an economy in which people would be largely emancipated from any grubby involvement with the physical world. The future, everyone insisted, would bring an “information economy,” which would mainly produce intangibles; the good jobs would go to “symbolic analysts,” who would push icons around on computer screens; and knowledge rather than traditionally important resources like oil or land would become the main source of wealth and power. But even in 1996 it should have been obvious that this was silly. First, for all the talk of an information economy, ultimately an economy must serve consumers—and consumers don’t want information, they want tangible goods.

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If your answer was “Well, that was a cute story, but I don’t see what it can have to do with the U.S. economy,” you get a D. You have failed to understand the usefulness of simplified models in cutting through the complexity of the real world. If your answer was “What’s all this about? I want to talk about globalization and the new information economy, and he’s telling me about baby-sitting,” you get an F. Not only don’t you understand the uses of models, but you have fallen into the naive error of supposing that the way to be sophisticated about economics is to use big words and talk about big things. For the fact is that by studying our model—the baby-sitting co-op, which is like a miniature version of the real U.S. economy, in which Alan Greenspan controls the supply of coupons—we can gain some very important insights that many people who believe that they are knowledgeable about these things never do seem to grasp.

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As Marvin Minsky, one of the movement’s founders, despairingly remarked, “What people vaguely call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire.” And it takes common sense to deal with the physical world—which is why, even at the end of the twenty-first century, there are still no robot plumbers. Most important of all, the prophets of an “information economy” seem to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information will be a world in which information per se has very little market value. And in general when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less rather than more important.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

Those biological lines are as fast as hard-wired lines, if not faster. Nor was it for lack of information-transmission efficiency. Their metal proteins leave nothing to be desired in that respect. On the contrary, they are fit to be compared with tunnel diodes, as we shall see. More likely, the limitations of use were dictated by information economy. The genetic-information cost of lines made from metal protein isn’t low, but is affordable when the lines are a few hundred thousandths of a millimeter long. But long-distance lines are another matter. The manufacturing cost rises steeply with length, and for lines long enough for intercellular communication, it becomes prohibitive.

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This enables the system to perform many computations at a time—a very different operational mode from that of our technological computers, in which information is processed sequentially, one piece at a time. Parallel computation has its advantages. The most obvious is speed. That on its own must have tipped the scales of Evolution toward selection. But there is another, more basic advantage: information economy. Neuronal parallel computation is inherently cooperative, as the network units share the workload and information cost of computation. From our perch high on the evolutionary ladder, it is hard to see when exactly the parallel mode came into use. But it must have been early, for we find it in neuron systems everywhere, from worms to humans.

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The brain is not so much about consciousness as it is, and cannot escape being, about computing—and above all, parallel computing. To perform myriads of parallel computations is par for the course for its neuron web (chapter 14), and for this reason alone a quantum-coherent neuronal material would be a tremendous boon. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if Evolution, ever on the lookout for information economy, had come up with materials that stay quantum-coherent long enough for physiologically meaningful computations. Quantum computation is a natural for parallel computation and is the perfect information bargain. Quantum computation may not sound like much—it may give the impression of being just another method of computation.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Wikipedia, Signaling System #7, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_7 (as of Aug. 15, 2007, 15:00 GMT). 33. Harmon, supra note 31. 34. Id. 35. Sullivan, supra note 1. 36. Spafford, supra note 5, at 678—81. 37. Id. at 680. 38. Id. 39. Matt Blaze, Cryptography Policy and the Information Economy, WindowSecurity.com, Apr. 5, 2000, available athttp://windowsecuritycom/whitepapers/cryptography_Policy _and_the_Information_Economy.html. 40. Increases in computer crime have received attention from the hacker community. See Harmon, supra note 31; see also PEKKA HIMANEN & LINUS TORVALDS, THE HACKER ETHIC (2001); BRUCE STERLING, THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (2002), available at http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html; cf.

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This is a sampling of major Internet applications founded and groomed by outsiders; start sliding down what Wired editor Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail—niche applications for obscure interests– and we see a dominance of user-written software.34 Venture capital money and the other artifacts of the firm-based industrial information economy can kick in after an idea has been proven, and user innovation plays a crucial role as an initial spark. GENERATIVITY AND A BLENDING OF MODELS FOR INNOVATION Eric von Hippel has written extensively about how rarely firms welcome improvements to their products by outsiders, including their customers, even when they could stand to benefit from them.35 His work tries to persuade otherwise rational firms that the users of their products often can and do create new adaptations and uses for them—and that these users are commonly delighted to see their improvements shared.

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The same mode of life is a healthy excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or crushes all internal life.62 The generative Internet and PC allow more than technical innovation and participation as new services and software are designed and deployed. In addition, much of that software is geared toward making political and artistic expression easier. Yochai Benkler has examined the opportunities for the democratization of cultural participation offered by the Internet through the lens of liberal political theory: The networked information economy makes it possible to reshape both the “who” and the “how” of cultural production relative to cultural production in the twentieth century. It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative nonmarket production.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Many human beings acquire a data trail almost as soon as they appear in the world—and sometimes before. Once created, it can never be destroyed, only modified, added to, parts of it made more visible while others are suppressed. To become part of the social web, then, is to join the networks of surveillance, tracking, and data circulation that now support a vast informational economy and increasingly shape our social and cultural lives. Few aspects of contemporary life have gone unaffected by this shift, by the ability to publish immediately, freely, and to a massive audience. Shareability, and the drive to rack up likes and other metrics, guides the agendas of magazine editors and the budgets of marketers.

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As the Danish academic Anders Colding-Jørgensen argues: “We should no longer see the Internet as a post office where information is sent back and forth, but rather as an open arena for our identity and self-promotion—an arena that is a legitimate part of reality, just like our homes, workplaces and other social arenas in our society.” We’ve moved, he explains, from an information economy to an identity economy. This is a bit self-serving—commentators have developed no shortage of dubious new types of “economy,” from the “attention economy” to the “knowledge economy”—but Colding-Jørgensen is onto something. Our consumption of information online has shifted from purely utilitarian to an expression of the self.

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(They, too, might be watching, waiting to reward you for your free advertising. Plus, spreading taste is spreading influence.) Klout measures your constancy, recommending to users that they increase their “cadence” of tweets and their positivity in order to improve their scores. It may be boring and soulless, but how else to succeed in the information economy except by turning your persona into a more rarified form of data? DOES THIS ALGORITHM LIKE ME? Reputation and influence services play on our anxiety about being invisible on social networks or about being visible in the wrong ways. We don’t want to think that all that work is for nothing.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The subsequent lowering of import barriers delivered yet another blow, as cheap imports from the efficient but also highly subsidized agribusinesses in the United States drove down the price of corn and other products to the point where only the most efficient and affluent Mexican farmers could compete. Close to starvation, many peasants were forced off the land, only to augment the pool of unemployed in already overcrowded cities, where the so-called informal economy (for example street vendors) grew by leaps and bounds. Resistance to the ejido reform was, however, widespread, and several peasant groups supported the Zapatista rebellion that broke out in Chiapas in 1994.19 Figure 4.3 Employment in the major maquila sectors in Mexico in 2000 Source: Dicken, Global Shift.

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In 1970 or so investment in that field was on a par with the 25 per cent going into production and to physical infrastructures respectively, but, by 2000, IT accounted for around 45 per cent of all investment, while the relative shares of investment in production and physical infrastructures declined. During the 1990s this was thought to betoken the rise of a new information economy.7 It in fact represented an unfortunate bias in the path of technological change away from production and infrastructure formation into lines required by the market-driven financialization that was the hallmark of neoliberalization. Information technology is the privileged technology of neoliberalism.

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Unfortunately, that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties of status by way of good looks (in the case of women) or of material possessions. ‘I shop therefore I am’ and possessive individualism together construct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core. But for those who have lost their jobs or who have never managed to move out of the extensive informal economies that now provide a parlous refuge for most of the world’s disposable workers, the story is entirely different. With some 2 billion people condemned to live on less than $2 a day, the taunting world of capitalist consumer culture, the huge bonuses earned in financial services, and the self-congratulatory polemics as to the emancipatory potential of neoliberalization, privatization, and personal responsibility must seem like a cruel joke.

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

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

A lucky few will provide the anecdotal success stories we will hear about, but the vast majority will struggle to maintain anything approaching a middle-class lifestyle. As techno-visionary Jaron Lanier has pointed out, a great many people are likely to be forced into the type of informal economy that is found in third-world nations.11 Young adults who find the freedom of the informal economy alluring will quickly discover its drawbacks when they begin to think in terms of maintaining a home, raising children, or planning for retirement. Of course, there have always been people living at the fringes in the United States and other developed economies, but to some extent they free-ride on the wealth generated by a critical mass of middle-class households.

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And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.10 Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors employed hundreds of thousands more people. Beyond that core workforce, the industry also created millions of peripheral middle-class jobs in areas like driving, repairing, insuring, and renting cars. Of course, the Internet sector also offers peripheral opportunities. The new information economy is often touted as the great equalizer. After all, anyone can write a blog and run ads on it, publish an ebook, sell stuff on eBay, or develop an iPhone app. While these opportunities do indeed exist, they are dramatically different from all those solid middle-class jobs created by the automotive industry.

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The most prominent digital optimists typically live at the extreme left of the long tail—or, even better, they’ve perhaps founded a company that owns the entire distribution. In a PBS television special that aired in 2012, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was asked about the possibility of a “digital divide”—meaning that only a small percentage of the population will be able to thrive in the new information economy. Kurzweil dismissed the idea of such a divide and instead pointed to empowering technologies like mobile phones. Anybody with a smart phone, he said, “is carrying around billions of dollars of capability circa 20 or 30 years ago.”12 Left unsaid was how the average person is supposed to leverage that technology into a livable income.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Known as “muckrakers,” investigative journalists such as Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair exposed the underbelly of the industrial revolution, from monopolistic price gouging by the trusts to working conditions in slaughterhouses. Their work led to laws that reined in the worst excesses of the era. I believe that today we are at a similar turning point. As our nation shifts toward an information economy, there are few laws policing the booming industry giants and few governmental or nonprofit institutions with the technical savvy to police the information economy. And so it falls to today’s muckrakers—investigative journalists and conscientious objectors like Edward Snowden—to reveal the underbelly of the information revolution. I hope that once we see the abuses clearly, we will be able to find a way to restrain the excesses of the information age.

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But since the Federal Trade Commission is not empowered to easily write rules—unlike the Environmental Protection Agency—all Brill can do is encourage the data industry to regulate itself, unless the industry’s activities cross the line and violate more general laws, such as the FTC’s ban on “unfair and deceptive” practices. In an information economy, we probably need an Information Protection Agency that is empowered to police the information economy, with a particular focus on bringing transparency and accountability to data handling and usage. * * * But just creating an Information Protection Agency is not going to be enough to police government surveillance or to remedy the plight of people like Gulet Mohamed.

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But it is an attempt to carve a middle path between those who ask us to hand over all our data and “get over it,” and those who suggest that we throw our body on the tracks in front of the speeding train that is our data economy. Nobody, including me, wants to give up on all the benefits of our information economy—with its magical maps and facts at our fingerprints and the ability to connect with anyone in the world in an instant. But nor should any of us simply give up all of our data without any assurances that it will not come back to bite us. We didn’t shut down the industrial economy to stop pollution.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It is a place that attracts the super-rich who want to consume the finest things the metropolis can offer, and the very poor who struggle to stay alive. In the coming decades the slums of the world are set to become the fastest-growing regions; these are often places of desperation, without resources, water and security as well as the precariousness of the informal economy. The metropolis is also the place on the front line of the climate-change debate. Cities take more than 2 per cent of the earth’s surface but use at least 80 per cent of all energy. If we cannot make our cities more sustainable, they could easily become our coffin rather than our ark. Most importantly, as I watch the people walking up and down the High Line, sitting and chatting on benches, taking off their shoes and dipping their feet into the shallow pools, young toddlers giggling as they splash about until their clothes are soaked, I am reminded how cities can affect us, individually and as a group – and perhaps even make us better people.

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According to a report by the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, Dharavi contains 5,000 industrial units producing garments, pottery, leather and steel goods as well as a further 15,000 single-room factories. It is a place of extraordinary industry and produces almost $500 million in revenue every year. This is proof of the power of the informal economy or what the journalist Robert Neuwirth calls ‘System D’. It is economic activity that is rarely recognised by governments, economists or business leaders, but is at the heart of developing communities like Dharavi. As Neuwirth writes, System D is ‘the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy … off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and more often avoiding income tax.’10 It is estimated that today System D includes 1.8 billion people worldwide; and by 2020 will include two-thirds of all workers globally.

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As Neuwirth writes, System D is ‘the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy … off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and more often avoiding income tax.’10 It is estimated that today System D includes 1.8 billion people worldwide; and by 2020 will include two-thirds of all workers globally. If it was possible to calculate the total income generated from the informal economy into a single figure it would represent the second-largest nation in the world. With such sums it is foolish to think of what occurs in places such as Dharavi as outside the system. For the vast number of people around the world it is the only system available, as Neuwirth notes: ‘It makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability or globalisation without reckoning with System D.’11 When 65 per cent of all Mumbaikar live their lives within System D it is ludicrous to continue to pretend that this is an invisible marketplace, somehow less important than the business of the neighbouring Bandra Kurla Complex.

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

It also provides specific information valuation models and adapts key economic principles to help you begin quantifying and maximizing the benefits of your information assets. Figure 1.2 Infonomics—Monetize Information The Possibilities of Information Monetization Let’s dispel the notion right away that information monetization (Figure 1.2) is just about selling your data. It’s much broader than that. In today’s information economy we see a range of possibilities: information is used as legal tender (or at least in place of legal tender in many kinds of transactions); information most certainly is used to generate a profit—and not just by Google, Facebook, and the rest of the digerati, but by just about every business in every industry today with even just a copy of Excel—and information is regularly converted into money by a growing marketplace of household-name data brokers such as ACNielsen, Bloomberg, and Equifax, and by upstarts like Tru Optik, AULIVE, and hundreds (perhaps thousands) of others.

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Not much, according to Tom Linsmeier, retiring board member of Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), who said: “[T]he current accounting model fails to provide much information on most internally developed intangible assets, resulting in an often-increasing market to book ratio for these organizations and leaving users with little financial reporting information to make their valuation assessments.”5 Irrespective of what accountants say or do, Linsmeier told me, “Accounting standards boards should be asking for an increased disclosure of internally-generated assets.”6 Here we are in the midst of the Information Economy, and the eponymous major source of value in that economy is considered valueless by the custodians of what constitutes value! Throughout the next few chapters, we will explore what constitutes an asset from the perspectives of the accounting profession and the law, and uncloak the increasingly sticky matter of whether information is something that can be owned.

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Now, five or six decades since the beginning of the Information Age, the namesake of this age, and the major asset driving today’s economy, is still not considered an accounting asset. Somewhat ironically, while information is at the crux of accounting and has been for millennia, even in today’s information economy it is not something accounted for itself. However, there is some movement on the issue. Both FASB and IAS recently have issued discussion papers for open comment, and have met on the topic of how to recognize, value, and report internally generated intangibles. Presumably these include information assets as well.2324 But even after laborious discussions, over 15 years after the accounting gentry were called before the U.S.

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

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

Intangible assets can be benign in origin and may include a trusted brand name, intellectual capital that results from research and development (R&D) spending, organizational capital that results from an efficient structuring of production and management, or the human capital of key employees. But another source of intangible assets is government-created barriers to entry or special subsidies. The increase in Tobin’s Q surely reflects the increasing relative importance of intangible productive assets in the post-industrial information economy, but it may also be a warning sign of an increase in rent-seeking. Meanwhile, it appears that many US industries are growing increasingly concentrated. Between 1997 and 2012, the share of total industry revenue accounted for by the 50 biggest firms in that industry rose in three-fourths of the broad nonfarm business sectors tracked by the Census Bureau.

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As a result, the number of patents issued annually by the US Patent and Trademark Office has increased almost fivefold, from 61,620 in 1983 to 109,414 10 years later, to 186,591 another decade later, to 302,150 in 2013.1 Until the 1970s, intellectual property was a sleepy little backwater of American law. The benefits of IP protection may have been modest, but so were the costs. Since then, the scale and complexity of IP law have exploded even as, with the rise of the information economy, the relative importance of IP-intensive industries has soared. From entertainment to software to pharmaceuticals, leading sectors of the US economy now operate in a much more densely regulated world than they did before the election of Ronald Reagan, which we usually think of as ushering in an era of deregulation.

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The decade prior to the passage of the act saw the development of only ten new drugs for treating rare diseases; in the decade that followed, the number jumped to 200.9 The evidentiary record on patents is thus mixed. Some findings describe positive effects, yes, but there is no convincing confirmation that patent systems as a whole work as intended. Overall, we find ourselves agreeing with the assessment offered nearly 60 years ago by the economist Fritz Machlup, a pioneer in the study of the emerging information economy. “If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one,” Machlup wrote. “But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it.”10 Patent protection’s muddled track record shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

You regularly cross the Hudson River for dinner on the town—and entrust your health to New York restaurant regulators. You drive through a tunnel and count on highway safety as regulated by New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles. But out-of-staters cannot buy insurance there. Ask yourself this: Who are those laws protecting? These geographic limitations also subvert the promise of the information economy. Let’s say someone in Wyoming develops a pink lump under the skin on his forearm. He doesn’t know that it’s an aggressive skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma, which strikes only 1,200 Americans per year. Chances are, the local radiologist in Cheyenne, Cody, or Detroit, for that matter, has never seen such a lump.

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And they’re engaged in radical and unusual behavior. They’re busy making money in health care by building something new and appealing to shoppers. For me, they’re much like the wildcatters who stormed to fortunes in oil, and the hackers, like the Steve Jobs, who outraced the staid leaders of technology and helped to build a new information economy. These people, to quote Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial, are the “crazy ones.” These crazy ones are committed to health and their patients, of course, but I’ve noticed that most of them don’t mind talking about money. It’s a subject that is broached only in hushed tones and inscrutable bills in the great research hospitals.

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If an app is successful, our service grows richer, the entrepreneur makes money—and we keep a slice of the revenue. Win-win-win. These entrepreneurs, I should add, have chosen a rough road. Plenty of tech visionaries, from AOL’s Steve Case to the leaders of Google, have attempted to colonize the hostile health care information economy, and have retreated, battered and bruised. Even when selling to enterprises, there are few buyers in health care, and their purchasing decisions often appear to defy reason. Ideas have to percolate through layers of bureaucracy. There are meetings, and lots of questions. Can it be incorporated into our legacy IT system?

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Prior to the pandemic, more than a fifth of the population lived below the poverty line, with around 14.5 percent in extreme poverty (that is, on less than $1.90 per day). Moreover, around 89 percent of Bangladesh’s workforce was employed in the informal economy, toiling as daily wage laborers, self-employed persons, piece-rate workers (who get paid per item made regardless of how long it takes), other hired labor, and unpaid family labor. In cities such as Dhaka, the informal economy is characterized by multitudes of rickshaw and cart pullers, head-loaders, construction workers, barbers, cobblers, garbage collectors, waste recyclers, and street vendors of vegetables, fruits, and meats.

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The government also tested people at a higher rate per capita than anywhere else in Latin America.81 After nearly two decades of impressive economic growth, Peru had resources its neighbors did not, and it quickly rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic relief packages. Aid not only aimed to keep businesses afloat and people on official payrolls but also targeted the poor and workers in the informal economy with cash transfers. The government initially provided approximately 7 billion soles (1.1 percent of GDP) in direct transfers to support vulnerable households during the lockdown, and in late July it approved an additional cash transfer of 6.4 billion soles (0.9 percent of GDP).82 In other words, Peru seemed to do a lot of things right.

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“They are earning day to day and working in difficult conditions.”89 Moreover, many Peruvians not technically considered poor still worked in highly precarious circumstances. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, about 54 percent of the labor force works in street sales, small retail shops, part-time construction, domestic work, and other jobs in the informal economy. In Peru prior to the pandemic, that number was nearly 70 percent.90 “The government’s [lockdown] strategy works for the 30 percent of Peru that is employed in the formal sector, that’s been growing economically,” Iván Hidalgo Romero, academic director at the Institute of Government and Public Management in Lima, observes.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/in-indian-slum-misery-work-politics-and-hope.html 4. Burman, Abheek. 25 October 2013. ‘Informal workers, making up 90% of workforce, won’t get a good deal till netas notice them’. Economic Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-10-25/news/43395491_1_neelkanth-mishra-india-fall-informal-economy 5. 28 September 2013. ‘India’s Informal Economy. Hidden Value’. Economist. http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21586891-activities-out-sticks-may-add-more-gdp-was-thought-hidden-value 6. Dr G. Rajan, Raghuram, Governor, Reserve Bank of India. 11 December 2013. Talk at the Delhi Economics Conclave titled ‘Financial Sector Reforms’.

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How can government primary healthcare centres and hospitals deploy technology in a similar way? The gap between dreams and reality Rayappa Pitkekar is a forty-eight-year-old leatherwork contractor in Mumbai’s Dharavi locality; its status as one of the world’s largest slums belies the fact that its flourishing informal economy boasts a turnover of over Rs 30 billion annually,8 thanks to the enterprising spirit of Pitkekar and his ilk. The son of a garbage picker who earned Rs 1.25 a day digging through trash to salvage plastic for reuse by the local plastic industry, Pitkekar studied by day and then worked two jobs, earning Rs 5 for every 100 newspapers he sold in local trains in the evening and then working in a hotel at night.

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Lurking in the shadows: India’s parallel economy Mumbai’s Dharavi locality is a place of staggering contrasts. With its narrow byways and tumbledown tenements teeming with people, at first glance it lives up to its title of ‘Asia’s largest slum’. Beyond the clichés, however, Dharavi is an economic boom town, the beating heart of India’s informal economy, generating anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion worth of output annually.3 Viral was given a tour of Dharavi by the local branch manager of the Indian Overseas Bank. Despite having grown up in Mumbai, Viral had never set foot in the area; he was amazed by what he saw. Crammed into a warren of tiny rooms and sheds were factories churning out savoury chivda and other teatime snacks, workshops producing fine leather goods, an ice-cream manufacturing plant and a garment factory making T-shirts that were exported to Saudi Arabia and other countries—and this was just a sample.

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

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

In Indonesia and Uruguay, taxi and motorcycle taxi drivers, including those working through gig economy platforms, are covered by social insurance through payments via an online application.8 Formalization, or bringing workers onto the books, would have further benefits, including the improvement of working conditions of those in the informal economy. What these examples illustrate is that public pensions can be provided even to those in the informal economy. Several additional reforms of existing pension systems could also provide more security in old age. First, with increased job mobility, pension portability—as is the case with health care—is important, and legislation has to ensure such portability.

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In many countries, it will be important to raise minimum wages and/or to supplement the incomes of low-wage earners. ■ A new problem that Europe has to confront is the emergence of precarious jobs, like those involved in the so-called gig economy. ■ In many countries, there has been an erosion of labor standards. Standards have to be raised and programs designed to bring the informal economy onto the books. ■ Europe has suffered from excesses of long-term unemployment and high rates of youth unemployment. Active labor market policies can help move these individuals into jobs, provided enough jobs are available. ■ More broadly, the state may have to actively intervene in labor markets to provide employment.

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While some countries have increased the number of labor inspectors, as is the case with France, Poland, and Spain, recent surveys show that the majority of European countries have reduced their number of labor inspectors because of budget cuts and austerity measures.9 The result is that enforcement has been uneven, which has resulted in a growing informal economy with precarious working conditions. Labor standards will not be consistently respected unless there is effective enforcement. Several reforms are needed: ■ Strengthen labor inspection mechanisms, increase funding for enforcement, carry out unannounced on-site inspections, raise penalties for violations of labor standards, and increase numbers of inspection staff, at least to meet the target recommended by the International Labour Organization (one inspector for every 10,000 workers)

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

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

Rinaldi’s research further concluded that in these circumstances the European economy would grow by an additional 9 basis points because moving to electronic money would shrink the cash-based ‘shadow economy’. I’m sure she’s right. When the Proton ‘electronic purse’ (e-purse) was launched in Belgium a decade ago, I recall a number of people at the time saying that one of the reasons for the poor usage figures was the size of the country’s informal economy. Time to scrap metal There’s a thing that economists call ‘the big problem of small change’. In essence, there’s a problem because it’s hard to make a living out of producing small change, so no one does it (Sargent and Velde 2002). The state therefore has to do it, delivering the token money that is supported by law.

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I agree with Keohane, though, when he says that this should at most mean we keep some coins and low-value notes. There is no need to print $100 bills or €500 notes for these purposes. Addressing that big problem of small change again, I think we should look to the future and find alternative ways to obtain inclusion. We need alternatives to cash to reach everyone, whether in the formal or informal economy, and (and this will have implications when we discuss privacy later) without moral censure. Douglas McWilliams entertainingly set this out in his Gresham College lecture on the Italian black economy (McWilliams 2014), explaining how Italy decided to revise its GDP calculations back in 1987 in order to obtain membership of what is now the G8 by including estimates for its ‘black economy’ in the figures.

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

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Illich considered that economic conditions, foremost among these being those in the employment situation, undermined ‘the conditions necessary for a convivial life’.16 Partly in response to this critique, Robertson develops a concept he calls ‘ownwork’ – ‘activity which is purposeful and important, and which people organize and control for themselves’ – only part of which is in the formal economy.17 He argues for the revival of the informal economy and the encouragement of ‘home-grown’ local economies, along with local self-reliance and the expansion of the third sector. ‘Ownwork’ is explained by reference to a quotation from Khalil Gibran, ‘You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession that marches in majesty towards the infinite.’18 Robertson’s argument for moving from employment to ownwork is partly economic – ‘because the development of productive and useful work in the local and household sectors will reduce the present dependency of localities and households on jobs provided by the large-scale manufacturing and service sectors of the economy, as well as on goods and services purchased from these sectors or provided by them at public expense’ – and partly psychological.

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As Henderson argues, a sustainable economy requires ‘the rise of worker-owned, self-managed enterprises, and of bartering, self-help, and mutual aid’.25 Such an economy can provide satisfying 64 GREEN ECONOMICS work and rewarding lifestyles but ‘simply cannot provide support for [the] enormous pyramided capital structures and huge overheads’ associated with the late capitalist economy. Greening production and distribution One of the lessons of green economics is that much of what we use in our everyday lives need not have come from a production process of the formal economy at all. Robertson coined the term ‘informal’ economy to describe the work we have traditionally done, unpaid, to provide for our needs and those of others close to us. This economic sector is increasingly squeezed as the market takes over more areas of our lives, so that children are sent to nurseries rather than being looked after by their grandmothers or neighbours, and we eat ready meals rather than cooking for our families or sharing meals with friends.

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Greens favour a system of ‘ownwork’ where people are more in control of their own time and reject the alienating form of work that has developed under industrial capitalism. The move towards a sustainable economy will also require a considerable degree of reskilling and more labour-intensive forms of skilled employment such as in mending and repairing. A green economy would have a wider role for the informal economy and for cooperative and community-based systems of mutual support; this is in contrast to sucking ever more areas of our lives into the market. Several green economists have been inspired by medieval economics, including the concept of the ‘just price’ and the organization of production through craft-based guilds.

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

They are all very well documented, so these descriptions should be great starting points for further research. 12 Anarchism in the Collaboratory Anarchist theory provides some of the background for our framing of autonomy and self organization. This is recapitulated by Yochai Benkler, one of the leading modern theorists of open collaboration, in his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom: “The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

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In a free cooperation, all members of the cooperation are free to quit, to give limits or conditions for its cooperative activity in order to influence the rules according to their interests; they can do this at a price that is similar and bearable for all members; and the members really practice it, individually and collectively.” —Christoph Spehr, The Art of Free Cooperation Ownership In the industrial information economy the outputs are owned by the company that produces them. Copyrights and patentable inventions produced by employees are transferred to the corporate owner, either directly or via the ‘work for hire’ doctrine, which treats the acts of individuals as extensions of the employers will. Collaborations amongst small groups o en use similar proprietary methods to control the benefits arising from their outputs, but parcel out ownership amongst collaborators.

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Nations and corporations have long term interests and the resources that will probably keep them in the picture long a er the networked effort will evaporate. These are brave yet very early experiments in new political association. They are widely informed by experiments in collaboration and control in information economies. Most of them will not automatically translate to meat space. Especially at times of natural disaster, when food and medicine shortage occupies much of the human rights debate. Open Leaders Failing Forward The abundance of information technologies have also lowered the price of failure and made it an inherent part of the process.

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

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

He also realizes that a Communications Commons will remain elusive if tied to a proprietary infrastructure. In the last few pages of his eloquent book The Wealth of Networks, Benkler argues that if future generations are to enjoy the immense benefits that come with a networked information economy, it will be necessary to create a common infrastructure. He writes: To flourish, a networked information economy rich in social production practices requires a core common infrastructure, a set of resources necessary for information production and exchange that are open for all to use. This requires physical, logical, and content resources from which to make new statements, encode them for communication, and then render and receive them.1 No disagreement here.

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Lawrence Summers, U.S. secretary of the treasury during President Bill Clinton’s administration and former president of Harvard University, and J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, revisited the capitalist dilemma in a joint paper delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s symposium, “Economic Policy for the Information Economy,” in August 2001. This time, there was much more at stake as the new information technologies and the incipient Internet communication revolution were threatening to take the capitalist system to a near zero marginal cost reality in the coming decades. Summers and DeLong’s concerns focused on the emerging data-processing and communication technologies.

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John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (Project Gutenberg eBook, 2011), 358–74, http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-essaysinpersuasion/keynes-essaysinpersuasion-00-h.html (accessed January 23, 2013). 8. Ibid. 9. J. Bradford Delong and Lawrence H. Summers, “The ‘New Economy’: Background, Historical Perspective, Questions and Speculations,” Economic Policy for the Informational Economy (2001): 16. 10. Ibid., 35. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 16, 38. 17. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 18. Isaac Asimov, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian, August 1970, 9. 19.

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Another reason was the restrictive immigration policies applied elsewhere in Northern Europe, particularly France, which made Spain a more attractive alternative for North Africans in particular. It gained a reputation because of the relative ease of entry and the abundant job opportunities in either the formal or informal economy available to work-seeking migrants (Martı́nez Viega 1999). Meanwhile, additional obstacles to entering the United States encouraged ever greater numbers of Latin Americans to select Spain as an alternative destination. For others, like the Argentines, the pressure to emigrate was enhanced by the dire economic conditions in their country.

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Spain’s economy is notable for the large number of small businesses and the high quotient of the selfemployed. This means that employment opportunities still occur predominantly in the lowskilled jobs and in small, family-run firms. It explains why employers look to foreign labor, despite the existence of a pool of educated jobless native workers. The second is the existence of a large informal economy, estimated by the European Employment Observatory to have reached around 22 percent of GNP (EEO 2004), that provides an access route into employment, albeit often of the temporary and low-paid variety. Among Spaniards, only a small number of the pool of the young unemployed are forced to accept any type of work in order to survive because they live at home, where there is already usually at least one breadwinner.

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Tsadanidis (eds.), Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, pp. 253–276. Azurmendi, M. (2001), ‘‘Inmigración y conflicto en el Ejido,’’ Claves de Razón Práctica, 116, pp. 8–17. 151 Baldwin-Edwards, M., & Arango, J. (eds.), (1999), Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe, London: Frank Cass. Castellanos, M. L., & Pedreño, A. (2001), ‘‘Desde El Ejido al accidente de Lorca,’’ Sociologia del Trabajo, 42, pp. 3–31. Chislett, W. (2005), Inside Spain 9. Madrid: Real Instituto Elcano. Colectivo IOE, Angel del Prado, M., Actis, W., Pereda, C., & Pérez Molina, R. (1998), Labour Market Discrimination against Migrant Workers in Spain, Geneva: International Labour Organization.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

The bottom line is, a large population in China is suffering, not just from the virus but from the resulting isolation, high uncertainty, anxiety and stress, reduced resources and freedom for daily living, and loss of income. And the point on income really should be considered. With weak social protection in China, in conjunction with the estimate of 60% of labour engaged in the informal economy in Asian and Pacific developing countries, lack of employment benefits and protection renders people extremely vulnerable to crises, such as the current one. There would have been social outcries if this happened in any other Western country, but just because there isn’t an outcry in China doesn’t make its people lesser people who shouldn’t be treated any less.

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Another constraint was an acute shortage of health workers, while yet another consisted of the large communities living in slums with no possibility for physical distancing. The government’s sudden enforcement of lockdown also disadvantaged already vulnerable populations. There was a mass exodus of migrant workers, and concerns rose about starvation among those who worked in the informal economy. Implementing public health measures is always difficult in places with overcrowded living conditions and inadequate hygiene and sanitation. Non-COVID-19 health services have been disrupted. The pandemic was also used to fan anti-Muslim sentiment and violence after a gathering linked to the group Tablighi Jamaat was identified as the source of a large cluster of cases.

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

And as labor became a powerful economic force, a large working population became more valuable. This idea of population as an asset rather than a burden has especially gained currency with the rise of knowledge-based industries such as IT, telecommunications and biotechnology in the 1970s. In fact the information economy is the culmination of what the Industrial Revolution started—it has placed human capital front and center as the main driver of productivity and growth. I do shy away, however, from unbridled optimism—that would be almost as bad as the previous mood of relentless pessimism on population growth.

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Transmitting information about a price shock around a certain crop from the central markets to the outlying rural areas can sometimes take months. As a result farmers in India find out about a price collapse too late, often after the planting season. For these farmers, IT is not just access to the information economy—it is their only access to it, and a critical, life-changing one. The demand for IT has consequently grown dramatically across rural India, and rural IT-based services led by the private sector have soared in recent years. Sriram Raghavan’s Internet community centers and kiosks, for instance, offer low-cost computing and networking services across villages, and ITC’s 7000 e-Choupal centers allow farmers to check commodity prices and sell crops online.

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Purchasing crop futures on the exchange is also giving them some insight into the potential price volatility of their crops and helps them make their planting decisions accordingly. From being virtually cut off, India’s farmers are now moving, in a single leap, from third-world infrastructure into the information economy. The exchange is now expanding its efforts to reach farmers by putting up price tickers on rural bus stops. It has also tied up with Reliance Communications to transmit voice-enabled information on crop prices over the company’s CDMA network, which now covers more than half of India’s rural areas.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Her intense interest in these deep processes was aroused in the 1970s when, as a young researcher, she was studying the oil industry, then and still today of critical importance for her own native country, Venezuela. In trying to explain the causes and consequences of the so-called OPEC crisis of 1973, she became convinced that the global economy had begun a long-term transition from a mass-production economy based on cheap oil to an ‘information economy’ based on cheap micro-electronics. The arrival of the microprocessor – a ‘computer on a chip’ – served as a ‘big-bang’ announcing this probability and she was able to develop her theory at this time through a period of postgraduate research in California – a state which was already then at the forefront of the Information Revolution.

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It is the time depicted by Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, by Friedrich Engels and Thorstein Veblen; the time when the rich get richer with arrogance and the poor get poorer through no fault of their own; when part of the population celebrates prosperity and the other portion (generally much larger) experiences The Turbulent Ending of the Twentieth Century 5 outright deterioration and decline. It is certainly a broken society, a two-faced world. But while the poor can usually see the conspicuous consumption of the ostentatious members of the new ‘leisure class’, to these, the poor are often hidden from view. In the globalized world of the information economy, this is all the more true, given that the cleavage between the excessively rich and the extremely poor is basically international. Were it not for satellite TV and mass illegal migrations, the invisibility could be almost total. When the financial breakdown comes, the party is over and the time comes for analyzing what went wrong and how it can be prevented from happening again.

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Worse still, when changes are made that suit the flourishing of the new technologies, the situation for those not modernized becomes even more difficult. Figure 4.3 shows how Business Week saw the US economy gradually decoupling from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, differentiating the ‘high-tech’ sector, belonging to the so-called information economy, from the rest. Figure 4.3 Decoupling of the system: the differing performance of the ‘hightech’ sector and the rest of the economy in the USA, 1989–96 NON SUPERVISORY AND PRODUCTION WORKERS DATA BUREAU OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS BUSINESS WEEK ©BW Source: Mandel (1997) Reprinted from the March 31, 1997 issue of Business Week, Latin American Edition, by special permission, copyright © 1997 by McGraw-Hill.

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

These issues will be as much a part of the subject matter of this book as the strictly economic issue of whether "skilled biased technological change" can account for the recent stagnation of most U.S. incomes. Nonetheless, the analysis of this relationship and its impact on the behavior of real wages and benefits can provide a precise measurement of how the information economy affects the lives of most Americans, which may be why so many leading economists have paid so much attention to the subject. Perhaps the most convincing way to demonstrate a causal link between "skilled biased technological change" and the stagnation of wages and benefits is to provide case histories of industries and groups of industries, each documenting the links in the causal chain with detailed and conclusive statistical evidence.

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But what sparks the front line is the obvious obsession for doing it right, making it right for the customer."3 In sober language more appropriate to a leading theorist of the Harvard Business School, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has also stressed the importance of CRM. With the shift from an industrial to an information economy "more people hold jobs involving human contact." These workers "must influence, affect, or satisfy other people, often in direct interactions in which they look customers in the eye or listen to their voices." These employees "are performing emotional work, not just technical work." The quality of the emotional experience in these human exchanges "often determines organizational success."4 However, no endorsement or promotion of CRM is likely to carry more weight than the one given by Bill Gates in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought: More than anything, though, a company has to communicate with its customers and act on what it learns in that communication.

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Since the eventual goal of redesigning a process is to create one that better meets customer needs, it is critical that the team truly understand these needs.7 Estimates of total employment in call centers vary from a low of 3.5 million, or 2.6 percent of the nation's workforce, to a possible high of 6 million. By comparison, there are 11 million production workers in all of manufacturing. The New Tork Times has estimated that there are at least 60,000 call centers in the United States.8 The corporate call center has become an enduring image of the information economy: a vast, football-field-sized space in which many hundreds of employees work, each enclosed within his or her cubicle, each equipped with telephone headset and computer screen. These are the "customer-facing" employees who, in the words of one report on the call center industry, act as the corporation's "voice to customers ... the frontline warriors in the battle for customer loyalty."9 Three strands of technology come together within the confines of the call center.

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

The farmers, hawkers, traders, nomads, artisans, repairmen, con men, day laborers, truckers, and metal bashers who help make most African economies tick generally work outside the taxed economy and largely beyond the purview of national statisticians. One of the basic tenets of our economies is that, if you can’t put a dollar sign against it, it doesn’t exist, but much of what makes Africa go round economically is invisible. The night-light method has been used to gain a better understanding of the massive informal economy in India, a country of 1.3 billion people where more than 90 percent of the working population toils outside the formal sector. One could theoretically ask electricity companies how much power they sell in each district. But satellite imagery provides a more accurate picture, since official figures don’t count small off-grid schemes powered by solar or hydro.

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Benjamin Muchiri, a senior official at Kenya’s National Bureau of Statistics, says his office has tried theoretical exercises to work out the imputed value of non-marketed activities from the draft power of oxen working in the fields to the transport provided by camels. You could, say, compare the oxen to tractors and the camels to journeys by motorcycle taxi. One might even count the cow dung used to line the walls of huts as self-produced building material. Including or excluding parts of the informal economy can make a big difference. In 2009 a study was made of milk, using data gathered in that year’s population census. This concluded that national income statistics for 2009 underestimated the economic contribution of milk by about twenty times. It also found that the total contribution of “ruminant livestock”—including cows, goats, and camels—was nearly $2 billion more than was captured in official statistics, no small discrepancy in an economy nominally worth only $37 billion.9 It estimated that 80 percent of beef consumed in Kenya was produced by pastoralists, including the Maasai, about a fifth of which was walked over the border from neighboring countries.

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He had to rely on figures from the notoriously corrupt petroleum industry and port authorities about the amount of oil produced and the volume of goods shipped. The suspicion was always that the official figures underestimated the real amount, creating the scope to skim off revenue at source. The informal economy was so vast and unknowable, Kale says, that even after the 89 percent jump, he suspected he was still underestimating it. Technically, Kale was being asked to conduct what national accountants call a rebasing exercise. When countries calculate their national income they do so in relation to a base year, which serves as a reference point.

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Castells reproposes the theory according to which industrial competitiveness does not depend on cheap labor, but on access to technology and information. From this viewpoint, the “Third World” no longer exists, being replaced by the countries of East Asia that have industrially developed and by the emergence of a “Fourth World” characterized by its inability to access the “information economy” and its consequent economic marginalization (“The Informational Economy and the New International Division of Labor,” 2239). According to Castells’s analysis, almost all of Africa and South America, and a good part of Asia, fall into this “Fourth World” (35-39). But the magnitude of the populations involved does not prevent him from maintaining that the work done by them is irrelevant for the objectives of the world economy and capital accumulation. 9.

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University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993. Castegnaro, Alessandro. “La Rivoluzione occulta dell’assistenza agli anziani: le aiutanti domiciliari.” Studi Zancan, 2 (2002). Castells, Manuel. The End of Millennium: The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. _____. “The Informational Economy and the New International Division of Labor.” In The New Global Economy in the Information Age, edited by Martin Carnoy, et al., 15-45. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993. Chandler, Michael Alison. “When a Kid Becomes the Caregiver.” Washington Post, August 25, 2007.

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Until the economic crises of the 1980s, the cities of the developing world were dominated by an elite core of lifelong jobs backed by a few low-paying service jobs. Now, this world has exploded into small constellations of permanent employees dwarfed by a galaxy of informal work: small, unlicensed shops or street-vending sites; services, including domestic work and transportation; or short-term work in building and small manufacturing. The informal economy, previously considered a parasitic irrelevance on the edge of the “main” industrial economy, now represents a quarter of all jobs in post-communist countries, a third in North Africa, half in Latin America, 70 percent in India, and more than 90 percent in the poorest African countries.2 It is a form of labor that is often less secure and that offers none of the social-security benefits or long-term guarantees of industrial work—but, to its immense benefit, it is a form of work that is available to almost everyone who comes to the city.

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THE ARRIVAL CITY IN THE POST-MIGRATION NATION The presence of a Central American peasant, like Mario Martinez, in Los Angeles, or a family of Bangladeshi villagers, like the Tafaders, in the East End of London, strikes many people as an aberration, an artifact of the past or a political mistake. In this age of border controls, high-technology information economies, and selective immigration policies, we often think there should be no reason to have large masses of the developing world’s rural poor forming enclaves in the cities of the West. In many western European countries, in Canada, the United States, and Australia, governments respond to the arrival city not by making it function better but by trying to pretend that village-origin migration won’t happen or can be permanently stopped or filtered out.

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The residents of arrival cities do not consider themselves “the poor” but rather successful urbanites who happen to be passing through a period of poverty, perhaps for a generation.5 The arrival city, if it is to function at all, must create members of a middle class: Families with enough earnings and savings to start businesses and employ others, to own and improve dwellings, to send children to university, to have a sustainable quality of life capable of moving them, and their neighbors, beyond merely surviving. An arrival-city middle class is important for a number of reasons. It creates social and political stability, because the middle class ties the neighborhood to the institutions of the wider city and thereby opens a pathway to something other than crime, marginal informal-economy employment, and dependency. The presence of an arrival-city middle class shows new arrivals and their children that the process of migration is not a journey into perpetual injustice, that sustainable prosperity is available to those willing to study and invest. It tends to generate employers and political leaders within the arrival city, improving the quality of life for others.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

For much of U.S. history, and in many ways still, it has been legal to discriminate against transgender people. As a result, transgender people are more likely to face job, food, and housing insecurity. They sometimes have few options for survival but drug, sex, domestic, or manual work in the informal economy. Though she eventually became a permanent U.S. resident, Jennicet Gutiérrez was a longtime undocumented transgender activist who, like Lorena, was born in Mexico, misgendered throughout her youth, and traveled to the United States as a young person. As she once told me, “Surviving in this country as an undocumented person puts people at a higher risk” for viruses and poor health in ways many LGBTQ political brokers ignore.

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The United States doesn’t just use viruses to create national borders; in conflating viruses with nonwhite people, it also tries to create borders of whiteness, where healthy white people are on one side of national belonging and people living with viruses are kept outside it. For those living undocumented in the United States, just trying to survive can put them at risk of deportation. The criminal justice system and the immigration system overlap for them when the work they do in the informal economy might get them arrested. It was an Obama administration policy embodying this dynamic that made life even more precarious for Lorena’s “girls” and that first brought her into Chase Strangio’s life. Long before he was known as an attorney who helped free transgender whistleblower army lieutenant Chelsea Manning from prison and worked on the landmark trans Supreme Court case R.

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Saddled with a record that made it impossible to rent a home in their own name and unable to live with family, record numbers of Black people were rendered homeless upon making contact with the criminal justice system after the 1996 bill passed. And homelessness inevitably led to their committing more “crimes” associated with being unhoused, such as panhandling, lying down outside, working in the informal economy, or urinating in public (the latter of which could lead to being labeled a “sex offender,” which would make securing employment or housing effectively impossible for the rest of their lives). This led to more incarceration, which created more homelessness, in an inescapable whirlpool of catastrophe.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In the twentieth century, value shifted from physical infrastructure like land and factories to intangibles such as brands and intellectual property. That now is expanding to data, which is becoming a significant corporate asset, a vital economic input, and the foundation of new business models. It is the oil of the information economy. Though data is rarely recorded on corporate balance sheets, this is probably just a question of time. Although some data-crunching techniques have been around for a while, in the past they were only available to spy agencies, research labs, and the world’s biggest companies. After all, Walmart and Capital One pioneered the use of big data in retailing and banking and in so doing changed their industries.

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Margolis, “When Smart Grids Grow Smart Enough to Solve Crimes,” Neustar, March 18, 2010 (http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/gc prod/documents/Neustar_Comments_DataExhibitA.pdf) [>] Fred Cate on notice and consent—Fred H. Cate, “The Failure of Fair Information Practice Principles,” in Jane K. Winn, ed., Consumer Protection in the Age of the “Information Economy” (Ashgate, 2006), p. 341 et seq. [>] On the AOL data release—Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller Jr., “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749,” New York Times, August 9, 2006. Also see Matthew Karnitschnig and Mylene Mangalindan, “AOL Fires Technology Chief After Web-Search Data Scandal,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2006. [>] Netflix identified individual—Ryan Singel, “Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims,” Wired, December 17, 2009 (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/).

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ICIS 2011 Proceedings, Paper 13 (http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2011/proceedings/economicvalueIS/13; also available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819486). Byrne, John. The Whiz Kids. Doubleday, 1993. Cate, Fred H. “The Failure of Fair Information Practice Principles.” In Jane K. Winn, ed., Consumer Protection in the Age of the “Information Economy” (Ashgate, 2006), p. 341 et seq. Chin, A., and A. Klinefelter. “Differential Privacy as a Response to the Reidentification Threat: The Facebook Advertiser Case Study.” 90 North Carolina Law Review 1417 (2012). Crosby, Alfred. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

That something – whether it went under the name of the post-industrial society, the knowledge economy or informational capitalism – was the growing importance of images and signs in everyday life. The rise of information technologies and whole industries based around communications, signs and images, altered not only the economy but the structure of meaning. The growth of information economies fits well with the inherent and ever-increasing celerity of capitalism. Capitalism encounters time and space as obstacles in the way of making money.64 They would ideally like to realize their investment here and now. The development of information technologies enabling the instantaneous transmission of symbols and images around the world makes possible, as Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ anticipated, the death of time and space.65 These technologies have been of most use in the financial sector.

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The development of information technologies enabling the instantaneous transmission of symbols and images around the world makes possible, as Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ anticipated, the death of time and space.65 These technologies have been of most use in the financial sector. But now big data, by way of ‘the cloud’, claims to extend similar advantages to traditional manufacturing firms, by enabling them to choreograph production processes all over the world. Ironically, the growth of information economies is catastrophic for meaning. No doubt, we have lived through a massive expansion in the amount of information that we are exposed to. In 1986, the average American was exposed to forty newspapers’ worth of information each day. Two decades later, it was 174 newspapers. By 2008, the average American consumed about 36 gigabytes of information each day.66 And most of this information, insofar as it reaches us on social media, is designed to keep us typing and scrolling, producing more information.

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Whatever the political purposes to which users put them, however, the most successful users are those who understand the informational politics of the platform. The infamous Facebook experiment, published in 2014, on ‘emotional contagion’, built on the well-known fact that sentiment is catching. By manipulating users’ moods, it found that this contagion can now be orchestrated on a massive scale by networks.34 The virality and celerity of the information economy piggybacks on this tendency, aggregating and herding sentiment, assembling makeshift alliances around a mood, building towards a euphoric climax and then dissipating. The experiment also showed that it is possible for the medium to fabricate and manipulate the mood of users, which of course Facebook already does on a molecular level through its management of feeds.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Much of this was inspired, he tells me, by what he calls a “backward reading” of Jeremy Rifkin’s influential book The End of Work, which predicted the decline of the workforce in a postindustrial age.16 What Ilves took, however, from Rifkin’s thesis is the counterintuitive idea that small countries like Estonia could actually benefit from the great transformation from an industrial to an information economy. Size would matter in the future too, he figured, but while the twentieth century naturally advantaged industrial leviathans like the Soviet Union, with their massive economies of scale and millions of industrial laborers, the networked age could favor small start-up nations like Estonia, with its small, highly skilled workforce that could speedily pivot around new technologies.

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A few days before my visit, Vestager had signaled her intention to ramp up Europe’s antitrust investigation against Google with a third formal investigation.9 This dogged determination to hold US tech companies accountable under the EU law had even elicited the rather sour comment by the then American president Barack Obama that her efforts were “a form of protectionism” designed to help European tech companies compete with Silicon Valley.10 Outside of Putin’s Russia, where the indigenous search engine Yandex dominates, and Xi Jinping’s China, where the Great Firewall blocks it, Google maintains an astonishingly tight stranglehold on the world’s online information economy. Google’s domination in the European market is even more exaggerated than in the United States, where Microsoft’s Bing has around a 20 percent share of the market. In search, the Google query engine enjoys 95 percent of the market in Spain and Italy, 94 percent in France, and 93 percent in Germany.11 But monopolies, in themselves, aren’t illegal.

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Like so many other critics of today’s networked society, Kallen believes the central problem is the disappearance of trust, caused mostly, in his opinion, by “too many people connecting too much data.” Burda, he explained, has a moral responsibility not just to make profits but also to figure out ways that we can once against trust media. To do this, Kallen explains, we need to “rethink” and “reinvent” search, the heart of the information economy. Created by Jean-Paul Schmetz, the former chief scientist at Burda, Cliqz is an innovative combination of search engine and internet browser, built on “privacy by design” principles. It’s been engineered or, perhaps more exactly, reengineered, as the anti-Google—an internet browser with an inbuilt search engine designed in such a way that it will never collect or sell its users’ data.

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

ASIA’S GRAY MARKETS Billions of Asians are accustomed to life in the informal economy, working either in sectors unregulated by the state or for unregistered businesses. This gray economy represents anywhere from 12 to 50 percent of GDP and employment in Asian countries. Hustling is nothing new to Asians. Westerners are only now becoming accustomed to life in the gigonomy of multiple jobs in the formal and informal economy. But tens of millions of Indians and Pakistanis are used to working half the year in low-skilled industry and the other half in seasonal harvesting. Across Asia, the informal economy accounts for anywhere from 12 to 50 percent of GDP and employment.51 But in another case of taking advantage of late development, most Asian societies have apps that allow people to be hired for part-time work based on their skills.

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Jaros, “Urban Champions or Rich Peripheries? China’s Spatial Development Dilemmas,” Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, April 2016, http://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/261226_ash_jaros_web.pdf?m=1461696669. 51 The largest share of GDP represented by the informal economy is found in countries such as Russia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. 52 Emma Lee, “Nearly 90% Phones Sold in China in 2016 Came from Domestic Makers,” TechNode, Jan. 12, 2017, https://technode.com/2017/01/12/nearly-90-of-560m-phones-sold-in-china-comes-from-domestic-makers-2016/. 53 Chris Cooper, “China to Surpass U.S. as World’s Largest Aviation Market by 2024,” Bloomberg, Oct. 20, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-21/china-to-surpass-u-s-as-world-s-largest-aviation-market-by-2024. 5.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Wilson blames the exodus for a spiraling decline in the inner-city tax base, a precipitous drop in public services, and the entrapment of millions of black Americans in a self-perpetuating cycle of permanent unemployment and public assistance. In New York City in 1975, more than 15 percent of the residents were on some form of public assistance. In Chicago it was nearly 19 percent. 23 In the 1980s many of the nation's northern cities partially revived by becoming hubs for the new information economy. Scores of downtown areas made the transition from "centers of production and distribution of material goods to centers of administration, information exchange and higher order service provision."24 The emerging knowledge-based industries have meant increased jobs for highskilled white collar and service workers.

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This small elite owns 37.4 percent of all corporate stocks and bonds and 56.2 percent of all U.S. private business assets. 39 Below the super rich is a slightly larger class consisting of 4 percent of the working population of the United States. Their ranks are made up largely of the new professionals, the highly trained symbolic analysts or knowledge workers who manage the new high-tech information economy. This small group, numbering fewer than 3.8 million individuals, earns as much as the entire bottom 51 percent of American wage earners, totaling more than 49.2 million. 40 In addition to the top 4 percent of American income earners who make up the elite of the knowledge sector, another 16 percent of the American workforce also consists mostly of knowledge workers.

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'l\t the end of the morning," says Brod, "she is exhausted, and wonders how she'll find the energy to complete the day's work."19 The new computer-based technologies have so quickened the volume, flow, and pace of information that millions of workers are experiencing mental "overload" and "burnout." The physical fatigue generated by the fast pace of the older industrial economy is being Requiem for the Working Class 189 eclipsed by the mental fatigue generated by the nanosecond pace of the new information economy. According to a study conducted by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), clerical workers who use computers suffer inordinately high levels of stress. 20 The hyperefficient high-tech economy is undermining the mental and physical well-being of millions of workers around the world.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Admittedly, he made these statements as we moved through the height of the information revolution discussions of the 1990s, when Microsoft was rocking the world as mainframe moved to desktop, and internet banking was bubbling on the horizon. Even then, it should be noted that most of this banker’s views that the basis for wealth has evolved from land to labour to information were formed back in the 1970s, when technology first hit the banking system and moved us to an information economy. Today, this vision is realised and businesses exist as information economies and they fight based upon information. Google is not a monopoly as there were and are plenty of search engines around - Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Bing, etc - but Google won this game early on by making algorithmic analysis of data more relevant and organised.

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It’s similar to the days of Business Process Re-engineering, where the push was for banks to reinvent the customer relationship from the external interaction viewpoint inwards ... instead, most banks opted for purely incremental improvements to internal processes to lower costs. Now there is a big change. That big change is the information economy and the ability of new players to use information as a competitive weapon. Deep data mining can now be used to leverage electronic relationships that deliver the depth, loyalty and sales that banks were seeking a decade ago, and it can all be done today without a human hand involved. We see this with Apple, Amazon, Google and more.

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

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

., p. 19. 94.Wacquant, ‘Rise of Advanced Marginality,’ p. 127. 95.While the size of the informal economy is notoriously difficult to measure, by all accounts it forms a significant part of the global economy. For an overview of methods to measure the global shadow economy, see Friedrich Schneider and Andreas Buehn, Estimating the Size of the Shadow Economy: Methods, Problems, and Open Questions (CESifo Working Paper Series No. 4448, 2013), pdf available at papers.ssrn.com. For a more detailed, ethnographic account of one urban informal economy, see: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 96.The United Nations suggests that two-fifths of workers in developing economies are in the informal sector, while other research notes a significant growth in this proportion between 1985 and 2007.

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Index 1968, 16–7, 63, 188n33 15M, 11, 22 abstraction, 10, 15, 36, 44, 81 additive manufacturing, 110, 143, 150, 182 affect, 7–8, 113–4, 140–1 afro-futurism, 139, 141 AI (artificial intelligence), 110, 143 alienation, 14–5, 82 algorithmic trading, 111 Allende, Salvador, 148, 149 alternativism, 194n95 Althusser, Louis, 81, 141–2 anti-globalisation, 3, 159, 162 anti-war, 3, 5, 22, 162 Apple, 146, Arab Spring, 131, 159 Argentina, 37–9, 173 authenticity, 10–1, 15, 27, 82, 180 automation, 1–2, 86, 88–9, 94–5, 97–8, 104–5, 109–17, 122, 127, 130, 143, 150–1, 167, 171–4, 181–2, 203n15, 212n121, 214n161, 215n9, 218n45 banking, 43–6, 61, 147 Beveridge Report, 118 big data, 110, 111 Bolshevik Revolution, 131 Bolsheviks, 137 Russian Revolution, 139 Brazil, 75, 119, 147, 157, 169 Bretton Woods, 61–2 Brown, Michael, 173 care labour, 113–4 Chicago School, 51, 59–60 Chile, 52, 62, 148, 149, 150 China, 87, 89, 97, 170 class, 14, 16–7, 20–1, 25, 53, 64–5, 87, 91, 96–102, 116, 120, 122–3, 126–7, 132–3, 155–62, 170, 173–4, 189n1, 206n44, 233n119, 233n4, 233n5, 234n18 Cleaver, Eldridge, 91–2 climate change, 13–4, 116 colonialism, 73, 75–6, 96–7, 225n3 common sense, 9–11, 21–2, 40, 54–5, 58–60, 63–7, 72, 131–7 communisation, 92, 225n5 competitive subjects, 63–5, 99, 124 complex systems, 13–4, conspiracy theories, 14–5 cosmism, 139 Critchley, Simon, 72 cryptocurrencies, 143, 182 Cybersyn, 149–150 debt, 9, 22, 35–6, 94 demands, 6–7, 30, 33, 107–8, 130, 159–62, 167 no demands, 7, 34–5, 107, 186n3 non-reformist demands, 108 transitional demands, 215n5 democracy, 31–3, 182 direct democracy, 27–9, 31–3, 164, 190n8 direct action, 6, 11, 27–9, 35–6 education, 64, 99, 104, 141–5, 165–6 Egypt, 32–4, 190n21 energy, 2, 16,19,41, 42–43, 116, 147, 148, 150–51, 164, 171, 178, 179, 182, 183 Engels, Friedrich, 79 Erhard, Ludwig, 57 ethics, 42 work ethic, 124–6 evictions, 8, 12, 36 feminism, 18–21, 122, 138, 161 Fisher, Antony, 58–9, 196n34 food miles, 42–3 fracking, 8 France, 17, 62, 149, 167 free time, 80, 115–6, 120–1, 167, 219n50 freedom, 63–5, 120–1, 126–7, 180–1 negative freedom, 79 synthetic freedom, 78–83 Friedman, Milton, 56, 59–61 full employment, 98–100 future, 1, 71–5, 175–8, 181–3 G20, 6, 94 gender, 21, 41, 90, 122 Germany, 45, 56–7 ghettos, 95–6 Gramsci, Antonio, 132, 165 Graeber, David, 33 grand narratives, 73–4 Great Depression, 46, 65, 99–101, 114–5 Harvey, David, 135 Hayek, Friedrich, 54–6 Holzer, Jenny, 175, 178 horizontalism, 18, 26–39 housing, 8, 28, 35, 48, 77, 80, 95, 96, 148, 159, 167, 168, humanism, 81–3, 180–1 hyperstition, 74–5, 138–9 Iceland, 34, 164 idleness, 85–6 immediacy, 10–1 immigration, 101–2, 161 India, 87, 97–8, 130 inequality, 22, 80, 93–4 informal economy, 95–8, 203n10, 206n44, 210n95 Institute of Economic Affairs, 58–9 Iranian Revolution, 131 Jameson, Fredric, 14, 92, 198n10 Japan, 147 Jimmy Reid Foundation, 117 jobless recovery, 94–5 Jobs, Steve, 179 Johnson, Boris, 172 Kalecki, Michał, 120 Krugman, Paul, 118 labour, 2, 3,9, 17, 20, 21, 33, 38, 48, 52, 58, 61–3, 74, 79, 81, 83, 85–143, 148, 150, 151, 156–8, 161, 163–181, 182 Laclau, Ernesto, 155, 159 Lafargue, Paul, 115, language, 81, 132, 160, 164–5 leisure, 85–6 Leninism, 17, 131, 188n33 Live Aid, 8 localism, 40–6 locavorism, 41–2 Lucas Aerospace, 147 Luxemburg, Rosa, 15 Lyotard, Francois, 73, 74 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58, 59 marches, 6, 30, 49 Marikana massacre, 170 Marinaleda, 48 Marx, Karl, 73, 79, 85, 86, 92, 115, 119, 121, 122, 132, 142, 156, 158, 180 Mattick, Paul, 92, 118 media, 2, 7–8, 31, 36, 52, 58, 60, 63, 67, 88, 118, 125–6, 129, 133–5, 163–5, 176, 182 Mirowski, Philip, 66 modernity, 23, 63, 69–85, 86, 131, 176, 181 modernisation, 23, 60, 63, 137, 174 Mont Pelerin Society, 54, 86, 134, 164, 166 MPS, 55, 56, 58, 66, 67, 134 Move Your Money, 44 Murray, Charles, 59 Musk, Elon, 179 National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, 172 negative solidarity, 20, 37 neoliberalism, 3, 12, 20–3, 47, 49, 51–67, 70, 72, 108, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 134, 141, 142, 148, 156, 176, 179, 183 neoliberal, 7, 9, 14–16, 20, 21, 37, 47, 49, 73, 93, 99, 118, 126, 127, 129, 131–2, 134, 135, 162, 169, 174, 176, 181 New Economics Foundation, 117, 144 new left, 18–22 New Zealand, 151 occupations, 5, 7, 10, 11, 29–31, 34, 49, 94, 172 Occupy Wall Street, 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 22, 26, 29–38, 126, 133, 158, 159, 160, 162, 189n1 ordoliberals, 54, 57 organic intellectual, 165–6 Overton Window, 134, 139 Partido dos Trabalhadores, 169 parties, political, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 30, 34, 39, 46, 59, 105, 116, 118, 124, 129, 162, 164, 168, 169 personal savings, 94 Piketty, Thomas, 140 Plan C, 117 planning, 1, 15, 56, 141, 142, 149, 151, 182 Plant, Sadie, 82 Podemos, 159, 160, 169 police, 6, 30, 33, 36, 37, 102, 133, 161, 168, 171, 173 postcapitalism, 17, 38, 130, 143, 145, 150, 151, 158, 168, 178, 180 postcapitalist, 12, 15, 16, 32, 34, 83, 109, 115, 126, 136, 143, 145, 150, 152, 153, 157, 179, 180 Post-Crash Economic Society, 143 post-work, 23, 69, 83, 85, 86, 105, 107–127, 129, 130, 138, 140, 141, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 167, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Pou Chen Group, 170 power, 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18–21, 26, 28–30, 33, 36, 43, 46, 48, 49, 59, 61, 62, 65, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 93, 100, 108, 111, 116, 120, 123, 127, 130–5, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155–74, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182 precarity, 9, 86, 88, 93, 94, 95, 98, 104, 121, 123, 126, 130, 156, 157, 166, 167, 173, 174 precarious, 2, 64, 117, 129, 167 Precarious Workers Brigade, 117 premature deindustrialisation, 97, 98 primitive accumulation, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97 prison, 90, 102, 103, 119, 133 incarceration, 102, 103, 104, 105, 161 productivity, 74, 88, 97, 110–17, 125, 150, 167 progress, 21, 23, 46, 71–5, 77, 107, 114, 115, 120, 126, 131, 138, 179, 180 protests, 1, 7, 18, 22, 28, 31, 37, 49, 66, 153, 164 psychopathologies, 64 radio-frequency identification, 110 race, 14, 31, 90, 102, 103, 140, 156, 171, 172 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 62, 66, 70 Republican Party (US), 135 resistance, 2, 5, 12, 15, 30, 35, 46–8, 49, 69, 72, 74, 83, 114, 124, 134, 158, 173, 181 Rethinking Economics, 143 Robinson, Joan, 87 Roboticisation, 110, 209n69 mechanisation, 95, 101 Rolling Jubilee, 9 Samuelson, Paul, 142 second machine age, 111 secular stagnation, 143 self-driving cars, 110, 111, 113, 173 shadow work, 115 slavery, 74, 90, 95, 103 slow food, 41, 42 slum, 86, 96–8, 102, 104 social democracy, 3, 17, 46, 66, 70, 167, 176 social democratic, 10, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 47, 57, 72, 80, 98, 100, 108, 123, 127, 168 social media, 1, 8, 182 South Africa, 119, 157, 170 Spain, 12, 22, 34, 35, 45, 159, 164 stagflation, 19, 27, 61, 65, 100 Stalinist, 17, 18, 137 strategy, 12, 20, 26, 49, 56, 67, 117, 127, 131–3, 136, 148, 153, 156, 163, 164 strategic, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 35, 49, 52, 55, 66, 70, 77, 108, 116, 131, 135, 157, 162, 163, 164, 170, 171, 173, 174 strikes, 9, 10, 28, 36, 37, 116, 120, 157, 167, 170–3 suicide, 94 surplus populations, 40, 86, 88–94, 96–97, 101–3, 104, 105, 120, 130, 166–7, 173, 203n10 Syriza, 159, 160 tactics, 6, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 26, 28, 39, 40, 49, 157, 164, 171–4 Tahrir Square, 32, 34 Taylorism, 152 technology, 1, 3, 72, 81, 88, 89, 98, 109, 110, 111, 129, 136, 137, 145–8, 150–3, 178, 179, 182 Thatcher, Margaret, 59, 60, 62, 66, 70, 72, 100 think tanks, 16, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 117, 134, 135, 165 trade unions, 10, 27, 47, 59, 61, 62, 71, 105, 116, 117, 124, 129, 148, 162, 166 labour unions, 16, 171 unions, 17, 18, 20, 27, 30, 44 UK Uncut, 126 unemployment, 20, 56, 60, 79, 86–98, 99, 100, 101, 101, 102, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 147, 159, 161, 168, 170, 173, 207n44 United Automobile Workers, 170 United Kingdom UK, 8, 20, 40, 42, 45, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 92, 93, 94, 117, 118, 126, 144, 147, 151, 172 United States, 8, 18, 29, 36, 44, 45, 59, 62, 78, 92, 95, 103, 114, 118, 123, 133, 135, 138, 167 America, 6, 16, 30, 38, 47, 56, 62, 76, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 164 universal basic income, 108, 118, 123, 127, 140, 143 basic income, 80, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143, 164, 165, 167 universalism, 69, 70, 75–8, 83, 119, 132, 175, 197n1, 199n40 USSR, 62, 63, 79, 139 Soviet Union, 57, 70, 74, 139 utopia, 3, 28, 32, 35, 48, 54, 58, 60, 66, 69, 70, 72, 108, 113, 114, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150, 153, 177, 179, 181, 182 vanguard functions, 163 Venezuela, 169 wages, 2, 71, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 111, 120, 122, 125, 156, 166, 167 welfare, 14, 38, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 73, 90, 100, 101, 103, 105, 118, 119, 122, 124 Wilde, Oscar, 182 withdrawal, 11, 47, 48, 69, 131, 182 exit, 47, 48, 181 escape, 3, 9, 11, 38, 69, 107, 114, 139, 165, 178 work, 1, 2, 16, 17, 23, 32, 36, 41, 44, 47, 64, 71, 85, 86, 90–6, 98, 100, 101, 103–5, 108, 109, 110–7, 120–7, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 152, 157, 163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 181 wage labour, 74, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 103, 104, 105, 120, 136, 141, 180 job, 2, 38, 41, 47, 48, 63, 64, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114–23, 124, 125, 126, 129, 147, 148, 161, 166, 167, 171 worker-controlled factories, 38, 39 workfare, 59, 100, 104 World Trade Organisation, 6 World War II, 46, 54, 56, 57, 115, 156 Zapatistas, 11, 22, 26, 35 zero-hours contracts, 93 Žižek, Slavoj, 140 Zuccotti Park, 31, 32

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

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

Even trickier for the existing social contract, as the average productivity and income in Western society rises, a small group of citizens is getting left behind. Their productivity is not rising but their expectations keep pace with the rest of us. They will not accept the exploitative jobs in which they might be employable, preferring the informal economy or even the illegal, drugsbased economy. Meanwhile, the grotty jobs that still need carrying out — we still need the cleaners, the auxiliary nurses and the all-night sales assistants at the convenience store — become harder to fill because of the political classes’ mania about keeping out immigrants.

…

From the late 1980s onwards policy-makers became much more concerned about the effects of social security on incentives to work. However, there was no great rolling back of the state under that most ideological of governments. The Thatcher experiment can be interpreted as an attempt to shape the welfare state into a more flexible form better suited to the modern information economy — not that there was any master plan to do so. There can be no doubt that the devolution of managerial power to unelected bodies such as the boards of hospital trusts and self-governing schools has damaged the fabric of democracy.10 It has devolved the responsibility without the accountability.

…

It is less true in education that the public sector is more efficient, but there the issue is the benefits to the economy as a whole derived from having a better-educated work force. There is a social benefit on top of the private benefit people reap from education in the form of higher earnings. Skills and a sophisticated general education are essential to the information economy and no government can afford to see its citizens under-invest in their own education. So if there is one branch of the welfare state that will have to continue growing, it is spending on education. With education essential to individual economic success, higher public expenditure might even be repaid in the form of reduced demands on other forms of social spending in future.

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

game design, informal economy, intentional community, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, the built environment

For the most part, I have not felt the need to make explicit the Commune’s resonances with the politics of today, although I believe those resonances do indeed exist—some of them quite humorous, as when the New York Times reported unknowingly the name of the young activist they were interviewing in the streets of Oakland, California in November 2011 as Louise Michel.2 There is little need to spell out in detail how the way people live now under the contemporary form of capitalism—with the collapse of the labor market, the growth of the informal economy, and the undermining of systems of social solidarity throughout the overdeveloped world—bears more than a passing resemblance to the working conditions of the laborers and artisans of the nineteenth century who made the Commune, most of whom spent most of their time not working but looking for work.

…

The way people live now—working part-time, studying and working at the same time, straddling those two worlds or the gap between the work they were trained to do and the work they find themselves doing in order to get by, or negotiating the huge distances they must commute or migrate across in order to find work—all this suggests to me, and to others as well, that the world of the Communards is in fact much closer to us than is the world of our parents. It seems utterly reasonable to me that younger people today, put off by a career trajectory in video-game design, hedge-fund management, or smart-phone bureaucracy, trying to carve out spaces and ways to live on the edges of various informal economies, testing the possibilities and limitations of living differently now within a thriving—if crisis-ridden—global capitalist economy, might well find interesting the debates that took place among Communard refugees and fellow travelers in the Juras in the 1870s that led to the theorizing of something called “anarchist communism”—debates, that is, about decentralized communities, how they might come into being and flourish, and the way they might become “federated” with each other in relations of solidarity.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women making all the decisions. In the past, men derived their advantage largely from size and strength, but the postindustrial economy is indifferent to brawn. A service and information economy rewards precisely the opposite qualities—the ones that can’t be easily replaced by a machine. These attributes—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women.

…

“We get graded on people skills,” Hannah says about her upcoming residency, and then “the drug knowledge is important, too.” As a profession, pharmacy put itself on the right side of history. It sidestepped a future in manual labor and moved itself into the more feminine-friendly service and information economy, where higher degrees are always required and technology does not make your job obsolete; instead it frees you to shake hands and smile. Pharmacy followed the script for success in the modern economy. And in that script, the flood of women into the profession is no longer a sign of pollution, but the assurance of a bright, happy future.

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See also Doctors, female; Nursing profession; Pharmacists Hearts of Men, The (Ehrenreich), 63 Hegedus, Nathan, 267 Heilman, Madeline, 210–11 Henderson, Darren, 89 Heriot, Gail, 145–48, 158 Hewlett Packard (HP), 219 “Hey, Soul Sister” (song), 122 Higher education, 94, 163 gender dynamics of, 149–60 See also specific colleges and universities Hiroshima, atomic bombing of, 175 History Channel, 126 Hodge, Monica, 109 Home health care, 118, 124 Honduras, 81 Hooking Up (Bogle), 20 Hook-up culture, 17–45 Housewives, 65, 152, 172 in Asian cultures, 239, 259 role reversal fantasy about, 122 in television shows, 47–48 Housing industry, collapse of, 87, 89 Houston, 81 How to Train Your Dragon (Cowell), 190 Huggies, 266 Humber, Gabby, 100 Hungary, 237 Hunger Games, The (Collins), 34, 190 Hunter-gatherer societies, 175 Hwang Myeong-eun, 241–45 Hyundai Motors, 204, 234, 250 Iceland, 5, 202 I Love Lucy (television show), 47–49 India, 5, 119, 184, 188 traditional families in, 220 Indiana, University of, 21 Information economy, 5 Information technology (IT), 138 Institutional Investor, 203 International Olympic Committee, 250 Internet boom, 201 Iowa, 96 Iraq war, 175 Israel, 237 Ivy League schools, 26–29, 31, 145, 198. See also specific universities J. C. Penney department stores, 97 Jackass 3D (movie), 143 Jacks, Margaret, 132 Jackson, Shirley, 170 Japan, 55, 238, 241, 253, 267 Jersey Shore (TV reality show), 178–79 Jews, 227 Job, The (Lewis), 120–21 Job loss.

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

“The available evidence shows just the opposite,” he told the red-faced senators. There was no need to study the patent policies of Japan or Germany, because the best case against turning public science into private monopolies was the high-tech innovation surge on the cusp of transforming the U.S. economy. The foundational technologies of the information economy—solid-state transistor circuits, lasers, fiber optics—had origins in three things: publicly funded research, liberal government licensing of that research, and above all, a 1954 Justice Department consent decree that forced open Bell Labs’ patent vault and diffused its contents. Had corporate America’s most notorious high-tech monopolist and knowledge-squatter been allowed to continue hiding its patented technology on bunkered shelves, the course of U.S.

…

As the Reagan administration intended, the executives focused the committee’s work on the patent issue, establishing an intellectual property task force and stacking it with patent lawyers and executives from patent-based manufacturing associations. Most of them represented chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but the task force also featured new players in the budding high-tech information economy—entertainment, software, biotech, agriculture, semiconductors—who were learning to see the world through pharmaceutical eyes. The patent-globalization train gained momentum during the Carter-Reagan transition year, but it still wasn’t clear where it was going. This changed in 1982, when the industry-administration nexus overseen by Pratt and Opel settled on a destination: the Uruguayan resort town of Punta Del Este.

…

Five years passed between MacTaggart’s op-ed and the U.S. government’s announcement of its intellectual property agenda at Uruguay. In a letter to the GATT secretariat dated October 19, 1987, U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter outlined a “basic framework” for the negotiations that amounted to what Drahos and Braithwaite call “a declaration of principles of property wanted by big business for the coming global information economy.” The G77 that faced this challenge was not the same G77 that called for a New International Economic Order and demanded health as a basic human right at Alma-Ata. By the mid-1980s, the global south was reeling from a debt crisis and tumult in the global political and economic order. Development funds and technology from the Soviet Union were disappearing, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were stepping into the void.

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

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

The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on. But the election, forcing a binary choice, temporarily consolidated the narratives on either side of the divide. In one country, cities are magnets for talent and ambition, higher education is the key to success in the information economy, diversity is a sign of progress, and Joe Biden is the legitimate president. In the other, the home fires of American greatness burn in aging towns and rural areas, the good jobs are in manufacturing, farming, and fuel extraction, diversity is shredding the national fabric, and Donald Trump was robbed.

…

The first step to renewing a democratic press is for its owners, practitioners, and readers to find the moral courage to think for themselves and stand on their own if necessary, even if the cost is high. But the changes also have to be structural, because technology and finance have driven the media into an economy of scarcity amid plenty. The transformation of the information economy and the effect on our minds are so radical that we’re whipsawed almost minute to minute by immense changes without understanding their meaning. From its beginning, Silicon Valley combined the narrative of Free America (no regulation) with that of Smart America (meritocracy with an idealistic global mission).

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

As Savio’s speech suggested, the students of the Free Speech Movement were afraid not only of becoming victims of a social machine, but also of becoming fuel for the engines of economic production. In the 1990s, the computer once again served as a metaphor for the organization of production and labor, but this time that link promised to liberate both individuals and society. How was it that the informational economy came to be seen not as an oppressive force, but as a site of political and cultural change? In order to answer this question, we need to revisit the research world out of which the computational metaphor arose in the 1940s and 1950s and the countercultural world of the 1960s. Contrary to the perceptions of many in the counterculture in the 1960s and of many scholars since, the two worlds had a great deal in common.

…

Thus, the rhetoric of community provided the ideological cover necessary to transform a potentially stark and single-minded market transaction into a complex, multidimensional act. To the extent that they could describe themselves as the givers and receivers of informational gifts within a community, members of the WELL could simultaneously recognize and ignore the degree to which they were also exchanging financially valuable goods within a newly informational economy. As a result, they could increase their own social capital and their access to the informational and social resources on which their work off-line depended. On the WELL, this heterarchical form of information work came together with the experience of interpersonal intimacy. Under the rubric of a New Communalist vision of a community of consciousness, this blend of emotional interconnection and informational labor gave rise to one of the most influential frames with which we have since understood the Internet: virtual community.

…

Richard Barbrook has argued that the gift-economy paradigm grew out of the New Left and has become a standard feature of the working world online. The history of the Whole Earth network suggests that in America, at least, it was the New Communalist movement rather than the New Left that drove the rise of the gift-economy paradigm. But Barbrook’s work remains an early and influential account of the gift economy’s role in the information economy. See Barbrook, “Hi-Tech Gift Economy.” 44. Mauss and Halls, The Gift. For a critique and extension of Mauss’s arguments, see Lévi-Strauss, “Selections from Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss.” See also Bourdieu, “Selections from The Logic of Practice”; and Bourdieu, “Marginalia.” For a broad-brush analysis of gift economies, see Cheal, Gift Economy.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Some branches of economics, such as mathematical economics, have come to look more like applied mathematics than like any kind of social science. Their reference point has become other mathematical models instead of the real world. The abstract of one paper in the field opens with this sentence: “We establish new characterizations of Walrasian expectations equilibria based on the veto mechanism in the framework of differential information economies with a complete finite measure space of agents.”16 One of the profession’s leading, and most mathematically oriented, journals (Econometrica) imposed a moratorium at one point on “social choice” theory—abstract models of voting mechanisms—because papers in the field had become mathematically so esoteric and divorced from actual politics.17 Before we judge such work too harshly, it is worth noting that some of the most useful applications in economics have come out of highly mathematical, and what to outsiders would surely seem abstruse, models.

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Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). 15. Diego Gambetta, “‘Claro!’ An Essay on Discursive Machismo,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24. 16. Marialaura Pesce, “The Veto Mechanism in Atomic Differential Information Economies,” Journal of Mathematical Economics 53 (2014): 33–45. 17. Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 461. 18. Golden Goose Award, “Of Geese and Game Theory: Auctions, Airwaves—and Applications,” Social Science Space, July 17, 2014, http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/07/of-geese-and-game-theory-auctions-airwaves-and-applications. 19.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Today, the city has fewer than 200,000 people working in industry; the loss of these firms, Braudel notes, left “a gap in the heart of New York which will never be filled.”84 Yet if the industrial heart was emptied, New York was not without recourse. The old industry base was supplanted by the “information economy,” which as early as 1982 already accounted for the majority of Manhattan’s jobs. So while plants were slowly going dark throughout the city, new office towers were rising over Gotham. In many ways, this transformation built on New York’s early history of being, first and foremost, a trading and port city.

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., 160 and social cohesion, 163 Hong Kong aging population in, 122 childlessness in, 16 colonial influence in, 87 emigration from, 16 family-friendly policies in, 195 family ties in, 114 foreign-born population of, 97 foreign housing investments in, 101 as global city, 84, 90, 91–92, 274n8 global influence of, 81, 82 housing prices in, 41, 134 inequality in, 102 as “necessary” city, 83 post-familialism in, 119 SARS epidemic in, 66 Horan, Thomas, 188 House sizes, 179 Housing affordability density and, 11–12 for families, 18 for millennials, 172, 173 and move to suburbs, 153–154 for next generation, 198–199 in post-familial cities, 133–134 and rise in fertility rates, 195 and shortage of housing, 173–174 Housing bubble, 151, 152 Housing inflation, 100–102 Housing options, future, 196–198 Housing production, 173, 174 Housing shortage, 173–175 Houston advantages in suburbs of, 157 bayou park system in, 46 density of, 183 family households in, 144 foreign-born population of, 98 global influence of, 82 housing production in, 174 as “necessary” city, 83 suburban growth around, 141–143 Howard, Ebenezer, 153, 176, 200 Howard, Sir Edward, 29 Human city, 5, 45–47 as approach to dispersion, 167–168 focus on choices in, 167–168 global cities as, 83 Human connectivity, 85–87 Human scale, 7, 12–14, 112, 200 Huxley, Aldous, 139 Hyderabad, 54, 68, 74 I Identity, 103–106, 108–110 Immigrants to global cities, 86–87, 97–100 to maintain workforce, 169 to post-familial cities, 136–139 in suburbs, 157–159 Imperial cities, 23–25 India, 49–50 carbon emissions in, 190 colonial domination in, 61 declining growth rate in, 55 growth of spaces in, 197–198 housing investors from, 100 housing shortage in, 175 infrastructure lack in, 68 megacities in, 54, 73–75 poverty in, 65 shift of business to rural areas in, 74 Singaporean immigrants from, 99 tech employment in, 185 telecommuters in, 188 villages in, 75 Individualism, 131–132 Indonesia, 90, 124 Industrial cities, 26–28, 58–59 Inequality geography of, 39–42 Gini index, 287n131 in global cities, 95–96, 102–103 income, 156–157 (See also Poverty) in suburbs, 159–160 Information economy, 38, 42 Infrastructure, 67–70, 84–85 Inherited wealth, 96–97 Innovative businesses, 8–9 “In Praise of Slums,” 71 International Congresses of Modern Architecture, 146 Iran, 126 Irvine, California, 166, 177, 184 Irving, Texas, 184 Islam, Nazrul, 62 Islip, New York, 177 Istanbul (Constantinople), 12–13, 52, 85, 199 Italian Renaissance, 114 Italy, 98, 119, 133, 137 Iwasawa, Miho, 129 J Jackson, Kenneth, 156 Jackson Hole, 188 Jacobs, Jane, 2, 15, 21, 31, 112, 146, 178 Jakarta (Batavia), 53, 55, 60, 63–64, 69 Japan, 52 aging population in, 122–124 colonialism by, 61 dispersion in, 153–154 family-friendly policies in, 195 housing affordability in, 133 inequality in, 95 infrastructure of, 67 post-familialism in, 119, 121, 128–129, 131 renovation of cities in, 60 secularism in, 126 women in workforce in, 135 Japan (Jolivet), 119 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 87 Jerusalem, 21–22 Job decentralization, 186–187 Johannesburg-East Rand, 54 Jolivet, Muriel, 119 Jones, Emrys, 25, 76, 82 Jones, Gavin, 120, 130, 133, 135 Josey, Alex, 90, 91 K Kaliski, John, 20, 199 Kandell, Jonathan, 55 Kaneko, Ryuichi, 129 Karachi, Pakistan, 52, 53, 55, 270n18 Kasarda, John, 85 Katz, Peter, 166, 171 Kaufmann, Eric, 125 Khaldūn, Ibn, 58 Khrushchev, Nikita, 34 Kinshasa (Leopoldville), 60, 71 Kirby, Andrew, 147 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 20 Klinenberg, Eric, 128, 131, 132 Knox, Paul, 83, 147, 163 Kolkata (Calcutta), 54, 60, 64, 69 Kolko, Jed, 152, 172 Kolson, Kenneth, 44 Koolhaas, Rem, 103, 105 Korea, 123, 172, 185 Kothari, Priya, 142–143 Krier, Léon, 161 Krugman, Paul, 151 Kumar, R.

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See also Everyday life Lifestyle centers, 177 Liotta, Peter, 53 Lithuania, 138 Liu, Eveleen, 166 Living well, 5, 6 Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, 176 Locational preferences, 38 Logan, John, 39 London aging population in, 130 as “connected” city, 85 dispersion from, 28–29 educational gap in, 166 foreign-born population of, 97 foreign housing investments in, 100, 101 as global city, 87–89, 97, 274n8 global influence of, 82 growth of, 51 homogenization of, 106 housing prices in, 41 as new consumer city, 37 in 19th century, 28 objection to densification in, 13, 199 population of, 51, 52, 115, 155 post-familialism in, 117–118 slums in, 58 suburbs of, 143, 155 as wealthy city, 52 working classes in, 27 Longman, Phillip, 137 Los Angeles black children living in, 156 commuting time in, 68 as “connected” city, 85 environmental wastefulness of, 11 as federation of communities, 176 foreign-born population of, 98 foreign housing investments in, 101 global influence of, 82 growth of, 176 and housing bubble, 134, 152 income spent on rent in, 174 inequality in, 95–96 as luxury-oriented city, 40 migration to, 173 as “necessary” city, 83 opposition to increased density in, 13 pollution in, 196 population of, 52 post-familialism in, 128 suburban inequality around, 159 as wealthy city, 52 Louv, Richard, 192 Luanda, 54 Lutz, Wolfgang, 130, 136, 195 “Luxurious extinction,” 144–145 Luxury-oriented cities, 39–40, 43–44 Lynd, Robert, 151 M Macau, 183 Madison, 9 Madrid, 154–155 Mahmoudi, Dillon, 42 Making Smart Growth work (Porter), 165 Malaysia, 85, 90 Malthusian urbanism, 192–194 Manchester, 27, 115 Manhattan asset-backed wealth in, 96 children living in, 15, 16 and densification proposal, 13 high-density development in, 146–147 inequality in, 97 information economy in, 38 as Le Corbusier’s inspiration, 7 move to Brooklyn from, 177 neighborhoods of, 142 single households in, 117, 139 Manila, 55, 63–64, 66, 69 Marin County, California, 178 Markham (Canada), 158 Marriage, 129–130, 180 Martelle, Scott, 32 Marx, Karl, 25, 51 Master-planned communities, 30–31, 176–177 Maya, 167 Megacities, 6, 49–78 alternatives to, 72–74 ancient, 56–58 colonial legacy in, 60–61 density decline in, 14 dispersion in, 155 early industrial cities, 58–59 health conditions in, 65–67 and humanization of urbanization, 74–76 infrastructure problems in, 67–70 in late 19th century Europe, 59–60 life expectancy in, 65 limits of density in, 76–78 negative conditions in, 61–65 and prosperity, 54–56 quality of life in, 65–67 rise of, 50–54 slums in, 69–72 Mehta, Suketu, 55, 56, 68 Melaka, Malaysia, 81 Melbourne, 98, 158–159 Merkel, Angela, 138 Metropolitan areas, 263n5, 269n5, 274n8 Mexico, 53, 73, 139 Mexico City appeal of, 22 colonialism in, 60 commuting time in, 68 employment in, 64 as megacity, 51 middle class in, 63 organic growth of, 73 pattern of building in, 55–56 share of national GDP, 55 tech employment in, 185 urbanization in, 53 water system in, 68–69 Miami, 97–98, 100, 134, 152 Michigan, 188 Micro-units/micro-apartments, 12, 132–133 Middle class, 64 detached housing of, 160 encouraging growth of, 194 forces undermining, 93–97 global cities and, 92–97 homeownership and, 153 in Mexico City, 63 move to periphery by, 116 and shift to suburbs, 150 smart growth vs. interests of, 44 Middle East, 98, 100, 138 Migration, 62–63, 76, 77, 85, 99, 136–139 Milan, 115, 137, 154 Milch, Michael, 111 Mildner, Gerard, 11 Millennials, 170–176, 179–180, 189 Mills, Edwin, 59–60 Milton Keynes, 149, 163, 197 Minneapolis, 156–157 Miskel, James, 53 Mississauga (Canada), 158 Modarres, Ali, 2, 62, 64–65 Modi, Narendra, 76 Molotch, Harvey, 39 Montreal, 117 Moral order, 22 More developed world, 280n58 Mori, Minoru, 70 Morocco, 139 Morrill, Richard, 159 Morrison, Herbert, 148 Moscow, 33, 34, 52, 82, 194–195 Multigenerational households, 182–183 Multiracial suburbs, 156–159 Mumbai, 49–50 colonial influence in, 87 colonialism in, 60 employment in, 64 housing conditions in, 69–70 infrastructure lack in, 68, 69 life expectancy in, 65 living conditions in, 62, 64, 75 population of, 54, 170 tech employment in, 185 Mumford, Lewis, 2 on ancient Rome, 57 on civic identity, 21 on Radburn, 30 on small units, 200–201 on suburbia, 160 on technical prowess, 200 Munich, 118 Murray, Charles, 131 Myanmar, 124 N Nagoya, 52, 153, 176 Nantucket, 188 Naperville, Illinois, 177 Napoleon III, 8, 29, 59 Nature, connecting with, 46, 191–192 Navi Mumbai, 185 Nazis, 35 “Necessary” cities, 83–84 Nelson, Ted, 141 Netherlands attitude toward immigrants in, 98 dispersion of economic activities in, 185 focus on family in, 113–114 immigrants to, 98 producer cities in, 25–26 New consumer cities, 36–42 New Deal, 30, 150, 176 New Jersey, 178 New Orleans, 32, 107, 144–145 News Corp, 130 New social environment, 132 New Urbanism, 7, 151, 161, 164 New urban paradigm, 19, 42–43.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

This investment is still paying off today since microelectronics and advanced materials are the among the few industries where the United States is still competitive. Thus, China’s big investment in the AI race could give it the lead in several key industries well into the twenty-first century. This is our wakeup call. AI is accelerating the “intangible” information economy. The output of an economy is measured by its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services in dollars. This measure was designed for an industrial economy whose primary products and services were tangible, such as food, automobiles and medical care. However, more and more of the value of an information company is not measured by such products.

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Scientific instruments, from telescopes to microscopes, are collecting larger and larger data sets that are being analyzed with machine learning. The National Security Agency uses machine learning to sift through all of the data it has been collecting everywhere. The economy is going digital, and programming skills are in great demand at many companies. As the world shifts from an industrial to an information economy, education and job training will have to adapt. This already is having a profound impact on the world. Information Theory In 1948, Claude Shannon (figure 15.1) at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, proposed a remarkably simple but subtle theory for information to understand signal transmission through noisy phone lines.1 Shannon’s theory drove the digital communications revolution that gave rise to cell phones, digital television, and the Internet.

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See Super-Turing computation Hyvarinen, Apo, 295n5, 296n10 IBM, 143, 171–172 Identity, the future of, 173–174 Identity database, digital, 173–174 Identity theft, 173 Independent component analysis (ICA), 81–85, 89, 296nn14–15 applied to EEG recordings from scalp, 66, 87f applied to fMRI data, 86, 88f beyond, 89–90 ICA filters derived from natural images, 85f overview and nature of, 82, 82f, 84b, 85, 85f vs. principal components analysis, 84b Inferotemporal cortex, 130 Infomax ICA algorithm, 85–86, 295n3 Infomax learning principle, general, 82 Information, units of, 219–220 Information economy, intangible, 193 Information explosion, 230–231 Information-theoretic learning algorithm. See Independent component analysis Information theory, 219–220 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 200, 259 Index Institute for Neural Computation at UCSD, 175, 182, 272 Integrated circuits. See Chips Intelligence evolution of, 263–264 fluid vs. crystallized, 20 general, 257 Intelligence tests (IQ tests), 21 IQ and Human Intelligence (Mackintosh), 277 Jacobs, Irwin, 222 Jennings, Ken, 171 Jeopardy!

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years—sometimes, our entire lives. We should know better by now. We’ve been doing business in the so-called Information Economy for decades. In 1969 and 1970 Johns Hopkins University and the Brookings Institution sponsored a series of conferences on the impact of information technology. One speaker, Herbert Simon, was a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and psychology who later won a Nobel for his work in economics.

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., 81 guilt, 193 Hagemann, Hans, 208, 220 Hallowell, Edward, 215 Hansen, Morten T., 67 Hardy, Benjamin, 218 Hastings, Reed, 71 health, 228 Heinemeier, David, 164 hobbies, 41, 79, 228 Holland, Barbara, 71 Ideal Week, 119, 162, 172–81, 226 Ideal Week template, 182 I Love Lucy (TV program), 25–26 impairment, 70 Information Economy, 13 innovation, and changing environment, 72 instant communication, 207–11 instant-gratification culture, 84 interruptions, 207–11, 226 Isolator, 205–6, 212 Jobs, Steve, 111 Johnson, Paul, 81–82 Jones, Charlie “Tremendous”, 50 journaling, 220 karoshi (death by overwork), 32 Kennedy, John F., 71 King, Stephen, 223 knowledge workers, 28 Koch, Jim, 200, 202 Lewis, Penelope A., 70 liberating truths, 59–63 lifestyle objectives, 38 limiting beliefs, 59–63 “loss of separation,” 184 lunch, 72 MacArthur, Douglas, 71 McCartney, Paul, 99 McKeown, Greg, 183 macro-processing software, 131–32 maintenance, 168, 169 margin, 33, 36, 52, 111, 157, 224, 225, 226 meals, and building relationships, 74 meetings, 197 MegaBatching, 162, 163–66, 172, 180–81 mental health, 83 mentoring, 153 Michel, Alexandra, 65–66 Michelangelo, 21, 100 micro-breaks, 82–83 micromanagers, 149 Miller, Megan Hyatt, 54 mindset, 54 Minor, Dylan, 78 morning ritual, 119 Mortimer, Ian, 223 movement (exercise), 74–77, 195 multitasking, 161–62, 212 music, 217 musicians, 46 Musk, Elon, 67–68 Naish, John, 161, 212 naps, 71 Nashville, 46 natural foods, 73 nature, 82–83 necessary routines, 147–48 Netflix, 71 Newport, Cal, 161–62, 164 Not-to-Do List, 93, 99–100, 113 Nozbe, 202 nutrition, 73 nutritional supplement protocol, 73 offloading tasks, 138, 225–26 Off Stage, 166, 170, 173, 176, 195 OneNote, 127 Opipari, Ben, 75 outdoors, 82–83 overgrowth.

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

The material object serves as a bridge between these two perspectives. One of the most fascinating aspects of the material landscape is the way everything in it is interwoven, in ways that are just as profound and subtle as the “networked” realm of the digital. When we overemphasize the promise of the digital information economy, we not only express an irrational preference for the new over the old, we also miss the physical know-how that binds our society together. The cultural habit of marginalizing this kind of expertise has deep historical roots and has always been related to class condescension. I believe that by challenging this legacy and building respect for material intelligence across our culture, we can form a bridge that emphasizes shared experience: a greater awareness of the things we hold in common.

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In order to work the hard shells, he was forced to make his own tools, turning discarded blades into files and adapting bicycle spokes for the purpose of punching holes. Having mastered the newly invented craft, he went on to teach it to others, earning the local nickname “cleverest of the clever.” Within a short time the island was home to a thriving cottage industry of coconut carvers. These craftsmen were able to build an informal economy for their wares by selling them to tourists from Europe and from mainland Africa, who in turn happily brought the objects home as souvenirs, under the assumption that they were helping sustain a centuries-old craft tradition.2 The story of clever Murage is clearly an extraordinary case, as his innovations began more or less from scratch.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

My Start-Up Life is not a how-to that will delineate how to create a successful business like Comcate with a few cookie-cutter instructions. This narrative will, however, reveal everything you xiv FOREWORD need to know as you begin your entrepreneurial journey. You’ll learn about everything from writing a business email to dealing with offshore contractors to the dynamics of an information economy. You’ll learn about the risks Ben took: the ones that paid off (offering early customers a discount) and the ones that didn’t (prematurely hiring an outsider as CEO). Most of all, you will enjoy this provocative, honest, and fun romp through an entrepreneurial achievement, which will leave you determined to embark on your own enterprising endeavor—and inspired to find your own way to make a difference.

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On the business side, I learned the difference between a sole proprietorship and a corporation. I learned about client relations and marketing. I learned how to write a business letter and how to make a business phone call. On the technology side, I learned about dealing with offshore contractors. I learned about the wonders of a “flat” information economy, and how even someone as young and inexperienced as I could partake in it. It all boiled down to one revelation: While I had learned a lot through ComplainandResolve, I was ready to move on. To what, I didn’t know, but something big, something world-changing. . . . Brain Trust: Take Responsibility BY HEIDI ROIZEN Three weeks into my junior year in college, my boyfriend was killed in a plane crash.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Americans in more affluent areas have jobs that offer fringe benefits; they are accustomed to health insurance that covers paid sick leave and medical care. They do not live in neighborhoods where attempts at normal child-rearing are constantly undermined by social forces that interfere with healthy child development. And their families’ prospects for survival do not require at least some participation in the informal economy (that is, an economy in which income is unreported and therefore not taxable). It is just as indefensible to treat inner-city residents as superheroes who are able to overcome racist oppression as it is to view them as helpless victims. We should, however, appreciate the range of choices, including choices representing cultural influences, that are available to inner-city residents who live under constraints that most people in the larger society do not experience.

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Among the inner-city mothers who were not receiving AFDC, those who lived in a coresidential household and received informal child care had a very high (90 percent) probability of labor-force activity. On the other hand, those who maintain sole-adult households and did not receive informal child care had a much reduced (60 percent) probability of working. Of the 12 percent of inner-city women on AFDC who candidly reported that they worked at least part-time—probably in the informal economy—those who lived in a coresidential household and received informal child care were more than five times as likely to work as were those who lived in single households and did not receive informal child care. There are many factors involved in the precipitous decline in marriage rates and the sharp rise in single-parent families.

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The absence of effective informal job networks and the frequency of many illegal activities increases nonmainstream behavior such as hustling. As Sharon Hicks-Bartlett, another member of the UPFLS research team, points out, “Hustling is making money by doing whatever is necessary to survive or simply make ends meet. It can be legal or extra-legal work and may transpire in the formal or informal economy. While both men and women hustle, men are more conspicuous in the illegal arena of hustling.” In a review of the research literature on the experiences of black men in the labor market, Philip Moss and Christopher Tilly point out that criminal activity in urban areas has become more attractive because of the disappearance of legitimate jobs.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The issue, then, becomes more of how we reenvision what we mean by work rather than just how we retrain the workforce. There are four areas where people can engage in work: the market, the government, the informal economy, and the civil society. Market employment, however, is going to continue to shrink with the introduction of intelligent technology systems. Governments around the world are also culling their work-forces and introducing intelligent technology in areas as diverse as tax collection and military service. The informal economy, which includes household production, barter, and at the extreme end, black-market and criminal economic activity, is also likely to diminish as traditional economies transition into high-tech societies.

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The Third Industrial Revolution offers the prospect, at least, that the poorest countries on Earth, who were virtually left out of both the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, could leapfrog into the new era of distributed capitalism over the course of the next half century. Still, no one, myself included, doubts the enormity of the challenge ahead. Assuring that 40 percent of the human race reaches the level of material comfort necessary to free themselves from the shackles of backbreaking and often mindless toil in the marketplace and informal economy, so they can be free to engage in deep play in the pursuit of social capital is a daunting task—made all the more difficult by the need to reorganize economic life to mitigate industrially induced climate change. Yet, for the first time in history, we are close enough to at least imagine such a possibility, which makes me guardedly hopeful that we might succeed.

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

The multitude of data we churn out and store is creating an ever-larger digital shadow – sometimes with our consent, but often without it. In the world of Big Data, information on users, citizens or people in general offers the ideal raw material for making a profit. Small wonder, then, that the information economy has evolved into a monster which not only swallows huge quantities of data but grinds them up with algorithms and spits them out again for a variety of purposes. The aim in every case is to create – and encode – difference, with far-reaching consequences for processes of classification and status assignment.

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Index ‘20-70-10’ rule 155 academics 139 and altmetrics 77–8 and h-index 75–6, 139, 144 self-documentation and self-presentation 76–7 status markers 74–8 accountability 3, 91, 115, 120, 134, 147, 159 accounting, rise of modern 17 activism alliance with statistics 127 Acxiom 164–5 ADM (automated decision-making) 63 Aenta 108 Airbnb 88 airlines and status miles 71–2 algorithms 7, 64, 127, 167 and nomination power 123–5, 126, 141–2 AlgorithmWatch 127 altmetrics 77–8 Amazon 96, 150, 156 American Consumers Union 167 apps 99, 105, 150 finance 66–7 fitness and health 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Moven 65–6 Asian crisis (1997) 57 audit society 24–5 automated decision-making (ADM) 63 averages, regime of 155–7 Barlösius, Eva 113 Baty, Phil 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 143 behavioural reactivity 131 benchmarks, regime of 155–7 Berlin, television tower 40 Better Life Index 20 Big Data 2, 79, 123 biopolitics 19 of the market 70 biopower 19 Boam, Eric 104 body images, regime of 156–7 Boltanzki, Luc 125–6 border controls 73–4 borders, smart 74 Bourdieu, Pierre 111, 114, 115, 162 BP 108 Bude, Heinz 37 bureaucracy 18 calculative practices 11, 124 expansion of 11, 115 and the market 15–17 Campbell, Donald T. 130–1 Campbell's Law 130–1 capitalism 15, 54, 55 digital 150 capitalists of the self 163 Carter, Allan 48 Chiapello, Ève 125–6 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) 17 China Sesame Credit 67 Social Credit System 1, 166 choice revolution 118–19 class and status 33 class conflict switch to individual competition 168–70 classification 60–80 see also scoring; screening collective body 104–6 collective of non-equals 166–8 commensurability 31–3, 44, 159 Committee of Inquiry on ‘Growth, Wealth and Quality of Life’ (Germany) 127 commodification 163, 164 Community (sitcom) 96 companies 16–17 comparison 7, 26–39, 159 and commensurability/incommensurability 31–3 and competition 28 dispositive(s) of 7, 28–31, 159, 169 new horizons of 33–5 part of everyday life 27 prerequisites for social 35–6 registers of 135–9 and self-esteem 30 shifts in class structure of 33 and status 29–30, 36–7 universalization of 27–8 COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions) 79 competition 6, 7, 115–19, 159–60 and comparison 28 increasing glorification of 159 and neoliberalism 23 and performance measurement 115–19 and quantification 116–17 and rankings 45 switch from class conflict to individual 168–70 competitive singularities 169 consumer generated content (CGC) 85–6 control datafication and increased 143, 147, 169 individualization of social 143 levers of social 144 relationship between quantification and 78 conventionalization 128 Cordray, Julia 97 Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) 79 Corruption Perceptions Index 26 cosmetic indicators 135 Couchsurfing 88 credit risk colonialization 64 credit scoring 63–7 and social status 67 criminal recidivism, scoring and assessment of 62–3, 79 criteria reductionism 22 cumulative advantages, theory of 174 CureTogether 106 customer reviews 82–6, 87, 88 Dacadoo 68 Daily Telegraph 149 darknet 87 data behaviourism 171 data leaks 152 data literacy 21 data mining 4, 22, 163 data protection 72, 142 data repositories 62, 73–4 data storage 22, 73, 135 data voluntarism 4, 152, 153, 159 dating markets and health scores 70 de Botton, Alain 30 decoupling 133, 136, 174–5 democratization and digitalization 166 difference 2 visibilization and the creation of 40–3 ‘difference revolution’ digitalization giving rise to 166–7 digital capitalism 150 digital disenfranchisement of citizens 151 digital health plans 70 digital medical records 67 digitalization 2, 7, 21–2, 25, 63, 73, 80, 111, 123, 180 and democratization 166 giving rise to ‘difference revolution’ 166–7 as ‘great leveller’ 166 quantitative bias of 124 disembedding 13 distance, technology of 23–4 diversity versus monoculture 137–40 doctors, evaluation of by patients 92–3 Doganova, Liliana 5–6 double-entry bookkeeping 15, 163 e-recruitment 61 eBay 87 economic valuation theory 5 economization 22–4, 38, 115, 117 and rise of rankings 46 education and evaluation 89–91 evaluation of tutors by students 89–90 law schools 44, 138–9 output indicators and resource allocation in higher 132 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 Eggers, Dave The Circle 41, 82–3 employer review sites 83 entrepreneurial self 3, 154 epistemic communities 121 equivalence 16, 27 Espeland, Wendy 44, 139 esteem 29, 30 and estimation 15, 38 see also self-esteem Etzioni, Amitai The Active Society 20 European Union 122 evaluation 81–98 connection with recognition 38 cult and spread of 7, 97–8, 134 education sector 89–91 loss of time and energy 136 and medical sector 91–3 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 portals as selectors 84–6 pressure exerted by reviews 147–8 and professions 89–93 qualitative 117 satisfaction surveys 82–4 and social media 93–8 of tutors by students 89–90 evidence-basing 3 exercise and self-tracking 101–4 expert systems 7 transnational 121–2 experts, nomination power of 119–23, 126 Facebook 94 FanSlave 95 Federal Foreign Office (Germany) 53 feedback power of 147–8 and social media 93–4 Fertik, Michael 66 Fitch 56 fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Floridi, Luciano 105 Foucault, Michel 19 Fourcade, Marion 163–4 Franck, Georg 29 fraud 137 Frey, Bruno ‘Publishing as Prostitution’ 146 ‘gaming the system’ 132 GDP (gross domestic product) 14 dispute over alternatives to 127–8 General Electric 155 Germany Excellence Initiative 51 higher education institutes 52–3 Gerstner, Louis V. 130 Glassdoor.com 83 global governance 122 globalization 34, 73 governance 12 self- 19, 37, 105 state as data manager 17–20 ‘government at a distance’ 145 governmentality 112 GPS systems 150 Granovetter, Mark ‘The strength of weak ties’ 147 gross domestic product see GDP h-index 75–6, 139, 144 halo effect 90 Han, Byung-Chul 154 Hanoi, rat infestation of 130 happiness and comparison 30 Hawthorne effect 107 health and self-tracking 101–4 health apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 health scores 67–71 health status, quantified 67–71 Healy, Kieran 163–4 Heintz, Bettina 14, 33, 34 hierarchization/hierarchies 1, 5, 6, 11, 33, 39, 40–59, 174 and rankings 41–2, 43, 44, 48 higher education, output indicators and resource allocation 132 Hirsch, Jorge E. 75 home nursing care 135–6 hospitals and performance indicators 131 Human Development Index 14 hyperindividualization 167–8 identity theory 29 incommensurability 31–3 indicators 2, 3, 5, 20, 23–4, 34, 114, 159 and competition 116–17 and concept of reactive measurements 129–33 cosmetic 135 economic 7 governance by 24 politics of 14 status 35, 75 see also performance indicators individualization of social control 143 industrial revolution 19 inequality 6, 8, 158–76 collectives of non-equals 166–8 establishment of worth 160–2 inescapability and status fluidity 170–4 reputation management 162–6 switch from class conflict to individual competition 168–70 inescapability of status 170–4 information economy 2 information transmission interfaces, between social subsystems 165–6 institutional theory 113 insurance companies 72, 108, 151, 152, 167 International Labour Organization 122 investive status work 36–7 Italian Job, The (film) 138 justice 126 Kaube, Jürgen 2 Kula, Witold 16 Latour, Bruno 34 law schools 44, 138–9 league tables 35, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 91, 138, 139, 146, 162, 175 legitimate test, concept of 125–6 Lenin, Vladimir 116 lifelogging 99, 109, 153 Luhmann, Niklas 166 Lyon, David 142 McClusky, Mark 101 McCullough, Nicole 97 Mann, Steve 153 market(s) calculative practices of 15–17 and neoliberalism 23 and rating agencies 55–6 Marron, Donncha 65 Matthew effect 174–5 measurement, meaning 10 media reporting 33 medical sector and evaluation 91–3 hospitals and performance indicators 131–2 MedXSafe 70 meritocracy 23, 161 Merton, Robert K. 161, 174 ‘metric revolution’ 16 Miller, Peter 112 mobility 71–4 border controls 73 digital monitoring of 72 and scoring 71–4 smart cars 72 and status miles 71–2 money as means of exchange 16 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 mood, self-tracking of 101–4 Moody's 56 motivation 106–10 and rankings 45 Moven 65–6 Münch, Richard 145 Nachtwey, Oliver 150 naturalization 113 neoliberalism 3, 12, 23, 25 basic tenets of 23 New Public Management 3, 117, 136, 155 NHS (National Health Service) 118 nomination power 111–28 and algorithms 123–5, 126, 141–2 critique of 125–8 and economization 115 of experts 119–23, 126 performance measurement and the framing of competition 115–19 and the state 112–15 non-equals, collectives of 166–8 normative pressure 144–6 North Korea 144 ‘number rush’ 2 numbers 13–14, 15 numerical medium 8, 14, 16, 18, 28, 33, 113, 160, 166 objectivization 35, 154, 160 OECD 122 Offe, Claus 175 Old Testament 17 omnimetrics 9 O’Neil, Cathy Weapons of Math Destruction 79 optimization 12, 25 Oral Roberts University (Oklahoma) 108 Peeple app 96–7 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 Pentland, Alex 151 people analytics 150–1 performance enhancement 12 performance indicators 12, 38, 53, 74, 118, 119, 120, 129, 155 and hospitals 131–2 performance measurement 23, 38, 115–19 performance-oriented funding allocation 22 performance paradox 132 performance targets 4 Personicx 165 Pisa system 122, 145–6 politicians 14, 120 politics 114 portals 84–6, 88, 90–1 power of nomination see nomination power prestige 8, 29, 67, 144 principal–agent problem 147–8 private consultancy services 117 professional control, loss of 133–4 professionalization 19, 133 professions and evaluation 89–93 publicity 33 QS ranking 52 qualitative evaluation 117 quantification advantages of 8 engines of 21–5 history 11 impact and consequences of 5, 6 meaning 10, 12–15 risks and side-effects 7, 129–40 role of 35 quantified self 99–110 Quantified Self (network) 99–100 quantitative evaluation see evaluation quantitative mentality 11–12 quasi-markets 116, 118–19 race and assessment of criminal recidivism risk 79 rankings 47–53, 58–9, 60, 144 and competition 45 and compliance 44 differences between ratings and 42–3 disadvantage of 43–4 economization and rise of 46 and evaluation portals 84–6 and hierarchies 41–2, 43, 44, 48 and image fetishization 47 and motivation 45 as objectivity generators 41 performance-enhancing role 46 popularity of 41 as positional goods 45 purpose of 45 and reputation 48, 49, 50, 52 as social ushers 42 and status anxiety 46–7 university 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 Welch's forced 155–6 rating agencies, market power of 53–9 ratings 41–3, 53–9, 60 definition 54 differences between rankings and 42–3 and evaluation portals 84–6 as objectivity generators 41 peer-to-peer 87–8 as social ushers 42 rationalization 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 105, 110, 154, 163 Raz, Joseph 31–2 reactive measurements 129–33 recommendation marketing 85 recruitment, e- 61 reference group theory 29 reputation 29, 39, 66, 74, 121 academic 75–6 cultivating good 47 and rankings 48, 49, 50, 52 rating of 87–8 signal value of 87 social media and like-based 93–8 reputation management 4, 50, 162–6 reputation scoring 87–8 research community 146 and evaluation system 146 and review system 146–7 ResearchGate 77 reviews 136 customer 82–6, 87, 88 doctor 92 high demand for 136 lecturers/tutors 90 performance 25, 149 pressure exerted by popular 147 Riesman, David 37 risks of quantification 129–40 loss of professional control 133–5 loss of time and energy 135–7 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 reactive measurements 129–33 Rosa, Hartmut 94, 173 Rose, Nikolas 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28–9 running apps 107 Runtastic app 107 satisfaction surveys 82–4 Sauder, Michael 44, 139 Schimank, Uwe 134 Schirrmacher, Frank 152 Schmidt, Eric 147 schools and choice 118–19 evaluation of 90–1 league tables 46 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 scoring 7, 60, 61, 78–80 academic status markers 74–8 and assessment of criminal recidivism 62–3 credit 63–7 health 67–71 mobility value 71–4 pitfalls 79 screening 7, 60–1, 78–9 border controls 73–4 e-recruitment 61–2 function 60–1 smart cars 72 self-direction 105, 121, 143 self-documentation 153 and academic world 76–7 self-enhancement 3, 137 self-esteem 29, 37, 170 and comparison 29, 30 rankings and university staff 50–1 self-governance 19, 37, 105 self-image 37, 47, 50, 89 self-management 3, 20, 25 self-observation 25, 42 quantified 99–110 self-optimization 3, 19, 104, 109, 163 self-quantification/quantifiers 4, 13, 25, 101, 154–5, 156 self-reification 105 self-responsibility 25, 110 self-tracking 4, 7, 99, 100, 106, 109–10 collective body 104–6 as duty or social expectation 108 emotions provoked 109 health, exercise and mood 101–4 and motivation 106–10 problems with wearable technologies 103–4 running and fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 and sousveillance 153 as third-party tracking 154 self-worth 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 170 and market value 67 Sesame Credit (China) 67 Shanghai ranking 47 ‘shared body’ 105 shared data 142, 152–3 Simmel, Georg 28 ‘small improvement argument’ 32 smart borders 74 smart cars 72 smart cities 21 smart homes 21 ‘social accounts’ 20 Social Credit System (China) 1, 166 social engineering 20 social management 20 social media 93–8, 153, 166 drivers of activity 93 and feedback 93–4 forms of connection 93 likes 93–5 and online disinhibition 153 and reputation building 95 resonance generated by 94 and running/fitness apps 107 social research 19–20 social security systems 19 social status see status social worth see worth socio-psychological rank theory 46 sociometrics/sociometers 2, 5, 36, 74, 141, 150–1 Sombart, Werner Modern Capitalism 15–16 sousveillance 153 sport 33 rise of world 35 Staab, Philipp 149–50 Stalder, Felix 124 Standard & Poor's 54, 56 statactivism 127 state as data manager 17–20 nomination power of the 112–15 statistics 14 origins of word 17 status and class 33 and comparison 29–30, 36–7 and credit scoring 67 inescapability from 170–4 and life satisfaction 30 seeking of 36 status anxiety 30 and rankings 46–7 status competition 26–39 status data 2, 80, 159, 161–2, 169, 174 functioning as symbolic data 8, 162 status fluidity 170–4 status insecurity 4 status miles 71–2 status sets 161–2 status symbols 158 status work 4, 36–7, 174 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (France) 127 Streeck, Wolfgang 171–2 subprime crisis (2007) 57, 64 surveillance 8, 142, 152 interdependence of self- and external 153–5 and neoliberalism 23 workplace and technological 149–51 surveys, satisfaction 82–4 symbolic capital 174 status data as 8, 162 target setting 22 tariff models 152–3 technological surveillance, in the workplace 149–51 technologies of the self 25 tertium comparationis 32 Thomas theorem 59 Thompson, David C. 66 Times Higher Education ranking 47, 48, 53 tourism portals 85 tracking as double-edged sword 142 see also self-tracking trade relations 16 transnational expert systems 121–2 transparency 3, 91, 141–3, 144, 147 Transparency International 26 ‘transparent body’ 105 TripAdvisor 85 Trustpilot 86 Turkey 54 tutors evaluation of by students 89–90 Uber 156 űbercapital 163–4 UN Sustainable Development Goals 20 United Nations 122 university lecturers evaluation of 89–90 object of online reviews 90 university rankings 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 valorization 5, 58, 124, 161 valuation 5–6 value registration 161 Vietnam War 131 visibilization, and the creation of difference 40–3 Webb, Jarrett 104 Weber, Max 15, 16, 154 Weiß, Manfred 119 Welch, Jack 155 ‘winner-take-all society’ 136 Wolf, Gary 99–100 Woolgar, Steve 34 workplace technological surveillance in the 149–51 World Bank 122 worth 5–6, 7, 11, 78–80, 170 assessments of 27 establishment of 160–2 orders of 11, 15, 29 self- 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 67, 170 Young, Michael 161 The Rise of Meritocracy 23, 161 Zillien, Nicole 105 Zuckerberg, Mark 158 POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity's ebook EULA.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

That kind of breakdown in Pakistan or Russia is quite another. Then there is the subtler version of this issue. In countries like India and Brazil, large populations of the urban poor living in largely ungoverned enclaves might simply provide their own governance, neighborhood by neighborhood, with an informal economy that operates under its own rules. This is a phenomenon already developing in some of the world’s most important emerging cities.15 Call this larger scenario the G-Subzero. As leadership weakens and power fragments inside individual countries, control is divided between local and central leaders, and competition arises among power brokers within individual states.

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